Arnaud De Lie’s days-long Tour de France battle ends on stage 3: 'I simply didn’t have the legs'

The former Belgian champion had been battling from the moment he arrived in Spain. A stomach infection forced him to miss the team presentation in Barcelona, kept him from completing the team time trial recon ahead of the opening stage and left him visibly struggling through the first weekend of racing.

For two days, De Lie fought to survive. On stage 2, he finished 183rd, just ahead of the broom wagon, with teammate Baptiste Veistroffer guiding him through a grim battle to make the time cut.

But on Monday, the fight ran out.

Stage 3, with almost 4,000 metres of climbing and punishing heat, proved one test too many. De Lie was distanced early as the peloton accelerated uphill, initially finding himself in a small group with Veistroffer, Robbe Dhondt (Team Picnic PostNL) and Arvid De Kleijn (Tudor Pro Cycling). 

As the kilometres passed, that support fell away. In the final 75 kilometres, De Lie was left alone.

His deficit grew minute by minute. The time limit moved further out of reach. After days of resisting, De Lie’s Tour was finally over.

“It is obviously a huge disappointment,” De Lie said afterwards in a statement by his team. “I had worked for months to be ready for this Tour de France and I was dreaming of fighting for the sprint finishes. Unfortunately, this stomach infection weakened me a lot.”

The Belgian said he had tried to push through the opening stages, but Monday’s terrain and conditions made continuing impossible.

“I gave everything I had over the first two stages, but today I simply did not have the legs to continue, especially in such extreme heat,” De Lie said. 

“I hung on in a small group behind Baptiste, but the succession of climbs in the final was just too demanding. I told Baptiste to go on so that he could make it back within the time limit.”

From the team car, Lotto-Intermarché sports director Pieter Vanspeybrouck watched De Lie’s struggle unfold in real time. At first, he said, the situation was not yet desperate.

“It was another fast start uphill,” Vanspeybrouck told Sporza. “He quickly got into difficulty, but there was still a teammate and other riders with him. At first it was not dramatic.”

But the longer the stage went on, the clearer it became that De Lie was not recovering from the efforts in the way he normally would.

“Those kinds of days in the heat do not help,” Vanspeybrouck said. “You could see that he was not recovering in a normal way. Arnaud still wanted to continue, but we were watching the gap.”

Eventually, Lotto-Intermarché accepted that the fight against the time cut had become unwinnable.

“We told him: chapeau, you fought so hard,” Vanspeybrouck said. “I found him quite calm and I was able to talk to him about it.”

For De Lie, the abandon brings another painful setback in a season that has already included several physical problems. He also left the Giro d’Italia in May, abandoning on stage 4 due to illness. Victories at the Famenne Ardenne Classic and the Tour de Wallonie have shown his quality, but his year has repeatedly been interrupted by health issues.

Vanspeybrouck pushed back against suggestions that De Lie’s preparation was to blame.

“We see his training and it is not down to the preparation,” he said. “Those small health issues have been there all year.”

De Lie now leaves the Tour not after one bad day, but after a battle that had been building since before the race began.

“The only thing I can do now is focus on making a full recovery and come back stronger for the rest of the season,” he said.