‘You can’t just sit and scroll TikTok’ – How Matthew Brennan is mentally preparing to lead in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad after teammate Wout van Aert falls sick

When Matthew Brennan was asked in Visma-Lease a Bike’s pre-Omloop press conference on Thursday what he had taken away from last year’s edition of the same race, he remarked that the biggest learning point for him in 2025 had not been so much what happened on the bike as off it.

“Most races are very similar, and normally I wouldn’t be doing a press conference, for example. But in a race like this, there are more things like that that begin to eat into your day,” he explained.

Not being able to look at social media might seem like a minor point, but it all adds up when it comes to the responsibilities of leading a team in a major Spring Classic, of course, something which Brennan was surely hoping would happen at some point in his career in the future.

But with teammate and experienced one-day racer Wout van Aert out with illness, suddenly on Thursday, the number of Visma representatives facing the media and the TV cameras in their press conference shrank from three to two, just Grischa Niermann and Brennan.

And rather than Van Aert likely fielding most of the questions directed at the riders, that role now fell exclusively to the 20-year-old Briton.

To his credit, Brennan seemed more than up to the task, despite next Saturday’s race being only his second participation and being flung fully into the media spotlight as sole team leader at almost the last minute. Rather, he took what is fast emerging as his typically phlegmatic approach to the questions fired at himself and Niermann, starting with one question about how it felt that just a single year on from racing the 2025 Omloop Het Nieuwsblad as a surprise participant, now in 2026 in the same race, he was leading one of the biggest teams.

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“It [leading in Omloop] is just how the years develop, I don’t think it points to anything. This year we have really good aims, a strong team,” he reflected. “If I can be there to benefit any of the other guys, that’d also be a good race for me.”

While the ideal scenario for himself, he said, would be a reduced group of racers at the finish, the most encouraging sign for now that he could be up there when it mattered on Saturday was that he had “already hit some good numbers, some good data at [Tour] Down Under” – where he won a stage. “Maybe I didn’t quite show it then, but it gave me some confidence going into these races now.”

“I’m going against some of the guys who I know are maybe stronger, but I know that after a hard race like this weekend, there could also be a different outcome.”

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The absence of Wout van Aert was always going to come up as well, and Brennan recognised it was a “big loss.”

“But I also think I have a really strong team that can also support whoever can be fighting for the wins. We want to be aggressive and do the best we can to put our options as far and as deep into the race as possible.

“So he’s a big card we’re going to be missing, but we also have a strong team.”

Asked if he considered himself a team leader – and Niermann himself said in the same press conference that Brennan was the best option that he had on the table – he was wary about the subject, saying simply, “Let’s say that I would like to be competing towards the back end of the race.

“I think we also have plenty of options to go with during the race itself, lots of other strong guys.”

As for his own position and whether he felt stronger or not compared to 12 months ago at the same point early in the season, when he took 69th in Omloop, Brennan was more open, saying that “if we go off power numbers, it’s better, especially in terms of depth or training.”

“Of course, training and racing are two very different things, but from a development point of view, it’s been a positive year.”

Development apart, it can also be said without a shadow of a doubt that it’s been a hugely positive year for Brennan in terms of his results, too.

Consistently successful from March through to September, all the way through 2025, he kept on churning out the wins, from the GP Denain as the first through to the Tour of Britain as the twelfth In between there were a string of top successes, including two stages in the Volta a Catalunya, a stage in the Tour de Pologne and the Tour de Romandie.

This year, the bar has been raised significantly higher, with his first-time participation in Milan-San Remo and the Tour of Flanders, a return to Paris-Roubaix, a string of other top Classics and, at the end of the season, his first-ever Grand Tour ride at the Vuelta a España. First, though, it’s his first-ever lead in a WorldTour-level major Classic – and that’s as soon as Saturday.

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