JÜRGEN ROELANDTS

After spending the first 10 years of his professional career with Lotto Soudal, Jürgen Roelandts made the bold decision to change teams this winter, joining BMC. It looks like the switch did him good. After seven wins in those 10 years, he won two times in his first five days with BMC – the stage 3 TTT then stage 5 in a bunch sprint at the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana.

Roelandts may not win all that often, but he’s quietly assembled one of the most consistent one-day palmarès in the peloton. He’s not dissimilar to his team-mate Greg Van Avermaet, who spent years getting consistent results before finally breaking through in 2016 and then dominating the cobbled Classics in 2017. Roelandts doesn’t quite have the firepower of Van Avermaet, but he’s an extremely good rider with a strong sprint. He beat Danny van Poppel in Valenciana, and he’s finished fourth in the Champs-Elysées sprint of the Tour de France, back in 2010.

Roelandts has only won one one-day race – the Belgian National Championships in 2008. But he’s got podium finishes in E3, Milan-San Remo and the Tour of Flanders, with top fives in Plouay, Montréal and the Worlds. The difficulty with which he converts good positions into wins means that he’s not best used as an out-and-out team leader in the Classics – that position is filled by Van Avermaet anyway. But he’s an ideal foil for his compatriot – he can attack deep into the finale and put the pressure on rival teams to use up firepower in chasing him down, or he can sit in for a sprint. In BMC, he might have found a better outlet for his talents than he had at Lotto.