The mantle of the favourite for Sunday’s Tour of Flanders sits firmly on the shoulders of Peter Sagan (Cannondale) and Fabian Cancellara (RadioShack-Leopard) and, to a lesser degree, on home crowd favourite Tom Boonen (Omega Pharma-Quick Step).

Sky’s Geraint Thomas must be counted among the outsiders for Sunday’s Monument and in Sky he enjoys the support of a team as strong as any in the race, and Thomas himself possesses a swift finishing kick not to be underestimated.

The Welsh rider hopes to be able to use the intense rivalry between Cancellara and Sagan on Sunday to sneak away and snatch victory as they keep a close eye on one another.

“I think my advantage is I’m not as big a rider as those two, and I can just sort of watch those two battle it out in a way and just try and sneak under the radar a bit. Because I don’t think either of them will be scared of me at all. I’ll just try and use that,” he said at a press conference Friday as reported on the Sky website.

So far Sky has failed to duplicate the proficiency on cobbles that it continuously displays in multistage races, and designating Thomas as the leader is also something of a new approach for the British, which normally tends to apply a platoon strategy in the cobbled classics.

“G is going to be the leader,” said Servais Knaven, a former Paris-Roubaix winner and Sky director. “At the other races we didn’t work with one real captain, because we wanted to give everyone a chance. They were training all winter for these two, three weeks. And we wanted to give everybody different roles in different races, so everybody got their own opportunity to show what they can do.”

According to Knaven Sky would profit from a hard race straight from the start, to isolate the stars from other teams and draw on its strength in depth, from Edvald Boasson Hagen and Matthew Hayman to Ian Stannard and Bernhard Eisel.

On Sunday you can follow the action from the Tour of Flanders live here on Cyclingquotes.com starting at 14.30