The 2024 road racing season may only be a month old and the first of this spring's round of Classics have yet to pass, but already there's a single question hanging over the Belgian curtain-raising double-header in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne…
Who will stop the super teams?
We are, of course, referring to the men's Visma-Lease A Bike and women's SD Worx-Protime teams – the two squads who ran riot last spring, racking up wins left, right, and centre like modern-day versions of Mapei minus the colourful blocks.
Both teams took four wins apiece at WorldTour and Women's WorldTour level last spring, picking up one-twos along the way and winning several more races besides. Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne, the E3 Saxo Classic, Gent-Wevelgem the Tour of Flanders… You name it, they were on the honour roll.
The only real blotch on the collective copybook was Jumbo-Visma's relative failure (Wout van Aert's fourth and third places) at Flanders and Paris-Roubaix.
The two teams, both emerging in 2024 under slightly different sponsorship getups, are nonetheless once again the teams to beat as Opening Weekend looms. This time last year, they swept the weekend.
On the men's side, Dylan Van Baarle and Christophe Laporte filled two-thirds of the podium at Omloop before Tiesj Benoot and Nathan Van Hooydonck went one-two at Kuurne. At SD Worx it was Lotte Kopecky and Lorena Wiebes who went one-two at Omloop before Wiebes followed up with Omloop van het Hageland on Sunday.
Barring the sadly retired Van Hooydonck, they'll all be back in action this weekend, and you can throw in Van Aert, Matteo Jorgenson, Jan Tratnik, Demi Vollering, and Marlen Reusser for good measure. On paper, in the betting shop, and in countless Pro Cycling Manager simulations, the Dutch squads are overwhelming favourites to add to their ceaseless lists of success.
But even if both teams can field a lineup featuring three or four riders who would be undisputed leaders at most other teams in the peloton, bike racing isn't played out with a pen and paper or on a computer screen.
Around both pelotons across the weekend, there'll be a wealth of riders striving to prevent more Dutch domination and take some of the glory for themselves, with Soudal-QuickStep and Lidl-Trek Women perhaps best poised to do just that.
Both teams have several potential leaders to call upon – always a positive on the cobbles, where the best-laid plans can vanish in the blink of an eye.
QuickStep's Classics department may have been weakened over the winter amid uncertainty over a possible Visma takeover and a refocus around Remco Evenepoel's GC ambitions, but a lead trio of Julian Alaphilippe, Kasper Asgreen, and Yves Lampaert would – in most other seasons – mark a lineup of unmatched quality.
Over at Lidl-Trek, meanwhile, another formidable trio leads the way in the form of former world champions and cobbled Monument winner – Lizzie Deignan, Elisa Balsamo, and Elisa Longo Borghini.
For years the dominant force on the cobbles, QuickStep have found themselves usurped in the past two seasons, with a sole Kuurne victory and zero Monument podiums across 2021 and 2022. Lidl-Trek, meanwhile, haven't endured a similar dry spell in the face of SD Worx, taking home two editions of Roubaix plus titles at De Panne and Gent-Wevelgem during the past three seasons.
The pedigree and the palmarès are there – we all know these teams and riders are capable of delivering the goods at Opening Weekend and beyond. So too are a host of names beyond these four powerhouses – Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck), Marianne Vos (Visma-Lease A Bike), Matej Mohorič (Bahrain Victorious), Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon-Sram), Stefan Küng (Groupama-FDJ), and Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig (FDJ-Suez) to name a few.
How's the form?
But how's the form? And is form even important heading into this weekend of racing at such an early stage in the season?
Lining up in Belgium we'll see riders who have already scored a win or two doing battle with riders who haven't come close, and some who have yet to even race in 2024 – Philipsen, Vollering, Asgreen, Deignan among the latter.
How does Alaphilippe, who finished sixth at the Tour Down Under, stack up against Van Aert, winner of a Volta ao Algarve sprint against a relatively weak field? Do Kopecky and Reusser's wins at the UAE Tour and Setmana Valenciana mean they're already firing on all cylinders?
Comparisons such as the former – unless a rider is already sweeping all before them (Mads 'six wins' Pedersen won't be at either race) – can hardly serve as useful form guides at a point in the season when even the most well-travelled racers have only racked up two weeks or so of racing.
As for the latter, well it's hard to transpose results on climbs in the familiar early-season warm-weather races to the grit and grime of the Flandrian cobbles. Though a clutch of wins at this stage can only be a good thing form-wise.
Nobody is going to be at 100% here, of course. Last year, riders and directors around the Opening Weekend peloton told Cyclingnews that the ideal situation is to be somewhere in the high 90s, percentage-wise, even if the nebulous concept of 'form' can't truly be measured beyond personal feelings.
"You want to be good, but not like 100%. Like 98%, I would say," Kasper Asgreen said, while his veteran DS Tom Steels put his estimate at 95%, adding, "There's always that one guy who is at 110% in the Opening Weekend who can beat you. But then they fade towards the end of Paris-Nice or Tirreno-Adriatico."
So then nobody wants to be flying just yet, lest they peak too early and lose their legs for the big ones in six weeks' time. Is that what happened to Jumbo-Visma last year? It's perhaps unfair to say that, though the team weren't particularly close to winning either Flanders or Roubaix despite Van Aert's top-five placings.
Instead, Tadej Pogačar – perhaps the only entity more unbeatable than the Dutch squad last spring – and Mathieu van der Poel – who didn't make his season debut until March – took home the big prizes.
Whether the same will transpire this season is frankly unknowable before we get to April. But with Van Aert having dialled back his cyclocross season this year to switch over to the road earlier, maybe a slight change in tack is required in order to win the Dutch team's first cobbled Monument since Rolf Sørenson's 1997 Flanders triumph.
