Tour of Flanders - Ronde van Vlaanderen - Tour des Flandres (World Tour)

Les Woodland's book Tour of Flanders: The Inside Story - The rocky roads of the Ronde van Vlaanderen is available in print, Kindle eBook & audiobook versions. For your copy, just click on the Amazon link on the right. Click here for a video about the race and the book (it's at the bottom of this page).

The race:

The Ronde van Vlaanderen is the most important race on the Belgian calendar and one of the single-day monuments in cycling that alone can make the winner's career a success. Originally run from Gent to Gent, it currently starts in Antwerp and finishes in Oudenaarde. The route is characterized by a series of short, sharp, cobbled climbs, in 2009 totaling seventeen.

It used to be held on the same day as Italy's Milan-San Remo, which is why there is only one pre-World War Two foreign winner, Heiri Suter (Switzerland). It was held in early April with Gent-Wevelgem coming a few days later (until 2010) with Paris-Roubaix on Sunday. Now Gent-Wevelgem precedes "De Ronde". This makes for a glorious couple of weeks of racing with three major and terribly difficult single-day races stacked into a very short period.

On the day of the 2021 edition the organizers announced that for the next six years Antwerp and Bruges will trade being the start city. The race will start in Antwerp in 2022, 2024 & 2026 and Bruges will be the start city in 2023, 2025 & 2027.