Weekly Recap

Mads Pedersen is on a farming spree this year, Remco did a Remco, a new UAE Team Emirates superstar? And much more.

I don’t even know the word for the number of races that took place this week (there were six at .1 level or higher on the men’s side on Saturday alone plus the New Zealand National Championships, for example). So there is a lot to discuss, but I will distill down the racing to what matters going forward.

Kicking off the week was the first stage of the Tour Colombia (2.1), the most important bike race in South America. Fernando Gaviria, the rare Colombian sprinter, won the opening stage.

Harold Tejada took stage two from a small group.

Colombian champion Alejandro Osorio took the third stage, confirming his talent in winning the national title over stout competition a few weeks ago.

Cavendish opened his 2024 account on Stage Four in a bunch sprint. I don’t read much into this; maybe he’ll get number 35 in the Tour de France, maybe he won’t, but a South American bunch sprint in February does not predict future success or failure.

Richard Carapaz won the Queen Stage but narrowly missed out the GC lead with Rodrigo Contreras defending valiantly on the brutally long altitude climb Alto de Vino (The Wine Mountain?).

Jhonthan Restrepo won the final stage from a small group and Contreras defended his lead to win the title by just six seconds over Carapaz.

I did not tune in to much of this race but the scenes from Colombia are always spectacular with hundreds of likely over a million fans lining the roads. It’s nice to see this race come back after a hiatus.

I’m not going to cover the 2.1 Tour of Antalya in Turkey; it was contested by a bunch of riders I don’t know anything about. No disrespect to them at all, I just didn’t get a chance to watch and I wouldn’t know enough to comment on the competition.

The Tour de la Provence is a four-day race in Southern France consisting of a Prologue 5km Time Trial and three sprinty days. Mads Pedersen won the first three stages with some Herculean efforts but came up short on the final crosswind sprint, taking fifth. Tom van Asbroeck got his fifth career victory at the age of 33. Pedersen easily won the General Classification, already his sixth of the young season.

People on Twitter are getting really excited that he might have stepped even from last year’s amazing level and be ready to challenge the big Galacticos in the Monuments. I’m not saying this is impossible, but I would point out that cleaning 2.1 sprints against fifth-tier competition does not prove that he is ready to go toe-to-toe with Mathieu van der Poel on the Ode Kwaremont in Flanders. I’m bullish on Pedersen, but cautiously so. Nevertheless, he’s already racked up a lot of UCI points with this early-season farming. I’m not sure he cares much about that, having stated that “All I want in 2024 is a Monument.” We’ll see!

The Muscat Classic is a new one-day race preceding the Tour of Oman. With a 1.1 ranking, but a nice parcours and the same field as the 2.Pro stage race, good racing was expected. What we got was a slog through the desert and an Adam Yates leadout on the final climb for the flying 22-year-old Kiwi Finn Fisher-Black. He did a Yates-style attack by rateching up the pace gradually, got a gap on the peloton, and held it to the line to take a nice second-career victory. He’s a big talent for UAE. American sprinter Luke Lamperti got over the climbs and won the sprint behind for second place.

The Tour of Oman kicked off the next day with a sprint stage won by Caleb Ewan in a nice bounce-back from his troubles at the start of his season.

Stage Two was a rainy hill-top finish in which Fisher-Black crushed everybody to take another win and the GC lead. Lamperti got another impressive second place for Soudal – Quick Step and the USA.

Stage Three was shortened to 76km due to weather. The new course featured another punchy finish with a draggy kick to the line followed by a short 9 percent punch that would suit a lighter sprinter. Lamperti got second to his teammate Paul Magnier, who is a 19-year-old Frenchman already pushing incredible watts (more analysis coming soon). But our American youngster took the GC lead (he would be expected to lose the jersey on the harder stages to come). Caleb Ewan should have done well here; I am bewildered as to why he is so inconsistent even in minor races like this.

The race unusually wraps around the weekend, so Stage Three was on a Monday, finishing just before I am writing this. I will wrap up the final stages of the race next weekend.

Meanwhile, arguably the biggest race of the week was the Figueira Champions Classic in Portugal, a parallel (to the Muscat Classic) prelude to the Volta Algarve. The course was initially set to be 222km on a 30-ish kilometer circuit featuring a 2.3k 8 percent climb. Essentially, it was a mini Liege-Bastogne-Liege. But the organizers chopped one lap off, making it 192km with less climbing. I was disappointed, but I did not expect that to change the outcome at all.

The important element of this race was the presence of one member of the Big Four on the start line: Remco Evenepoel. As his first race of the season, and traditionally not amazing in that annual debut, he wasn’t a 6-star favorite. He would start as the heavy favorite, but not a 100-percent option. We should have known better; there was nobody present in his Stratosphere of ability. He’s also more focused than ever with a Tour de France debut on the horizon.

Remco attacked from about 55km out and did his usual Remco solo performance, winning by almost 2 minutes over a big pack of third-tier puncheurs (Marc Hirschi was the best of the lot on paper, but found himself in sixth place. Who the f*** knows what happened to that man since his ridiculous 2020 season during which he was barely 21 years of age?).

Remco looks good and I imagine his form will continue to improve as he approaches some bigger targets this spring.

Concurrent with Figueira was the Vuelta Murcia, a 1.1 race in Southern Spain with an interesting course that opened up the possibility of a lot of different scenarios. The one that played out was a solo victory for Ben O’Connor of Australia and Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale Team. Jan Tratnik took second ahead of Tim Wellens, each about a minute behind the winner. O’Connor has not ridden too well since his stage win and fourth place finish in the 2021 Tour de France, so perhaps he’ll resurrect himself this year.

The final race of the weekend was the Clasica de Almeria, a 1.Pro race in, you guessed it, Southern Spain. This was tilted heavily towards the sprinters, but importantly was the season debut of Wout van Aert for Visma – Lease a Bike. With Olav Kooij in the team, it was assumed that Wout would be on lead-out duties. He sure did a thermonuclear lead-out and dropped Kooij off just a few seconds away from the finish line. Despite celebrating a bit too early, the young Dutchman held on to win over Matteo Moschetti and Matteo Trentin. So two Italian Matteos on the Podium of a 1.Pro race. I Tweeted at Cillian Kelly, GCN’s statistician, asking if that had ever happened before, and while I have not heard back, you can follow me on Twitter here.

I’ve already previewed the big races (Algarve and Andalucia) happening this week in my February Preview, which you can check out here. Clasica Jaen in Spain just finished, and it was banger, but I’ll discuss that one in next week’s recap.

More soon.

Jamie