Quick-Step crew provide a unique perspective at the soul of cycling

As he watched his rider Bob Jungels pass the line at the end of Kuurne‑Brussels‑Kuurne on Sunday, turning into the first man from Luxembourg to win one of motorcycle racing’s cobbled classics in more significant than a century, Patrick Lefevere could appearance returned to the day, forty-one years ago, while he won the race himself. Lefevere’s very own racing career become incredibly short. But now he’s the guiding spirit of the best team in his game. Perhaps, pound for pound, the best crew in any game nowadays. Lefevre would have felt especially at domestic on Sunday. He was born 64 years in the past in Flanders, the part of Belgium where the weekend’s racing took place. Flanders is to cycling what the north-east of England as soon as become to football: a heartland whose essence survives even after the highlight has moved someplace else.

He is part of long and deep culture. But he exists inside the modern-day international less as a reminder of a loved beyond than as the master of the present. Women’s cycling race forced to pause after lead rider catches guys’ race Read extra Jungels’s win on Sunday got here 24 hours after Zdenek Stybar, a hugely experienced Czech rider, had received the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, the first of the year’s cobbled classics. Stybar, too, was wearing the jersey of Lefevere’s Quick-Step team, now also bearing the call of every other sponsor. These have been the Deceuninck-Quick-Step team’s 14th and 15th wins of the season, and it changed into only the primary weekend of March. That puts them on route to fit their overall performance of the final year, in which – by way of I be counted – they gained 64 individual races, plus one crew trial and three level-race typical victories. It changed into a yr exquisite enough to justify a Wikipedia page all to itself, cataloging the successes of its famous person riders. They covered Niki Terpstra in E3 Harelbeke, and the Tour of Flanders, Julian Alaphilippe inside the Flèche Wallonne and the Tour of Britain, Jungels in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and stage wins within the predominant excursions for the sprinters Elia Viviani and Fernando Gaviria and the climber Enric Mas.

The crew backed through two Belgian businesses manufacturing flooring and home windows to make a yr-round assault at the calendar. However, their happiest hunting ground emerges as wintry weather starts offevolved, becoming spring. This is when success calls for not just velocity and strength but also reserves of intellectual patience and race intelligence. In the spring classics, the riders put on radio earpieces and feature crew cars near at hand, but they seem to be on their very own, struggling with now not just their competitors but an inhospitable environment. Grey skies, grey houses, grey church buildings, brownfields, muddy verges, raindrops at the lens of the helical-cam, moto headlights reflecting yellow off the greasy grey cobbles on the quick, brutal climbs: this was the perfect climate for the weekend’s racing. There turned into never the chance that round the next corner the riders would glimpse Cézanne’s Mont Sainte‑Victoire shimmering in a summer season haze throughout ripening vineyards, as they once in a while do inside the Tour de France. When Dave Brailsford launched Team Sky, it changed into the precise objective of triumphing the world’s largest and most glamorous motorbike race. Everything else became peripheral to that ambition, which turned into important to attracting this lavish multinational sponsor.

But Lefevre’s group provides a unique perspective at the soul of motorbike racing. The Recap: sign on for the excellent of the Guardian’s sport insurance Read extra “Strength is the whole thing in Belgian cycling,” Eddy Planckaert, a hero of the Eighties and a member of a famous dynasty, says in The Beast, the Emperor and the Milkman, Harry Pearson’s entertaining new e-book on biking in Flanders. Planckaert is speaking about pride in using a huge gear at all times: “If there’s a hill or a headwind, you simply press harder on the pedals.” This isn’t always the cycling of flyweight Colombian climbers or Chris Froome’s excessive-cadence style. Sky’s effort inside the one-day classics every so often seems to be the result of obligation in preference to preference. In the 5 Monuments – Milan-San Remo, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Tour of Flanders and the Giro di Lombardia – they’ve won most effective two times because getting into the game in 2010. Lefevere’s riders have gained 20 for the reason that 2000. But Sky did have a result to reveal for the ultimate weekend in Flanders. The 25-year-vintage Welsh rider Owain Doull, an Olympic group pursuit gold medal winner in Rio and an apprentice with the teams run with the aid of Sean Kelly and Bradley Wiggins earlier than joining Sky in 2016, gained the fee for 2nd place in the back of Jungels, having worked difficult for his teammate Ian Stannard the day before today.

Doull’s overall performance would be preferred through the past due to Alberic “Briek” Schotte, the totemic parent of Flandrian biking, immortalized overdue in life in graphics by the photographer Stefan Vanfleteren. “His expression is as eager as an eagle’s and as fierce,” Pearson writes, looking at those photos. “It made me think about my old records teacher, a Welshman from the Valleys, who’d been the ordinary stand-off for Cardiff inside the Nineteen Fifties. ‘You visit to play in France,’ he’d say. ‘Toulouse, Toulon, the heartland of French rugby football. It’s not an enjoy you forget. Big men, they had been, big. Oh, I tell you, it lives with you ever after: the brutality, the ferocity …’ Briek Schotte had the Welsh schoolmaster’s depth. You certainly wouldn’t have wanted him catching you sticking chewing gum beneath your desk.” A barrel-chested farmer’s son who gained the world championship two times inside the past due Nineteen Forties, Schotte gave the impression of a man who would possibly have taken an excellent day as an excuse now not to ride. According to Pearson, he raced with a brown ale in his drinks bottle and a combination of beef stew and potato and vegetable mash – a Flandrian specialty – in his feed bag. Take that, you prophets of marginal gains.