Making a list and checking it twice, EF Education-Oatly are coming to town. 📸 Keir Plaice/EF Pro Cycling.
Hauwaart 88, 9700 Oudenaarde.
It’s a corner junction where an old fruit market once stood. The doors are boarded up, the weeds are seeping across the car park, and it’s just an innocuous crossing in Belgium with nothing remarkable about it.
I’m here because these are the coordinates I was sent by EF Education-Oatly’s Huub Duyn the previous evening after the sports director and I agreed to meet ahead of the team’s recon of Dwars door Vlaanderen.
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It’s 10:45 am, and just like clockwork, the big pink team bus arrives with two team cars in tow. In the blink of an eye, the bikes are unloaded, and the riders’ machines are lined up outside the bus. Duyn and fellow sports director Daniel Foder gather for a last-minute chat, as the athletes make their final preparations.
The full race route. The team would recon the most important sectors before the finish.
Ahead of them lie around 70km of recon, with seven athletes set to tackle the most demanding part of Wednesday’s course, starting with the Berg Ten Houte climb and running through until the final lap around the finish in Waregem – the scene where the team’s Neilson Powless took on three Visma-Lease a Bike riders in 2025, and won.