With E3 and Gent-Wevelgem around the corner and Flanders looming, Mathieu van der Poel, Wout van Aert and Mads Pedersen show promise but have questions yet to answer.
Cor Vos
Spring is well and truly here and Milan-San Remo is in the books, which means that the heart of Cobbled Classics season is nigh. One big name (guess who?) has already added a Monument to his tally for the year but Tadej Pogačar’s win on Saturday will have made so many other big names that much hungrier to get on the board in the weeks ahead.
We won’t have long to wait to see those big names in action again. Pogačar is taking some time off and second-place finisher Tom Pidcock won’t race any more one-days until the Brabantse Pijl, but the rest of the big names in that department will appear in one or both of E3 and Gent-Wevelgem this coming weekend. The bigger prizes of the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix – Pogačar will be in attendance at both races – will follow, but even now we already have a lot of intel to work with as we try to feel out the pecking order of Classics stars as the premier pavé events loom.
A little ways behind Pogačar and Pidcock at Milan-San Remo, three other big names in particular gave things to think about with more one-day racing to come.
A big weekend for Mads Pedersen and Lidl-Trek
Just five days ago, Lidl-Trek’s chances of getting something out of the 2026 Classics campaign seemed uncertain at best as the timetable for the return of team leader Mads Pedersen remained unclear. The fractures sustained in a crash at the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana in early February and subsequent surgery threw his entire spring into doubt, calling into question whether he would race Flanders or Roubaix at all.
Kinesiotape was the only visible sign of Pedersen’s broken wrist suffered only six weeks prior. But cobbles are a different stress.
Lidl-Trek announced last Thursday, however, that Pedersen would race Milan-San Remo, and two days later, he delivered a performance that must have brought a massive confidence boost to the team, sprinting to fourth on the Via Roma. Under normal circumstances, another top 10 for Pedersen in San Remo, where he had already racked up four such performances in the past without landing on the podium, would hardly be cause for celebration – but Saturday was an indication that Pedersen is very much a contender for the rest of the Classics, which might have seemed like a lost cause for his team not long ago.
At the finish line, Pedersen said that everything went “better than expected,” and in a video from Lidl-Trek, he was more effusive in his excitement about the result and the fact that his team had backed him as leader despite the question marks.
“Coming back here six weeks after the operation and still giving me the full support and to do like this for me in the final, it’s absolutely incredible and shows how good these guys race and how much they believe in me; it means way more than they think,” Pedersen said.
It’s not all good news for Lidl-Trek as Jonathan Milan missed the race due to illness and Toms Skujiņš just announced that he would miss the rest of the spring campaign due to illness, but on the whole, the team’s ambitions are so squarely on Pedersen’s shoulders that the team has to be far more confident about the next three weeks of racing than they were just days ago.
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