Stat Attack: Why has no male rider ever done the Omloop-Flanders double?

There have been 76 different years when the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and the Tour of Flanders have both taken place. And it is still true that no male rider has won both races in the same year.

It is a statistical oddity and is really rather inexplicable. These are not two randomly selected races which have no bearing on each other, quite the opposite. Every rider who wins one should be physically capable of winning the other. The Omloop, which takes place this coming weekend, is a shorter distance than the Ronde but the routes are very similar, taking in many of the same cobbled bergs. In fact, the Omloop was originally created back in 1945 explicitly to rival the Ronde and it was originally named the Omloop van Vlaanderen.

Read more: Everything you need to know about Omloop Het Nieuwsblad

On the calendar, there are five weeks between the two races. This is sometimes suggested as a reason why this particular double has never been achieved - that if a rider is in good enough shape to win the Omloop, then five weeks is too long for them to maintain fitness to follow it up with a second victory.

It is the same logic which gives rise to a lesser known curse in professional cycling: La Malédiction de la Marseillaise. The story goes that the winner of the GP La Marseillaise in January will be cursed with bad luck for the rest of the year. The explanation is that if you are fit and winning that race in January then you’ve peaked too soon and you’ll struggle from then on - bad news for this year’s winner Kevin Geniets.

But the stats would suggest that for these two Belgian races, this logic is nonsense.

If this theory had any genuine merit then no riders should even come close to winning both. But it has happened 21 times that a rider has finished on the podium of both in the same year. The last riders to do that are all recently retired - Greg van Avermaet (2017, 2014), Peter Sagan (2016) and Niki Terpstra (2015).

Read more: Stat Attack: The nearly men of the professional peloton

And it’s not because riders don’t tend to ride both races, they do. On average over the past 20 seasons, 107 riders take part in both races each year. And in all but four of those years, at least one rider has finished in the top 10 in both.

The king of this particular stat is the bespectacled Dutchman Jan Raas who managed to finish on the podium of both races in the same year four times in his career, winning the Omloop once and the Tour of Flanders twice along the way.

To add further credence to the notion that those five weeks should not be an inhibiting factor to winning both of these races, four riders have won Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne and the Tour of Flanders in the same year. Kuurne, of course, takes place just a day after Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. Those four riders were Noel Foré (1963), Jan Raas (1983), Edwig van Hooydonck (1989) and Andrei Tchmil (2000).

Perhaps teams more often use the Omloop as a race to give opportunities to their B-list leaders to keep them sweet for the bigger challenges to come. As it is true that a team has managed to win both races eight times over the years, the most recent of which was Deceuninck-Quick Step in 2021 with Davide Ballerini and Kasper Asgreen.

While this double appears to be impossible for the men, the women are making a mockery of any notion that it’s not doable. It’s only been a possibility since 2006, but since then it’s been done twice already. Lizzie Deignan won both in 2016 and in ultimate style as she did so while wearing the rainbow jersey, and the current world champion Lotte Kopecky won both races last year. And given how Kopecky has looked so far this year, I don’t think I will be betting against her winning both races again.