Thank God, Some Actual Racing
Go to Hell, The Offseason, it's time for some cobblestones
As much as I love it when major bike racing leaves western Europe, the start of the professional road racing calendar can be a bit scattershot. There’s the Tour Down Under, then a break, then the UAE Tour, then another break…all the while, different teams and riders are ramping up at different rates for different calendars, and sometimes you get something like the Women’s UAE Tour, which is nominally a really big race, but only one star GC rider showed up…
All of that’s done now. Tomorrow is Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. Not only was the men’s edition one of my favorite races of last year… (post below)
…it also heralds the proper start of the Northern Classics season. Here’s what the calendar looks like for the next four days:
Saturday, March 1
Omloop Het Nieuwsblad Men (1.UWT)
Omloop Het Nieuwsblad Women (1.WWT)
Faun-Ardèche Classic (1.Pro)
Sunday, March 2
Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne (1.Pro)
Faun Drome Classic (1.Pro)
Omloop van het Hageland (1.1 Women)
Tuesday, March 4
Samyn Classic (1.1)
Le Samyn des Dames (1.1 Women)
Then, next Saturday is Strade Bianche, followed by the start of Paris-Nice on Sunday and Tirreno-Adriatico on Monday, and then, like, we’re fuckin off. The next gap of more than a week1 in the Women’s World Tour calendar comes in late April and early May, between Ardennes Week and the Vuelta Femenina. For the men, the next two-week gap isn’t until late June and early July, when everyone goes home for northern hemisphere national championships between the Tour de Suisse and the Tour de France.
I’m gonna deal with these races in four groups, in order from least to most interesting.
Le Samyn is a mostly flat cobbled race that’s generally contested by whoever’s still hanging around Belgium after the weekend and feels like taking another trip around the block. It’s fairly flat, but has a kick up toward the finish in the final kilometer. The men usually end in a sprint of at least a large breakaway group; the women have a reduced bunch about half the time, and occasionally there’s a solo winner.
The Faun-Ardèche and Faun Drome Classics are hilly one-day races in southwestern France, in the foothills of the Alps. I was looking up the etymology of these race names, and while I figured that Ardèche and Drôme were place names, I was surprised to learn that Faun…well, Faun is absolutely ungoogleable, by the way. Just an SEO nightmare. I know what fauna is, jeezus.
Anyway, Faun is a German manufacturer of garbage trucks and street sweepers. If you look it up on Wikipedia, you’ll get directed to Tadano Faun GmbH, a Japanese crane manufacturer. This used to be the same company, which was founded as the Fahrzeugfabriken2 Ansbach und Nuremberg, then spun off the trash truck brand in the 1980s and sold it to a different company, while Tadano bought the remainder in 1990.
Kind of like how Rolls-Royce sold off the car-making part of the business and now makes billions of dollars a year selling airplane engines. There still is a company called Rolls-Royce that makes cars, but it’s now owned by BMW, not Rolls-Royce Holdings.
The Faun-sponsored French classics don’t have their full startlists finalized, but these are pretty strong fields for hilly classics races. With the same organizer and adjacent courses on adjacent days, if you’re racing one you might as well race both. Both races are getting 13 World Tour teams, plus the cream of the Pro Tour crop: Tudor, Lotto, Israel-Premier Tech and Q36.5.
And those teams are bringing some real riders: UAE is taking Juan Ayuso, Brandon McNulty and Isaac del Toro to both. Marc Hirschi’s suiting up for Tudor; Mattias Skjelmose, Tao Geoghegan Hart and Quinn Simmons; Richard Carapaz and Ben Healy for EF; Enric Mas and Javier Romo for Movistar; and down the line you’ve got some killer puncheurs for smaller teams, like Mike Woods and Alex Aranburu.
These races aren’t all that prestigious on their own, but they’re a good opportunity for the more climbing-oriented Ardennes Week contenders to lay down an early marker. Especially with the heavier cobblemasters occupied at Omloop and KBK.
Group Three is the Sunday doubleheader of Omloop van het Hageland for the women and Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne for the men. You might remember OVHH from last year as the first indication that 2024 would be the Year of Kristen Faulkner, as the future Olympic road race champion won on a 50-kilometer solo break.
That’s not going to happen this year. Mostly because EF didn’t get an invite. The 135-kilometer course doesn’t really feature much tough climbing, but there is a lot of it: Five laps of a finishing circuit that contains three climbs. So while SD Worx is taking Lorena Wiebes to Omloop Het Nieuwsblad,3 the Yankees of women’s cycling are swapping her out for Anna van der Breggen on Sunday.
