Danish champion Kasper Asgreen has made plans for the 2021 season that include a return to the Tour de France as well as a successful spring classic and, hopefully, a trip to the Tokyo Olympics.

The 25-year-old, who is currently training with his Deceuninck-QuickStep team in Spain, said cobbles will be his first goal this year in hopes of replicating his 2019 Tour de Flanders runner-up finish and 2020 Cune Brussels-Cune victory.

Asgreen ended his 2020 campaign with a successful defense of his Danish time trial title, finishing 11th in Ghent-Wevelgem, 13th in the Tour de Flanders, and 9th in the Driederage Brugge des Pannes. With the super-strong Dečuninck-Quick-Step team, he is expected to do even better this spring.

"I'm going for the classics again. It's my first big goal of the year." If I can win one more Classic on the cobbles, that would be great."

"After that I will concentrate on the Tour de France and the World Championships in the fall.

As for which specific classics he will target, Asgreen said it is not up to his third year as a pro to pick and choose.

"I'm not in a position to pick one or the other. That race is so hard to win, so if I could win it, that would be a great accomplishment already."

Asgreen said that he is not looking for a "one-size-fits-all" goal.

He and his team will face a powerful Trek-Segafredo team, a rebuilt AG2R Citroen, the dual threat of Lotto Soudal, and superstars like Wout Van Aert, Peter Sagan, and Mathieu Van Der Pol.

Asgreen sees the depth of Dečuninck-Quickstep, where he, Julien Alaphilippe, Yves Lampert, Zdenek Stival, and Florian Senechal can lead the team, as the key to beating these rivals throughout the spring

"There is no doubt about it.

"Definitely, that's been the team's approach the last few years. 'I think we've been very successful. So I don't see any reason not to continue this approach, and I think it's a great advantage to have good riders as teammates, not competitors."

After an initial peak in April, targeting the Tour, the Olympic road race (held five days after Paris), and the World Championships in mid-September will be a major challenge. But now that the Olympics could be threatened again by the COVID-19 pandemic, Asgreen is examining its feasibility.

"Like you said, these are all three races that I would like to go to. 'Let's see if it's possible to combine them all. At this point, there are so many question marks, especially with regard to the Olympics, that we don't know yet. Until we know for sure if it's possible to combine them, I'm not ruling anything out.

"At the moment, we are not going to change our preparations because it is still a long way off. So for now I'll just wait and see what happens and keep the three of us in mind."