Greg Van Avermaet (CCC Team) has acknowledged that the changes to the Liège-Bastogne-Liège parcours increase his chances of success but is not yet committing to racing La Doyenne this year, with a decision to be made only after Amstel Gold Race the week before. Van Avermaet´s natural terrain is the cobbles and bergs of the Flemish Classics but he is a better climber than most of his rivals for those races, meaning that his ambitions can stretch into the Ardennes of southern Belgium. Liège-Bastogne-Liège is the hilliest and hardest Classic of the spring, and Van Avermaet, who has won medium mountain stages in the Tour de France and the Olympic title on a punishing Rio course, finished 12th two years ago and seventh in 2011.ADVERTISEMENT Last month, the race organisers announced that they were scrapping the uphill finale in Ans and moving it to a flatter finish in the centre of Liège, a change that race director Christian Prudhomme has predicted will bring riders like Van Avermaet and Peter Sagan into the equation. `It´s a super hard race, and now they´ve changed the finish, which is a bit in favour of me,` Van Avermaet acknowledged ahead of the Tour of Oman, his main Classics tune-up race. `I was already hearing for quite a long time in the Belgian newspapers that they were going to change the parcours, but then you wait for the real release and the parcours. I know the region really well, I also have a house there. For me, it´s always a nice race but my qualities as a rider are more for Flanders. And also, I don´t have the palmares to say `I won Flanders three times and Roubaix three times, and I´m going to only focus on Liège´. First, we see how it goes in the Flemish Classics and if there´s something left I can decide what I want to do for Liège.`
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
|
