When the 27-year-old Ian Stannard (Team Sky), drenched to the bone, face caked in dirt, pipped Greg Van Avermaet to the line at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, it seemed like a seminal moment in his career. Here was a man who was throwing off the lingering tag as the hardy workhorse and showing himself to be a rider who wins big bike races. It was the first Classic of the season, and there was genuine excitement about what he might go on to achieve.
But the anticipation was crushed and momentum cruelly halted when he came down less than a month later at Gent-Wevelgem, with a fractured vertebra ruling out the rest of his one-day calendar.
“It was really tough at the time,” he tells Cyclingnews. “It was a bit of a breakthrough and proved what I could do. It was good for the confidence and I really felt like I had made a step forward. I had learned more about the races, become stronger, and put myself in a position where I could start challenging for wins in those kinds of races. Then to fall off like that and finish it was really hard on the head.”
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There was a further setback when he crashed on his comeback ride in the Tour of Britain which resulted in a broken scaphoid and ended his season. This, though, is a new year and a new start. With just a couple of days to go until Het Nieuwsblad kicks off the Classics once again on Saturday, the man nicknamed Yogi is back where he wants to be and eager to pick up where he left off.
“I feel capable of going for the win [at Het Nieuwsblad],” he says. “I expect myself to be back racing the Classics as hard as I can and doing as well as I can. You can never say you expect yourself to win, but I want to be up at the front putting myself in a position to win - I kind of expect that from myself.”
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