If you want to do well in White Roads and your name isn’t Tadej Pogačar, then it’s definitely a good idea to have done a few one-day races beforehand, and if one of them at least is Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, there are several advantages. That’s because Strade and Omloop are both very nervous races, and that extra high tension is something you can practice handling in one race and then put that practice into effect in another.
OK, the terrain is completely different and there’s not so much climbing in Omloop. But every time you have an approach to a sector and there’s a fight to be in the front, the efforts are exactly the same in both races.
Equipment is a very different story. I’d imagine the bikes many teams are using in Strade are the same ones that they have already used in the Clásica Jaén. Maybe the surface isn’t 100% the same in both races, but the feeling on most of the sectors will be, as well as the amount of climbing, and it’s quite different to do a flat gravel/off-road race than one that’s constantly uphill and downhill.
Equally, given Omloop is a much more important race than Jáen, they’ll have tried out tyres or wheel setups there in Spain rather than in Belgium. The feedback from there will be very important for Strade, although again, they’ll test the pressures there again in Italy. That’s because I don’t know if there’s much difference in the kind of gravel they have in Jaén and in Strade, but that also affects the tyre pressure a lot.
Handling Tadej (or not)
Then there’s the race itself and how you adapt to having a big favourite like Tadej Pogačar, which is very similar to Omloop and how it was for the opposition with Mathieu van der Poel.
It’s a difficult one, because not many riders, if any, can follow Tadej if he attacks, so you cannot really put your focus on him. Imagine if you’d been in Omloop and said ‘Right, when I’m on the Muur I’ll follow Mathieu, and then I’ll get in the top three at least’, but then he did what he did on the Muur and dropped everybody. And the same goes with Tadej.
So riders or the team at least have to make their own plan. One way round it is to make sure that you are in a break before him and then when he catches you, you can hang on as long as possible and then you maybe will have a good result. But if you base your strategy around Tadej too much, then you’ll lose anyway.
The other strategy at Strade would be to do what Florian Vermeersch did in Omloop, jump ahead on the Molenberg just before Mathieu went, make a split and see what happens. His plan though, was probably not to have just two guys with him – Mathieu, himself and Tim van Dijke, as it turned out – rather he’d have preferred it to be 10 or 12 or whatever.
But then the crash behind happened with Rick Pluimers falling on the Molenberg and there were three ahead, and – again a good strategy – Vermeersch quickly adapted to what had happened. He just said to himself, ‘OK, we’ll go full on with the three of us and see how far we can get’.
What were the advantages? Well, if they’d got a minute and then riders behind closed the gap, say, the riders ahead would still have been fresher than the guys that just did that. At the same time, Vermeersch was with the best rider of the race and it was better to cooperate – which he did – rather than sitting on the wheel and saying you won’t do anything, because then Mathieu might have got angry and he might have attacked earlier. Who knows? Instead, Vermeersch had the courage to cooperate and go as far as possible and he ended up on the podium.
Another key is not to waste energy. Take the (possible) example of Tom Pidcock in Circulationwho seemingly had some strange moments in the race, likely getting a rain jacket himself rather than having one of his teammates do it for him. This criticism is very much assuming he wasn’t doing that purely because he was getting back to the bunch after a crash or another race incident and he’d picked up the jacket en route – in which case this doesn’t apply at all, so it’s only a possible example. Otherwise, I’d say he maybe risked messing up his race there, he ended up burning matches when he didn’t need to.
Which tyres for the rain?
Next question is: the weather. If it’s raining in Tuscany, then it’s going to be more a muddy kind of race than gravel. For that I’m guessing they’d prefer a bit more grip on their tyres instead of going for the usual tyres in a 32 millimetre version. In fact, if it’s really rainy I could potentially see real gravel tyres getting used in Strade, too, because then they might use the smallest version of a gravel tyre like a 35 millimetre or something, but opting for a really knobbly one instead of the slick version.
If would say there’s not really a disadvantage in rolling resistance and you have extra grip with the gravel, although there are a lot of climbs, too, so it has to be a lightweight variant. That’s because the bigger the tyre, the heavier it is because you also have to put in more sealant, which for the normal tyre it’s 80 millilitres and in the really big tyres it’s 160 millilitres. So that’s a factor.
At the end of the day, things like tyre pressure all depends on the weather. But I think there just has to be one crazy guy – or maybe Pogačar himself – using the gravel tyre for Strade and everybody will do the same next year as well. That’s how trends work in bike racing!
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