TOUR OF FLANDERS
ESTABLISHED 1913 EDITIONS 105
Theoretically, the Tour of Flanders is no more difficult to win than any other race. There is, after all, a victor every year. However, there’s something unique about the combination of challenges that the Ronde presents. The measure of how hard it is to actually thrive in it is that the record number of wins is stubbornly stuck at three. By comparison, Eddy Merckx won Milan-San Remo seven times and Liège-Bastogne-Liège five times; Fausto Coppi won Il Lombardia five times. But even the greatest cobbles riders in history - Johan Museeuw, Tom Boonen and Fabian Cancellara - never managed even a fourth win in Flanders.
On one level, the Tour of Flanders is brutally logical: the organisers put in 17 or 18 cobbled climbs, and that, along with the length, means that the list of potential winners is already small. You’d think the strongest rider would win, but there’s more to it than that.
The route twists and turns, following narrow roads north, south, east and west in the Flemish Ardennes. Positioning is far more than a case of staying near the front - pick the wrong side of the bunch near a turn into a crosswind, and it’ll cost a lot of places in the bunch, and a sapping chase back to the front. Riders need to know when to ride hard, and when to relent; the rule of thumb is that the pace before a climb is horribly high, and then the pace up the climb is steady but high, and then there’s a fight for position over the top - 18 climbs actually means 54 efforts.
The final challenge is complex - the long ramp of the Kwaremont favours big, strong diesels, while the Paterberg is much shorter and punchier, and the winner has to be able to handle both challenges.
The 2020 event had the air of a new era, as Mathieu van der Poel just outsprinted Wout van Aert. The race could barely separate them, and it’s easy to imagine them going head to head in the race for the next few years. The irony is that the only thing stopping each winning four times will probably be each other.