Where were Thor and Gilbert?

With two great sprinters added to their team this year, you'd think BMC would have been able to pull off a win, or at least a podium spot...wrong!! Even with Philipe Gilbert and Thor Hushovd riding in the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, BMC's best placed position was Greg Van Avermaet in 5th. What happened???

BMC falls short at Omloop Het Nieuwblad

(http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/bmc-falls-short-at-omloop-het-nieuwblad)

They may have one of the biggest budgets and the some of the sport's most decorated and accomplished Classics riders but BMC proved that racing doesn't always go to plan after their performance in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad fizzled out following a promising start.

The team lined up with arguably their strongest Classics line-up - only George Hincapie was missing - as Philippe Gilbert, Thor Hushovd, Greg Van Avermaet and Alessandro Ballan took to the start in Ghent.

The opening half of the race went to plan. The team's leaders were kept out of trouble by able domestiques, while rival squad, Omega-Pharma, did the majority of the work on the front of the bunch.

However, the team's race began to unravel on the Taaienberg. Gilbert lacked form and positioning, finding himself isolated before a puncture effectively ended his chances of wining a third title in the race.

At the front of the race, Thor Hushovd made the split and looked set to contest the win but the 2010 world champion cracked along with Matti Breschel (Rabobank) on the Paddestraat with 30 kilometres to go.

"I was happy that I was there with the best riders when we went fast. I just had a bad moment on the Paddestraat but I don't know what happened. Suddenly I was dropped but I felt strong and that's important," Hushovd told Cyclingnews.

"I had confidence that I was strong enough to be there in the final. Like I said I had that bad moment and suddenly I lost the power. When things like that happen it's just over for such a hard race."

BMC did eventually rally, leading the chase from behind and Van Avermaet secured 5th place in the bunch sprint for 4th.

For the likes of Hushovd and Gilbert, bigger tests are on the horizon and the team will surely chalk up today's race as a learning experience. For second year professional Taylor Phinney it was exactly that. The American rode on the front for the first 70 kilometres and finished his first semi-classic in 44th place.

"It didn't work out 100 per cent," added Hushovd. It's the first race together and I think today the Taaienberg was the main place to be in the front and we missed a couple of guys to really be in the final with two or three but we'll work on that for future races."

Hushovd will skip Sunday's Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne and venture home before starting next month's Paris-Nice.

Gilbert: I didn't have the legs

(http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/gilbert-i-didnt-have-the-legs)

Philippe Gilbert’s first appearance on Belgian roads as a BMC rider ended in disappointment as he was unable to make an impact at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on Saturday.

While he admitted that he didn’t have the legs to compete for the win, Gilbert believed that a lack of information about the gap to the winning break frustrated BMC’s efforts to bring the race back together in the finale.

Twice a winner of the Omloop, Gilbert’s hopes of adding a third triumph disappeared at the foot of the Taaienberg. When winner Sep Vanmarcke (Garmin-Barracuda) and Tom Boonen (Omega Pharma-QuickStep) hit the front, Gilbert was poorly placed in the heart of the peloton, and a subsequent puncture on the Eikenberg definitively ended his challenge. He went on to finish 41 seconds down in 31st.

“I wasn’t in the race,” Gilbert told dhnet.be. “I was there without being there. I didn’t have good legs. I was always fifteen or twenty places too far back and in these conditions, you can get caught up in a crash or puncture…”

While his teammate Thor Hushovd had initially succeeded in following the winning move sparked by Vanmarcke and Boonen, Gilbert complained that information was hard to come by in the absence of radio earpieces.

The BMC riders in the peloton were unaware that Hushovd had been dropped from the lead group, and they only began to organise their pursuit inside the final 15 kilometres.

“Racing without earpieces doesn’t bother me, but it’s not normal not to have any information,” he said. “I only saw the chalkboard once and it was only with 15km to go that John Lelangue was able to fill us in and tell us that Thor had been dropped.

“At that moment we started to ride, but it was too late, we knew that it was only for 4th place. In the end, Greg [Van Avermaet] was 5th, which isn’t bad, like the fact that there were five of us in that group.”