Mathieu van der Poel starts the second half of his season this afternoon. Five years later he returns to Dward door het Hageland and he will be the main favourite. However,
Alpecin-Deceuninck have several cards they can use to chase the triumph in the cobbled classics.
“Many people already assume that Mathieu will win on Saturday, but it is not that simple," team DS Bart Leysen told Het Nieuwsblad this morning. "A race must always be ridden. You should also not forget that Mathieu has only just returned from his altitude camp. He worked hard there, but that is no guarantee of success.”
After some high-altitude training at La Plagne, France, a lot of the Tour de France block for the Belgian team will be racing the Baloise Belgium Tour. Beforehand, already in the country, they'll be racing Hageland and the Elfstedenronde Brugge too. Explosive racing in Belgium before the national championships, and a sharp comeback to competition.
Van der Poel will be joined by the likes of Dries de Bondt, Timo Kielich and Gianni Vermeersch who have all shown great quality over the past few months, and together can cause mayhem as was the case at Antwerp Port Epic where they swarmed the whole podium. “We prefer to avoid a mass sprint, but it is not certain whether that will work with all those sprinters at the start. Fortunately, we have Timo Kielich and Jonas Rickaert on hand," Leysen concluded.
