It really should not have happened, but it did. Against all odds, the women’s Omloop Nieuwsblad was won by late-starter and former duathlete Lotte Claes (Arkéa-B&B Hotels) from the day’s early breakaway, as the peloton let the biggest race of the season so far slip through their fingers – not unlike trying to win a staring contest with your eyes closed.
While it is of course a terrific result for the 31-year-old Belgian – and second-place Aurela Nerlo (Winspace Orange Seal) – the way the race played out presented significant questions for the favourites and their teams in the peloton.
Fine, let the unthreatening breakaway establish a sizeable advantage, but someone then has to take responsibility and race, right?
[race_result id=9181 stage_id=0 count=10 gc=0 year=2025]
A red letter day for the breakaway
It’s actually not that unusual for a breakaway to get what seems like a massive lead, even in the relatively short one-day classics. If the peloton is content with the group’s composition, and confident enough that the bigger teams can use the terrain and their combined strength to their advantage later on, a breakaway may get a decent gap before seeing it evaporate as fast or faster than the power in their legs when the peloton puts the hammer down.
It’s also increasingly ordinary for a hotly contested women’s race to see no true breakaway at all, but that was not the case at Omloop Nieuwsblad, where five riders survived the early battle to make a move: Elena Pirrone (Roland), Lotte Claes (Arkéa-B&B Hotels), Aurela Nerlo (Winspace Orange Seal), Julie Stockman (DD Group) and Mieke Docx (Lotto). Of the quintet, only Pirrone had yet to spill ink in her logbook having taken a solo victory at the Grand Prix Stuttgart & Region in 2023. She’s also the only one on a WorldTour contract with Roland.
A number of others attempted to bridge, but the five leaders stayed clear and as the miles passed, their advantage continued to grow and grow, and grow some more.
With 40km to go, the gap had come down to around 11 minutes, by which point the peloton ought to have been throwing everything they could afford at the chase, but they’d take barely a minute back in the ensuing 10 km.
The gap finally started to tumble precipitously on the way to Geraardsbergen, but the leaders still had more than six minutes in hand at the foot of the Kapelmuur. With Pirrone and Docx dropped on the climb and joining Stockman off the back, only Claes and Nerlo remained, but their time loss on the Muur-Bosberg double-header was fairly minimal.
Despite the late chase by two pre-race favourites, the last wisps of hope were extinguished, and the unlikely leaders raced towards their fairytale ending.
“It’s really unbelievable,” Claes said in her winner’s interview. “It’s only my second pro year. Before that, I combined [racing] with working in a hospital as a nurse. So I hope it’s a step towards a bright future.
“We were here with ambitions, but since the race usually ends in a sprint, my role was to help our sprinters. But I am very happy that they gave us such a big advantage … I don’t have fast legs, but after a hard race, I often have something left. [Nerlo] started quite early, which was to her advantage because she is a bit more explosive, she can get going really quickly. I don’t have that explosiveness, and I was hurting everywhere. But then she couldn’t keep it up, and I managed to get back with one big push.”
The old rivalry cancels itself out
But what was happening behind Claes and Nerlo?
Put simply, no one appeared to be particularly keen to race. A number of teams tried to lift the pace and reduce the peloton’s deficit to the front – and there was some talk of issues with the race radio that meant the gap was miscommunicated – but one major sticking point was that the focus appeared to be less on the leaders and more on one or two big names, and assumptions of supremacy, in the bunch.
By the time Demi Vollering and Puck Pieterse broke clear of the peloton on the Muur van Geraardsbergen, it was already too late.
The rivalry between Vollering and SD Worx-Protime, which at Omloop Nieuwsblad meant Lorena Wiebes, Mischa Bredewold, et al., has been well chronicled by this point (even when she was part of the team), and it seems rather like both parties cancelled the other out. And took the rest of the bunch with them.
Quotes after the race reached a (disappointing) consensus: It wasn’t our responsibility to chase.
“Everyone looked at each other. As a result everyone lost except the winners,” Wiebes said in quotes provided by her team. “It’s not always up to us to chase. There are new dynamics in the peloton. The pressure is not always on us, the favourites are among a lot of different teams. We are less certain to win a race, so we also try to save more riders for later.”
Similar sentiments came from FDJ-Suez and Lidl-Trek among others. The idea that it’s early in the season and some don’t want to push too hard too soon also came up, but the bewildering lack of impetus across the board was not sufficiently explained away.
“I asked them didn’t they want to ride,” Vollering said of her former team, SD Worx-Protime. “They said: ‘No, we’re not allowed to, from the car.’ I think they were also annoyed that they weren’t allowed to ride, but then again, that’s how it is, right? I think that everyone is too afraid to put their hands in the fire too early at the beginning of the season. And that they are afraid that they will have to ride first for the rest of the season. Then it’s sometimes a gamble. Whoever guesses best, wins. Or you don’t win. None of us won today.”
With no disrespect to the breakaway, there was more than enough power in the peloton to close them down, but negative racing tactics backfired – as they should.
If no one is willing to race, no one is going to win.
Headline credit goes to Escape Collective member Jordan W.
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