Rub the sleep from your eyes, wash the surprisingly large amount of winter filth off your bike – Omloop Het Nieuwsblad has taken place and the cycling season is now unequivocally underway.
So how have things changed?
They haven’t.
Olympic road race champion Greg Van Avermaet won the Omloop, just as he did last year. Peter Sagan came second, just as he did last year.
Fabian Cancellara may have retired, but otherwise it seems safe to assume that our 2017 cobbled classics cast will be much the same as the year before. This feeling was further underlined by Sep Vanmarcke’s third place. Vanmarcke was third in the Tour of Flanders and fourth in Paris–Roubaix in 2016.
If you, like me, struggle to hold more than two pieces of information in your head these days, just keep an eye on Peter Sagan and anyone Belgian and you won’t go far wrong.
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