ANALYSIS: THE HARDEST RACE
The Tour of Flanders is one of the most di cult races to master. Procycling looks at what makes it such a challenge
Procycling explores what makes the Tour of Flanders so tough to win, and then win again
On the surface of it, the Tour of Flanders should be no easier or more difficult to win than any other race. After all, it starts from point A, finishes in point B, and the first across the line is the winner, same as all the rest.
However, while the instructions for many other races can be simplified to a series of bullet points, those for the Tour of Flanders would be dozens of pages of densely packed text. The team talk to a sprinter’s team on a flat stage of the Tour de France might be: don’t let too many riders into the break, only riders from certain teams, nobody that’s too strong; keep them at three or four minutes ahead; chase them down; lead out (that’s the complicated bit, these days); sprint. A mountain stage: similar, only uphill. Milan-San Remo: also similar, unless your leader is not a sprinter, in which case, attack on the Poggio.
The Tour of Flanders, however, combines complexity and toughness in a way that makes it a difficult race to master. Being strong is not necessarily enough – without detailed knowledge of the route and roads, how they interact and how a peloton behaves on them, a strong rider will merely have plenty of opportunities to waste energy before the real manoeuvring begins in the last 50 kilometres.
The race is dynamic and uncontrollable and can change shape several times in a short space of time. Even knowing the route well and being well suited to it can’t guarantee a win - this is something Greg Van Avermaet knows full well, having finished in the top 10 seven times in 12 attempts at the race, but never won.
There are two noticeable aspects of the Ronde which reinforce the perception that it’s a hard race to win. First, generally, it takes even classics thoroughbreds a few attempts before they master it – Fabian Cancellara may have been dominant between 2010 and 2014, during which time he won the Ronde three times, but he had seven goes before his first win, and only came in the top 20 once. Johan Museeuw took six goes to win it, Peter Sagan took five. Even Tom Boonen, who proved his precocity and strength by coming third in Paris-Roubaix at the age of 21, ‘only’ won on his fourth attempt in Flanders (see graphic on page 49).
Second, Flanders is a hard race to win multiple times. Of all the monuments and grand tours, its record number of wins by individual riders is the lowest, with several having won it three times, but nobody
ever having won four. All the other major races can count quadruple victors or more. When even Boonen and Cancellara, who were both in their different ways perfectly designed for the race, could only win three times, then how could anybody ever envisage winning four?
So why is Flanders so difficult to master? The primary reason is the complexity of the route. The bergs of the Flemish Ardennes – short, steep climbs, many of which are cobbled – are the headline grabbers and are marketed as the USP of the race. They’re hard to ride on, especially when the surface is bad, and narrow, so they tend to stretch the peloton into a thinner line – a rider might be sitting in 20th or 30th position on one of the wider roads, but he or she could easily be squeezed back to 40th or 50th on a cobbled berg. With such high pace at the front, that makes that rider vulnerable to being caught behind splits, which means an energy-intense chase to get back.
But the bergs are still only a small part of the equation. Because they are such obvious flashpoints, they affect what happens for the
10 kilometres and more before them – the fight to start a berg near the front begins at the end of the last one; when the bergs come in quick succession, the fight is relentless.
Then, afterwards, the damage is assessed – if dangerous riders are isolated behind, it can be fatal for them, as front groups (by definition composed of the strongest and best riders), can just ride away making the race even harder. The classics specialist Nikolas Maes, who grew up in the Flemish Ardennes, once said that though there are 20 climbs and cobbled sections in total, each consists of three efforts – hard riding in, then the climb, then hard riding out – so that there are 60 red-line efforts to get through during the Ronde. Try doing 60 sprints in a hard six-hour ride some time, to get an idea.
These are not all – the rest of the race is ridden at an attritional pace as well – George Hincapie said that his normalised power in the 2011 race was 339 watts over the six hours of the race. This constant rinse-and-repeat of the bergs and the fight to get in and out of them, erodes the peloton from the back as well. If the bergs weren’t enough, the route constantly switches direction, meaning that a benign tailwind or uncomplicated headwind can easily become a crosswind.
This is where local riders are favoured – knowledge of the roads, the way the wind affects them and experience of how these affect a peloton is a huge advantage to have on your side. Flemish riders like Peter Van Petegem, Boonen, Museeuw and Stijn Devolder grew up racing in the Flemish Ardennes and developed an almost instinctive ability to read the race. Others, like German Andreas Klier and Australian Baden Cooke (good Flanders riders who were both contenders and strong teammates for race favourites) came to the region later in their riding lives, but set
The bergs are such obvious lashpoints: they affect what happens for 10 kilometres and more before them
about learning the roads in a more conscious way.
And even those great
Flanders champions who came from elsewhere, like Cancellara, knew that while their strength and experience was enough to put them near the front, having a couple of local riders on the team also helped – the last time Cancellara won Flanders, for example, in 2014, he had Devolder (not only local, but a double winner) and Jasper Stuyven doing the domestique work. Plus he had Grégory Rast in the squad, who may have also been Swiss, but was riding the Ronde for the 12th time that season.
Tom Boonen said that the Ronde sets a trap for ambitious and unprepared riders: “It’s the hardest race to read. It challenges you and it wants you to start racing… every time you reach the bottom of a climb full of adrenalin, and you have a fight with the guy on the left and the guy on the right,” he explained. “You have to stay calm and keep thinking, but the race wants you to race. If you have a plan it lasts five minutes.”
And at the end of all that, the physical challenge of the Ronde is such that a rider must still be supremely strong to win. The number of climbs, and their order, is tweaked every year, but typically there are between 16 and 18 bergs for the peloton to tackle, plus the flat cobbled sectors.
By the time the final three or four bergs come around, only the strongest riders among those clever enough not to have wasted too much energy beforehand, can hope to win. It’s down to this that the Tour of Flanders is the ultimate test of both strength and racing intelligence.