Which is interesting, because you know who’s racing on Saturday but not Sunday? Kasia Niewiadoma and Demi Vollering. Looks like the champ is ducking her big rivals. Or Charlotte Kool is ducking Wiebes by racing on Sunday, even though Saturday’s course is way more sprinter-friendly?
You know what, this has already started to bleed into talking about Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, so I’m gonna just dispense with Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne real quick so I can just lump all the action together.
KBK is super flat. It’s going to come down to a sprint. The startlist includes Wout van Aert, Jasper Philipsen, Arnaud Démare, Jonathan Milan, Jordi Meeus and Tim Merlier. So even if this parcours were capable of producing more traditional classics racing, someone would keep it from happening.
OK, back to the various Omloops.
I expect the men’s race to be controlled, as it was last year, by the Visma-Lease a Bike trio of van Aert and Matteo Jorgenson, who’s making his 2025 debut. Last year, those two rolled attacks with Christophe Laporte in the front group, allowing a late opportunity for Jorgenson to attack from the break. When he got caught, Jan Tratnik came over the top and pulled away for the win. Tratnik’s now racing for Red Bull, so I imagine the third guy in the Visma-LAB trident will probably be Tiesj Benoot, though honestly this entire team is strong.
I don’t hate Red Bull’s team, with Tratnik joined by Oier Lazkano. Alpecin-Deceuninck is bringing both Philipsen and Kaden Groves, so look for them to win if it comes down to a bunch sprint of any size. I’m also, as alwaays looking forward to seeing Arnaud de Lie in the classics against the big boys. And I don’t expect him to win, but Tom Pidcock has started his career at Q36.5 on fire. But this is going to be by far the strongest field he’s faced so far this season.
Visma-Lease a Bike’s interdisciplinary trident of Marianne Vos, Fem van Empel and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot is sitting this weekend out. And with the top two sprinters both racing this weekend—but not against each other—and van der Breggen and Vollering both racing this weekend—but not against each other—the proper start of classics season is a little bit of an anticlimax.
But I’ll point you in the following directions: First, this looks like a wide-open goal for Puck Pieterse, who won a stage at the Tour de France Femmes last year but is still looking for her first major classics win. Last year, she rode eight classics races in the spring and finished in the top 10 seven times, but never finished higher than third. With no Vos, no Elisa Longo Borghini, no Shirin van Anrooij, and only one of Vollering or van der Breggen—oh yeah, and no Lotte Kopecky!—the door is open.
And second, this is a return to action for a pair of Americans: Skylar Schneider returns to SD Worx after a stint on the North American crit circuit.
She’ll be riding at Omloop van het Hageland and Le Samyn, almost certainly in support of van der Breggen in the former and Wiebes in the latter. It hasn’t been that long since Schneider raced in Europe; she actually suited up for three classics races
(including Omloop van het Hageland and Le Samyn) as part of a U.S. select team. But you know, spiritually, it’s been a minute.
Veronica Ewers made her 2025 debut earlier this week at the Clasica de Almeria, but Omloop will be her first World Tour race since the Vuelta last year. Ewers posted top-10 GC finishes at the 2022 Tour and 2023 Giro, but hadn’t had the same results since a nasty crash at the Tour ended her 2023 season early. Last year, she took the second half of the season off and revealed that she’d been suffering from RED-S,4 a condition suffered by female athletes who run a calorie deficit by either under-eating or over-training. One of the symptoms is low bone density, which contributed to Ewers suffering a stress fracture in her heel.
Cycling’s emphasis on weight, and the intense training and cardio demands, force athletes to walk a mental tightrope. It’s tough to think about, especially if you’re used to sports like baseball or football, where fitness is important but it’s not like every calorie matters.
I think this is something the sport is getting better at. The post-PED reckoning led to the marginal gains craze, which led to a lot of nasty stories about overtraining and disordered eating, and I think we’re getting one step beyond that, to where a mental health episode or an eating disorder gets treated with compassion by the fans and press and scientific exactitude by the teams. But this is elite sport, so the pressure to produce remains—and must remain—intense.
To be honest, the results don’t really matter for Ewers; this really isn’t her parcours. Nor does EF have a contender for her to support; this is a race for Faulkner, or Alison Jackson, or maybe Lotta Henttala, and none of them are on the startlist. So a good day on the bike for Ewers probably just means getting from the start to the finish without incident. Do that enough times, and maybe she’ll get back to contending for stage race wins.
“Week” here sometimes means eight days, since there is the odd instance of one weekend’s big race being on Saturday and the next week’s being on Sunday
I love German. What an incredible language.
I got really good at spelling this last year and it has just deserted me in 2025
Relative energy deficiency in sport
Incredible. It’s go time!