The spring racing calendar is at full tilt now with several single-day races going off per week, punctuated by races like Gent-Wevelgem and the Tour of Flanders on the weekends. Wednesday, March 24 saw the Oxyclean Classic Brugge–De Panne, a pancake-flat 204-kilometer single-day WorldTour level race. Though it skips the famed cobbled roads of Flanders, the race is still very much a quintessential Belgian race, featuring sections prone to crosswinds.
The peloton kept breakaways close all day, and the race arrived at the final kilometers together, setting up a classic bunch sprint. As so often happens, Deceuninck-Quick-Step took over the race in the final meters, setting up a perfectly executed lead-out train for sprinter Sam Bennett to take victory, his first WorldTour-level single-day race win. Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Fenix) and Pascal Ackermann (Bora-Hansgrohe) rounded out the podium.
