The three races that traditionally close the men’s spring classics season — La Flèche Wallonne, Amstel Gold Race, and Liège- Bastogne-Liège, affectionately known as Ardennes Week — are rich in history, and consistently offer brutal climbs and cutthroat competition. It’s where many legends have been born.
Now, the Women’s WorldTour will have its turn to put an exclamation point on the spring season in much the same way.
While Flèche Femmes has been a staple of the women’s season for almost two decades, the addition of Amstel Gold and Liège fill out an already packed women’s spring calendar. (The first eight WWT races span just seven weeks.) It creates a women’s version of the Ardennes Week, providing more rhythm to the season and expanding the variety of racing for the women’s peloton.
For years, the cobbled classics were the pinnacle of the women’s spring season — and in many ways the entire season. Riders battled at Gent-Wevelgem and the women’s Tour of Flanders for a chance at career-changing glory. The races often overshadowed Flèche, which became an afterthought for the biggest teams.
“Until now it’s been all about the cobbled classics,” says Tiffany Cromwell (Canyon-SRAM), 2013 winner of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. “Everyone tried to be cobbled classics riders, since they have been the biggest one-day races we’ve had on our [calendar] outside the world championships and Olympic Games.”
The reshuffling of the racing schedule will have multiple impacts on teams and racers. Smaller teams will undoubtedly bring the same riders to both the cobbled and hilly races, while larger teams will shuffle their rosters based on each rider’s specialty.
“We won’t treat the cobbled classics and Ardennes as one block of racing,” explains Orica-Scott’s team director Gene Bates. “We will individualize certain riders’ programs to suit their strengths.” Katrin Garfoot (Orica-Scott), for example, will put more effort into Flèche and Liège while some of her teammates will focus on the cobbles.
A short list of pro women have the diverse skills to shine in both sets of racers. Brit Lizzie Deignan (Boels-Dolmans) and Annemiek van Vleuten (Orica-Scott) can both challenge on flat roads, as well as climbs. They face the challenge of choosing which races to target and how to prepare for each. “They are subtly different and require different approaches,” says Deignan, winner of three spring classics last season. “It is now worthwhile taking a different approach as there are three [Ardennes] races to target rather than the one.”
But which race or races to target? That’s the question on every team leader’s mind this season. After a hiatus since 2003, the women’s Amstel Gold returns this April. The women will take to the tight and twisty Dutch roads and tackle many of the same climbs as the men’s race. They’ll charge up punchy climbs like the Geulhemmerberg (970 meters at 7.9 percent), the Bemelerberg (900 meters at 7.0 percent), and finish 1.8 kilometers beyond the top of the Cauberg (800 meters at 12 percent) giving the peloton a small glimmer of chance to chase back any attacks established by the climbers.
Liège-Bastogne-Liège Femmes will be the second one-day monument (after the women’s Tour of Flanders) to join the WWT calendar. The women’s race will include the traditional finale of the Côte de La Redoute, Côte de la Roche-aux-Faucons, and Côte de Saint-Nicolas. Boels-Dolmans’s Anna van der Breggen is a studied Ardennes rider, having won Flèche two years running. She’s the rider to beat when it comes to the steeps of the Mur de Huy. But translating her skillset and fortune into wins at both Amstel and Liège will prove difficult, especially with more riders eyeing the Ardennes than ever before.
A bigger challenge may be targeting the overall WWT series, the winner of which will be forced to focus on consistency throughout the spring season rather than victory at a single race.
“This could compromise looking for victories towards the back end of the eight weeks [from the start of the cobbles through the Ardennes] — the schedule leaves little time for training and recovery,” Deignan says. The calendar change could further splinter the field, pulling women in different directions as they attempt to specialize, and pushing teams to accommodate complex season plans to protect and support their riders.
Women’s teams generally run a single race program, with around 10 to 14 riders. Orica-Scott’s Bates says that careful planning is necessary for making sure the team’s best riders are in optimal shape for each of the big events. It’s a balancing act to prioritize certain races and rider goals without over-cooking the team, or worse.
Last year, Canyon-SRAM suffered a debilitating bout of bad luck, with illness and injury, during a similar six-week period of racing. The team was forced to race with the same squad for the entire block of events. “We were all mentally and physically drained by the end,” Cromwell says. “[We] weren’t able to perform at the level we knew we were capable of as a team by the end of the block of racing.”
With the lion’s share of WWT points crammed into a two-month period, luck is now essential to the teams and riders hoping to win the overall. Should a prominent rider or team come down with a cold or suffer a crash, the door could open for smaller teams to excel. Cromwell predicts this dynamic will produce multiple winners, rather than domination by one athlete or team.
That would be a good thing for women’s racing.
A variety of winners adds excitement and unpredictability to the season and elevates the level of intricacy and nuance of racing. This further drives the evolution of racing tactics we’ve seen within the women’s peloton in the past few years.
“Riders and teams race increasingly aggressive, attacking, which is exciting,” says Hans Timmermans, the women’s coach of Team Sunweb. “On top of that, most of the new races have great and challenging courses, which will take a similar approach to that from the men’s.”
WWT races have similar field sizes to the men’s events (around 200 riders), but the women are allowed just six riders per team. With more teams in the mix and fewer riders to contribute, it’s harder for one team to control the peloton.
Women’s races are also shorter than men’s races, which changes the racing dynamics entirely. While men’s races can feel like drawn-out chess matches, the women’s events can see explosive racing from the gun. This year, the UCI will allow a WWT one-day race to be, at most, 160 kilometers — an increase of 20 kilometers from last year.
Bates says this should cause the peloton to be more likely to let an early break go. “We are starting to see different race tactics employed by women’s teams,” Bates says. “If you look around at the [male] directors of all the major women’s teams, there is certainly a few years of racing experience [from their time racing in] the men’s peloton, which will surely start to have an affect on the outcome of races.”
Will the more complex tactics and more vibrant racing help the women’s peloton develop a Tom Boonen-Fabian Cancellara type rivalry? Or will we crown the first queen of the Ardennes? It may not all happen in one season, but the addition of a full Ardennes week is helping shape women’s cycling by introducing a few elements of the unknown.
“It’s going to add a whole new character of racing in the women’s peloton,” Cromwell says. “And the majority of the women’s peloton is excited about this.”
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