In Belgium, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad is the next biggest Classic after the Tour of Flanders, but simply because it's the first one of the year.
Everybody is very eager to watch this race on TV, and it helps, too, that back in the day, Omloop used to be the first bike race for all the big names, so everybody was excited about how their favourite rider was going to perform.
Now as everybody starts in January, it's a bit different, but even so in Belgium, the newspapers are full of articles about the Classics, about the Classics teams, about if certain teams have strong enough domestiques to support the big names, about who is going to perform well.
Everybody has a theory about the best teams and the best tactics which is something you don't see happening, for example, for the E3 Saxo Classic or Gent-Wevelgem. It's only for Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Tour of Flanders that they go crazy like this in the Belgian newspapers.
Omloop is also a very hard race to predict. If you look at the last few editions, several of the riders who won Omloop were not really the team leaders. Last year it was Jan Tratnik for example, who won from a domestique role.
So if they win, it just means this team's domestiques will be at a very high level for the whole Classics season. And I would expect a strong rider to win, but not one of the leaders. It's a bit too early to be at a really good level because if they win they have to keep it up for five or six weeks, which is doable but they would prefer to be at their best at the beginning of April.
If a top rider wins, it's because they are such good riders: Wout van Aert, say, or Mathieu van der Poel, if he were racing, could win Omloop in a sprint. But I don't see them dominating like they do in the Ronde and Paris-Roubaix.
For Lotto and all the Belgian teams, in any case, after the first weekend of the season, they'll have the global result from the two races, and if you don't have a podium from Opening Weekend, it's a really bad start and the sponsors already starting to get nervous. But if you have a win, that means your Classics season is already made and the sponsors are already very happy.
I know this from when Arnaud de Lie got second for Lotto in the 2023 Omloop. Before that, we hadn't had a run of good results in Opening Weekend, and I could see the team manager and the sports directors were getting a bit nervous because we didn't have that result, the sponsors weren't happy and everybody was watching.
Then when Arnaud got on the podium, suddenly everything changed, everybody was more relaxed, now they were all saying we would have a good Classics season.
I know that Arnaud wants to win, but if he gets a top-three result, he'll already be very happy. And if he's not up there on Saturday then a top three on Sunday in Kuurne will already make the weekend a bit better.
All the eyes, though, are on Saturday, which is a bit harder, and which will say more about riders' condition than Sunday.
On Sunday if there is no wind and it's not really rainy or cold, there could be a bunch sprint of 100 guys. On Saturday even in the best of weather conditions and without any wind, I don't see a big group of riders sprinting for the victory.
The weather is always a really big factor at Omloop and that's one reason why it's totally different to what's come before in the season. You can win your races in UAE and the Algarve, but if on the day of Omloop, it's two degrees and raining, nobody can be prepared for this.
Omloop is totally different in other ways too, right down to demanding a different kind of effort compared to those early-season races. Omloop is 120 kilometres of full-gas racing, fighting for every sector or every climb. You can't really train for this, because you just don't have races the same as Omloop before.
Most of the races they are doing are what we call spielerei [childsplay] like they are still playing a little bit and just testing the legs here or there. Then from Omloop onward, every day in Belgium is the same, with races somewhere. But Omloop is the first time the big teams can test their domestiques, the setups, the wheels, the tyres, the way that they choose their lineups, their tactics, everything: all the rest is actually just child's play in comparison.
So it's nice to win before Omloop, but for the people in Belgium Omloop is the first real race and all the rest beforehand is just training: that's how they see it at least.
The reality is actually different, they ride hard in Valencia and UAE, and I know they went very fast in the Tour of Oman this year as well. But in Belgium – that's just not the same.
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