THE SEASON START

Never win a Classic? I could live with that,” read the HetNieuwsblad headline above its Sep Vanmarcke interview the morning of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. The 29-year-old was pictured smiling, on the massage table. Vanmarcke, the winner of the Omloop in 2012, was a rare drop of sanguinity in a region that was feeling the first feverish flush of the year for bike racing. “Cold War” boomed the paper on the front of its 17-page race supplement, which pictured the top favourite Greg Van Avermaet’s head frozen in ice – a reference to the clear, icy weather brought in on the scything northeast wind from Russia. The rare wind would dictate the terms of the race.

In the week prior to the racing, HetNieuwsblad’s coverage ran to 43 pages – about three pages fewer per day than it devotes to the Tour of Flanders. Every contender, every berg, every curious human interest angle the Omloop offered was dissected in the paper, which took over the race sponsorship in 2009. “People have been talking about the race for weeks,” BMC’s sporting manager, Allan Peiper said. Even for him, an Australian who’s spent 40 years living and breathing cycling in the Flemish Ardennes, it was hard not to get swept up in the occasion of ‘opening weekend’.

Peiper’s key charge, Van Avermaet, had been tanned to a nutty brown in the Middle East and on training camps in southern Spain, but here was where the season started, Peiper said. “There’s a lot of interest because there hasn’t been any bike racing here for a while,” he added, describing the race’s special status and outlying place in the calendar, a good three weeks before the main body of the Flemish Classics.

For three years now, Omloop has started in the conference complex of Ghent’s Citadelpark. It used the high-banked and historic ’T Kuipke velodrome to present the riders. Buses parked in the Floraliënhal, a gigantic dusty grey hanger used for garden exhibitions. In here, in the soft outside-inside light of the dazzling winter morning, spectators gathered around the teams or filtered into the dark, gig-venue ambience of the ’T Kuipke to see the riders. Much talk was of the finish, the Muur-Bosberg finale with the line in Meerbeke. It was lifted straight from the much-loved, much-missed pre-2012 Ronde van Vlaanderen. But Philippe Gilbert, a two-time winner of the semi-Classic back when the race was Omloop Het Volk - the folksier name still preferred by many - predicted the Molenberg, 50km out, as the point the race would crack open.

There was a buzz in the Floraliënhal. The autograph hunters and selfie snappers were out in force. Team staff greeted each other from their respective paddocks. We watched Hilaire Van der Schueren, the grizzled old team manager at Wanty-Groupe Gobert and possibly the living incarnation of Belgian bike racing, receive a steady stream of friends and well-wishers all morning long. “The funny thing is,” remarked Peiper, “you more or less see the same people year in, year out. It is the same crowd – but it’s our crowd isn’t it?”