As the men’s Omloop Het Nieuwsblad was heading into the final, the women’s edition was still in the early phase of the race. But this turned out to be a decisive phase as the early breakaway kept adding to its advantage. In the peloton, none of the big teams took responsibility to control the gap and bring back the attackers, instead looking to their rivals to start the chase first in a game of ‘who blinks first’ until, eventually, it was too little, too late.
The experienced 38-year-old Ellen van Dijk (Lidl-Trek) realised during the race that the gap had become too big, but didn’t see her team as being the one responsible for chasing.
“I thought it was way too much, but I also thought ‘it’s not up to us’. Most of the teams were thinking that; it was a really strange race,” Van Dijk told Cyclingnews as she looked back on a curious day out in Flanders.
“I think it’s the new dynamic in the peloton with riders in different teams, and then they start looking at each other. It was kind of the first race where they say, like, ‘it’s up to you’, ‘no, it’s up to you’, and then nobody is doing it, and somebody else is going to win,” the Dutchwoman said.
Pfeiffer Georgi (Team Picnic PostNL) had similar feelings.
“We heard 10-12 minutes, and our feeling was like ‘okay, that's pretty big’, but we thought it wasn't up to us to chase, we don’t have a favourite. I think it was down to FDJ and SD Worx to start but I think everyone was kind of waiting,” the British champion said.
Puck Pieterse and her Fenix-Deceuninck also looked to FDJ-Suez and SD Worx to show their cards. The 22-year-old was the only one who could keep up with Demi Vollering (FDJ-Suez) when the latter made her move on the Muur but had to keep her own powder dry.
"It was super frustrating for me personally as I like to race in the front. But it’s not my job to start pulling because I have to survive the Muur as well. We were looking to SD Worx and especially to FDJ to start pulling, and then we would put somebody in as well. In the final, before the Muur, we put some of our riders in together with FDJ, but that was already too late,” Pieterse said after her fourth-place finish.
Vollering, racing the first Classic with her new team FDJ-Suez, had talked to her former teammates during the race but received a clear answer.
“I went to the SD Worx riders and asked, ‘don’t you want to chase’, and they said, ‘no, we’re not allowed to chase by the car’. I had the impression that the girls didn’t like it either, but that’s how it is,” recounted the 28-year-old.
“I think that at the beginning of the season, everybody is a bit too afraid to put their hands in the fire too early, they are afraid that they will have to ride first every time for the rest of the season. Then it becomes a gamble, and whoever is the best at bluffing wins … or not. Today, none of us won,” Vollering continued.
Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx-Protime) defended her team’s decision to call their rivals’ bluff.
“We didn’t have a rider to come over the Muur in the first group, so we thought it was a bit more up to the other teams. Everybody was waiting, and we were not the first ones to start a chase. At one point Puck came to us, like, ‘if you start to chase, we start to chase’. But it was really looking at each other at that point,” Wiebes said.
“I was feeling quite okay, but I wasn’t 100 percent sure to get over the Muur in the first group. And in the end, Puck and Demi stayed in front. So even if we had caught the front group, we would have been sprinting for third place, and that’s also not what we come for. It would have been different if we had Lotte today, for instance, because then you know that she can follow Demi,” explained Wiebes.
Asked if she had experienced anything like this before, Van Dijk drew parallels to the 2021 Olympic Games road race.
“I wasn’t there, but I think the Tokyo Olympics was very similar,” she said.
Georgi could see the positives in how the race played out, giving escapees more hope that they can make it.
“Sometimes cycling is unpredictable. And I think it shows that if you take your chances, it can pay off and you can win,” said Georgi.
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