Thomas de Gendt may be racing the Tour of Oman right now, but the Belgian breakaway specialist is more than half keeping an eye on his young teammate Arnaud de Lier's remarkable progress in Europe.

This Lotto-Dostony sprint phenomenon was the first professional to win nine races last year and has already won three this season. At only 20 years old, the Belgian still has a long way to go before reaching that upper limit.

De Gendt likens his compatriot to a star from Peter Sagan's early days.

"He has a playful spirit on the bike. But now he is still playful and enjoys attacking even when he doesn't have to.

"I remember when Sagan was with Cannondale and Liquigas, he won the Paris-Nice stage by attacking with over 3km to go.

"It's good to see that Arnaud still has a playful spirit."

De Lier was also impressed with riders like Mats Pedersen, a former world champion like Sagan, who "would have a tough sprint battle in a hard race like the Etoile de Besseges."

De Lier, who has already won two stages this season in Besèges and the Autonomous Region of Valencia Classica 1969, is the favorite to win Sunday's Almeria Classica. In addition, he will make his debut in Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix, and will head into the unknown with the World Tour Monument.

"He will ride the Classics this year to learn and improve," de Gendt said. If he can get through the climbs with the lead group in San Remo, and he will, he has a chance to win. If he can get through the climb with the lead group in San Remo, then he has a chance to win.

"He is still young and has a few more years to learn.

What impresses de Gendt, apart from his ability to enjoy a race and win at the same time, is the fact that de Lier has proven himself in races where he was clearly in good form against the best of the classics like Pedersen.

"It's nice that he's winning smaller races, but that stage against Pedersen and the way he won after that was really extraordinary," de Gendt said. A good sprinter can win 10 races a year in a normal bunch sprint, but he can do what de Rij did in a hard bunch sprint like this one."

." He will be a really good rider in the future, probably one of the big stars."

While de Rije will make his Classics debut this year, de Gendt himself was forced to change his season goals when his original target, the Giro d'Italia, was no longer on the Lotto-Destney program.

"I wanted to run the Giro and the Vuelta, but I understand why they chose the Giro.

The ideal Grand Tour is the Tour de France, de Gendt said. So you have to show yourself somewhere first and go from there," he said. Maybe not in Oman, but hopefully soon.

Before heading to another Grand Tour, de Gendt hopes to add to his win total with a stage 3 victory in Paris-Nice or a stage 6 victory in the Volta a Catalunya, where he has the most wins in his career.

The Tour of Oman is de Gendt's first stage race of 2023, but the offseason has gone well for the breakaway specialist. Looking further into the future, he is working for his teammates in Oman.

"We had a seven-week training camp in Calpe, Spain, where the weather was good and the team atmosphere was great. There was not one training session that was shortened or cancelled," de Gendt said of the winter.

"The training was a little different; we stuck to the basics. For the first three or four weeks we did more endurance training, and then we tried to do more intervals."

[3 [Over the past three years I've increased intervals and decreased my training, but now I'm back to a 25-hour-per-week schedule. I'm just trying to get back into a good frame of mind."

If his training schedule is partly new, de Gendt will be running Oman for the first time in his 15-year career. Compared to the mostly flat UAE Tour, this one has more color and atmosphere," he says, "but the pace is more intense than expected. The UAE Tour is mostly flat, always running at 170-180 watts."

"We got to the first climb here, which was actually pretty hard.

"After this I will go to the UAE and probably race Caleb (Yuan) and it will be a sprint every day. It's not my choice, but at this time of the season, there aren't that many options."

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