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Cycling Weekly
From 'best condition ever' to 'worst' - Wout van Aert reflects on crashing out of Classics
By Tom Thewlis,
2024-05-02
Wout van Aert says he may have been in his best physical condition ever prior to his horror crash at Dwars door Vlaanderen , which ended the first part of the Belgian’s season and landed him in hospital.
Television pictures at the time showed Van Aert sitting on the road with his shoulder visibly bruised and battered. The documentary included the same clip in which his screams of pain could also be heard.
"I wanted to get to the side of the road immediately, as soon as possible," Van Aert said as he recalled the crash. "When I tried to move, I felt that there was something wrong with my shoulder and with my hip. Then I had a lot of pain until I was given strong medication at the hospital so that first half hour was truly terrible."
"The collarbone fracture was something I could already tell," he added. "But that was confirmed in the x-ray pictures. And then they said that they thought my ribs were broken too. Then the next doctor came to see me and told me that I had broken seven ribs and, on top of that, my sternum was also broken.
"At that moment, I was pretty calm. Then I said to myself 'I hope there won’t be too many doctors because there will only be more injuries.'"
"According to the people guiding me, my recovery is progressing well," Van Aert explained. "It's definitely a great feeling to put on the cycling shorts again although that was a challenge as well.
"Then it quickly becomes confronting that I might have been in my best condition ever and suddenly I'm knocked back to the worst possible condition. It definitely feels good to be a bit active again and it will truly be blissful when I can go outside again."
He said that around the time of Roubaix, he experienced the most difficult period mentally of his recovery from injury.
"I wasn’t at home for Roubaix, I followed it from a distance," he said. "But I might have found it more difficult. I started to realise that it wasn’t over yet. That I was still very tired and that I still had to recover from my wounds and that I was still very far from training."
"In combination with watching one of the most beautiful races of the year, that was mentally the hardest moment for me in the past weeks."
It is not yet known when the Belgian will be able to return to competition. His next big scheduled objective is the road race and time trial at the Paris Olympics.
A return to the Tour de France before could be a possibility, but that is also still unclear.
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