As he watched his rider Bob Jungels cross the line at the end of Kuurne‑Brussels‑Kuurne on Sunday, becoming the first man from Luxembourg to win one of bike racing’s cobbled classics in more than a century, Patrick Lefevere could look back to the day, 41 years ago, when he won the race himself. Lefevere’s own racing career was relatively short. But now he is the guiding spirit of the greatest team in his sport. Perhaps, pound for pound, the greatest team in any sport today.

Lefevere would have felt particularly at home on Sunday. He was born 64 years ago in Flanders, the part of Belgium where the weekend’s racing was taking place. Flanders is to cycling what the north-east of England once was to football: a heartland whose essence survives even after the spotlight has moved elsewhere. He is part of a long and deep tradition. But he exists in the modern world less as a reminder of a cherished past than as the master of the present.

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Jungels’s win on Sunday came 24 hours after Zdenek Stybar, a vastly experienced Czech rider, had won the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, the first of the year’s cobbled classics. Stybar, too, was wearing the jersey of Lefevere’s Quick-Step team, now also bearing the name of another sponsor. These were the Deceuninck-Quick-Step team’s 14th and 15th wins of the season, and it was only the first weekend of March.

That puts them on course to match their performance of last year, in which – by my count – they won 64 individual races, plus one team trial and three stage-race overall victories. It was a year extraordinary enough to justify a Wikipedia page all to itself, cataloguing the successes of its star riders. They included Niki Terpstra in E3 Harelbeke and the Tour of Flanders, Julian Alaphilippe in the Flèche Wallonne and the Tour of Britain, Jungels in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and stage wins in the major tours for the sprinters Elia Viviani and Fernando Gaviria and the climber Enric Mas.

The team sponsored by two Belgian companies manufacturing floors and windows makes a year-round assault on the calendar, but their happiest hunting ground emerges as winter starts turning into spring. This is when success requires not just speed and power but reserves of mental endurance and race intelligence. In the spring classics the riders wear radio earpieces and have team cars close at hand but they seem to be on their own, battling not just their rivals but an inhospitable environment.

Grey skies, grey houses, grey churches, brown fields, muddy verges, raindrops on the lens of the heli-cam, moto headlights reflecting yellow off the greasy grey cobbles on the short, brutal climbs: this was perfect weather for the weekend’s racing. There was never the likelihood that around the next corner the riders would glimpse Cézanne’s Mont Sainte‑Victoire shimmering in a summer haze across ripening vineyards, as they sometimes do in the Tour de France.

When Dave Brailsford launched Team Sky, it was with the specific objective of winning the world’s biggest and most glamorous bike race. Everything else became peripheral to that ambition, which was crucial to attracting such a lavish multinational sponsor. But Lefevere’s team offer a different perspective on the soul of bike racing.

“Strength is everything in Belgian cycling,” Eddy Planckaert, a hero of the 1980s and a member of a famous dynasty, says in The Beast, the Emperor and the Milkman, Harry Pearson’s entertaining new book on cycling in Flanders. Planckaert is talking about a pride in riding in a big gear at all times: “If there’s a hill or a headwind, you just press harder on the pedals.” This is not the cycling of flyweight Colombian climbers or of Chris Froome’s high-cadence style.

Sky’s effort in the one-day classics sometimes seems to be the result of obligation rather than desire. In the five Monuments – Milan-San Remo, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Tour of Flanders and the Giro di Lombardia – they have won only twice since coming into the sport in 2010. Lefevere’s riders have won 20 since 2000. But Sky did have a result to show for last weekend in Flanders. The 25-year-old Welsh rider Owain Doull, an Olympic team pursuit gold medal winner in Rio and an apprentice with the teams run by Sean Kelly and Bradley Wiggins before joining Sky in 2016, won the charge for second place behind Jungels, having worked hard for his teammate Ian Stannard the previous day.

Doull’s performance would have been appreciated by the late Alberic “Briek” Schotte, the totemic figure of Flandrian cycling, immortalised late in life in portraits by the photographer Stefan Vanfleteren. “His expression is as keen as an eagle’s and as fierce,” Pearson writes, looking at those images. “It made me think of my old history teacher, a Welshman from the Valleys, who’d been the regular stand-off for Cardiff in the 1950s. ‘You go to play in France,’ he’d say. ‘Toulouse, Toulon, the heartland of French rugby football. It’s not an experience you forget. Big men, they were, huge. Oh, I tell you, it lives with you ever after: the brutality, the ferocity ...’ Briek Schotte had the Welsh schoolmaster’s intensity. You certainly wouldn’t have wanted him catching you sticking chewing gum under your desk.”

A barrel-chested farmer’s son who won the world championship twice in the late 1940s, Schotte looked like a man who might have taken a fine day as an excuse not to ride. According to Pearson, he raced with brown ale in his drinks bottle and a mixture of beef stew and potato and vegetable mash – a Flandrian speciality – in his feed bag. Take that, you prophets of marginal gains.