Jasper Philipsen: The team is pushing me more towards the Classics

2025 was a season of quality rather than quantity for Jasper Philipsen, whose seven victories included the opening stage of the Tour de France and a hat-trick of wins on the Vuelta a España.

It remains to be seen if the Belgian will boost those numbers in 2026, but he has confirmed that he will continue to emphasise the Classics in the opening part of the season.

Philipsen won Milan-San Remo in 2024, when he also finished second in Paris-Roubaix, and his Alpecin-Deceuninck squad will continue to deploy him as a foil to Mathieu van der Poel next Spring.

“This is something we are also discussing with the team,” Philipsen told Tuttobici. “The team is trying to push me more towards the Classics, especially at the beginning of the season, and this obviously means that I focus less on pure sprints, but that’s not a problem. Being able to compete for victory in races I dream of, such as Roubaix, is something very beautiful that makes it easy to focus on that type of event. 

“In the second half of the season, however, things change because the goal is always the Tour. It’s a demanding race where you need to have a very solid engine and base level to be fast and competitive even in the third week.”

Philipsen’s 2025 campaign was marred by crashes, including the heavy fall that left him with a broken collarbone and forced him to abandon the Tour on stage 3. Despite those setbacks, however, the Belgian enjoyed notable successes, holding the overall lead at both the Tour and the Vuelta. 

“I think that when you evaluate a season, it’s not just the number of wins that counts,” he said. “There have been years where, for example, I’ve won more but the quality of the victories has been lower, so personally I’m very happy to have managed to wear both the yellow jersey at the Tour and the red jersey at the Vuelta in recent months. I think that’s something special within a single season. 

“That said, it has definitely been a difficult year for me. I had two bad crashes at the wrong time, when I was in great shape after preparing for a long time to pursue important goals, and I didn’t have much time to recover from them.”

Philipsen made a remarkable recovery from his Tour crash to return for the Vuelta, where he won the opening stage in Turin. Despite that success on Italian roads, he indicated that a Giro d’Italia debut was unlikely in 2026 given his focus on the Classics and the Tour.

“It would be great to take part in the Giro, but its position on the calendar is a bit complicated for me because it comes halfway between the Classics, which are a very important goal for our team, and the Tour de France, which is equally important for us,” Philipsen said. “We’ll see in the future how to fit it into my schedule because sooner or later I want to ride the Giro.”