But first things first.
“Oh, my God, what happened?”
In the men’s Omloop, all eyes were fixed on the favorites – such as two-time race winner Wout van Aert (Visma–Lease a Bike), last year’s winner Jan Tratnik (Red Bull–BORA–hansgrohe), Tom Pidcock (Q36.5), Jhonatan Narváez (UAE Team Emirates–XRG), Arnaud de Lie (Lotto) and Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck).
But de Lie suffered a mechanical failure at about the halfway point in the 197km race from Ghent to Ninove and used so much of his energy catching up to the peloton that he ran out of gas with about 25km left to race. Tratnik had a puncture at the worst possible moment, near the beginning of the super-hard climb of the Muur van Geraardsbergen (1.2km@9.3%, with ramps up to 19.8%) and never came close. Pidcock was prominent near the end, but the climbs and cobbles had weakened him. He finished with the peloton, but down in 38th place. The same could be said for Narváez, who finished 43rd.
In the end, the race came down to a bunch sprint, which van Aert and Philipsen seemed poised to battle out between them. But van Aert had neither the legs nor the heart left for a sprint and finished 11th. “I feel quite tired. It was not the race I hoped for,” he said afterwards. “I never felt I was in contention. I thought I was missing the feeling you need for a Classic like this.”
But Philipsen was there at the end, as was the highly touted 20-year-old French rider Paul Magnier (Soudal Quick-Step). But they were both beaten to the line by Uno-X Mobility’s unsung Søren Wærenskjold, whose surprising victory should perhaps not have been quite that surprising since he won the Under-23 ITT World Championship in 2022 and outsprinted Lidl-Trek’s superlative sprinter Jonathan Milan in a stage of the 2023 Saudi Tour.
Women’s Omloop het Nieuwsblad
A much greater shock shook the women’s Omloop, in which Demi Vollering – who has already won the Setmana Ciclista Volta Femenina de la Comunitat Valenciana for her new team, FDJ-Suez – was the big favorite. A five-rider breakaway formed after about 12km of the 137.9km race and was allowed to enjoy a lead of more than 14 minutes, apparently because none of the riders in that group posed a big threat.
However, the teams in the peloton left it much too late for the chase and had underestimated two of the riders, Lotte Claes (Arkéa–B&B Hotels Women) and Aurela Nerlo (Winspace Orange Seal). Neither Claes, a 31-year-old Belgian, nor Nerlo, a 27-year-old Polish rider who had toiled for small teams for her entire career, had ever won a professional race before.
They broke away from their group and worked together as if it were the race of their lives, which it was, to keep the peloton at bay. When they rode down the final kilometer together, they both knew this was a chance of a lifetime. Sensing that Claes was the better sprinter, Nerlo accelerated with about 900m left to race, trying to open a gap Claes could not close.
But close the gap she did and outsprinted her rival at the end to take a famous, much deserved and unexpected victory. Her first words? “Oh my God, what happened?”
As for Vollering, she finished third, 3:25 behind, after breaking away from the peloton with Puck Pieterse (Fenix-Deceuninck) on the Muur and then outsprinting her rival to the line.
Shades of the Algarve
In a race against the likes of Juan Ayuso, Brandon McNulty and Isaac del Toro (all UAE Team Emirates–XRG), Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek), Romain Bardet (Team Picnic PostNL), Marc Hirschi (Tudor Pro) and Enric Mas (Movistar), in the 169.5km Faun-Ardèche Classic, Groupama-FDJ’s Romain Grégoire was probably hoping for a bit of luck. And he got it.
After being one of the most active riders in the peloton, he found himself in a breakaway with Mas, McNulty and seven other riders with 1km to ride. Mas attacked but took the wrong turn and several riders, including McNulty, followed him. Grégoire stayed cool, took the correct route and was the fastest of the rest, beating Tudor’s Marco Brenner and XDS Astana’s Lorenzo Fortunato to the finish line by 3 seconds.
“It’s still weird the feeling with these riders who made a mistake with 300 meters to go,” he said after the race. “I sort of have the impression of not having made the sprint. But then, it’s the riders’ fault. I’m going to try to enjoy it. I won and that’s what counts.”
The error is reminiscent of stage 1 of this year’s Volta ao Algarve, when most of the peloton took a wrong turn from a roundabout with 700m left to ride and the stage had to be annulled. Let’s hope this is not a sign of things to come.
Bad weekend for top teams
Sunday’s sprinter-friendly Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne was relatively normal as Philipsen won his first race of the year, largely thanks to an excellent lead-out by Kaden Groves. Olav Kooij was forced to also use Groves as a lead-out, behind Philipsen, as he was separated from van Aert and other Visma–Lease a Bike riders as the sprint started heating up. But his late sprint was not enough to catch the winner. Israel–Premier Tech’s Hugo Hofstetter finished third.
All in all, it was a weekend to forget for Visma–Lease a Bike and UAE Team Emirates–XRG who, between them, managed to get only one rider on three podiums, and that was Kooij. Visma especially looked discombobulated, often being caught in the second half of the peloton in the Omloop and having to scramble to catch up when the pace accelerated.
In the Kuurne, on Sunday, UAE’s Tim Wellens tried mightily to break away and prevent the race from ending with a sprint, but he had little help. Visma’s Matteo Jorgenson, who looked very strong on both days, admitted on Sunday that the team still had a few kinks to work out.
“We just haven’t clicked yet, so it’s also difficult,” he told journalists. “We have a lot of new riders for the Classics in the team because of more bad luck, losing Christophe [Laporte] to a really big sickness and then Dylan [van Baarle] still hasn’t [returned to racing] after his collarbone fracture in Down Under. So we’re still missing our core team, but I think actually this year is going to be good. We didn’t win both Opening Weekend races, but we can build into the cobbled Classics a little bit, instead of starting at the top and kind of petering out.”
That’s assuming that things get better. As for UAE, it is not known as a sprinter’s team and it doesn’t really get serious in the Classics until Tadej Pogačar saddles up, so they have a viable excuse. In any case for me, it was great to see some unsung riders take over the spotlight for a while and get rewarded for their hard work.
