'I am still chasing Flanders and Roubaix' - Wout van Aert on future goals, but can he do it?

The image tells the story. Arms raised, standing tall, the rain still clinging to his kit, the Belgian looked as if he had shed an entire season in one breath. Only later did he fully grasp why that finish on Montmartre carried such weight. “After I was injured, I had a goal. I just wanted to show that I’m still there, that I can be among the best riders. I wanted to show I’m still standing,” he said to The Athletic.

That release came after months of uncertainty. The year before had already been turbulent, with a heavy crash at Dwars door Vlaanderen forced him out of the cobbled classics he cherishes most. What followed was a race against the clock to be ready for July, a process interrupted, restarted and reimagined more times than he cared to count.

By the time the Vuelta arrived, his form finally returned. “Eventually, at the Vuelta, I found my best legs again, was really at my top level, and could win some nice races,” he said. “I felt like: ‘Finally, I’m back.’ And then I crashed out of the Vuelta.”

Stage sixteen of the Vuelta made the comeback feel painfully fragile. Wearing the green jersey after three stage wins, he slid out on a descent and immediately knew the damage was serious. The deep cut on his knee revived memories of the frightening leg wound he suffered during the 2019 Tour de France. “It was just too quick after the injury before,” he remembers. “I realised it was going to be exactly the same again. It was too much.”

The crash left more than physical scars. “When you’re younger, when you’re twenty years old, you don’t even really think that you’ve been crashing,” he said. “But then after a couple of injuries, you understand what it’s like. Every injury gets more complicated, and it doesn’t help when you get a family and have children.”

What followed was a winter without a pause. No reset, no holiday, only training and a growing need for confirmation that he was still the rider he believed he could be. “I had a really good Classics season, but I missed out on any victories, just had a few really pretty losses,” he said. The gap between form and results lingered a little too long.

That changed on the steep cobbles of Siena. Winning stage nine of the Giro d’Italia, out sprinting Isaac del Toro to the fortress above the city, brought the feeling he had been chasing since spring. “The start of the race was complicated for me, especially being a bit sick before,” he said, smiling. “So with all these things summed up, it was a bit more emotional than usual.”

And perhaps that is why Montmartre meant so much. When he looks back on that final stage of the Tour, he remembers how chaotic it felt. “On television, it always looks pretty clear what’s going on,” he said. “But in the moment itself, I could not hear anything. At points, on parallel sections, I was passing groups and they were shouting on their radio to support me. But every time the radio was open I just thought, f***, they are there, I couldn’t look back properly with the rain and motos behind me. It was only on the final straight that I could believe I was so far in front.”

It was the moment everything slowed down after months that never did.

What comes next matters more to him than the suffering that came before it. Van Aert has never hidden which two races sit at the very top of his list: Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix. “They would mean the world to me,” he said. “I feel already that I’ve been chasing them my whole career. But I’m still chasing them.”

Those ambitions carry the weight of memory too. In 2020 he lost the Tour of Flanders by the smallest imaginable margin, beaten by Mathieu van der Poel in a millimetre sprint. Three years later, in Roubaix, a puncture on Carrefour de l’Arbre ended his chances just as he and Van der Poel were in promising position. Those near misses colour the chase as much as the dream itself.

For a Belgian rider the expectations only amplify that chase. “They’re the biggest, the best races of the year, happening so close by,” he said. “It gives me extra motivation. But, yeah, it’s so big in our country that the pressure is always there.” It is a pressure he has come to understand, not fear.

The question is what it will take to finally turn that lifelong chase into a breakthrough. His 2025 season offers clues and warnings. He showed in the Spring Classics that the big engine is still there, consistently riding himself into the front of races as they wore on. But by the time he arrived there, he had often already missed the decisive moves because the explosive kick he once had was not quite the same.

The lost sprint to Neilson Powless at Dwars door Vlaanderen, even with a clear numerical advantage for Visma, underlined the same pattern. He was strong enough to make it to the front, but not sharp enough to finish the job.

But set against that were the flashes that reminded everyone of what he can still do. 

His surge on the Via Santa Caterina in Siena, his explosion on Montmartre and the way he managed to go toe to toe with two of the most explosive riders in the world, Pogačar and Del Toro, showed that the spark is not gone.

If Vlaanderen and Roubaix are to shift from dream to reality, the key lies in turning those flashes back into something he can depend on regardless of the toughness and duration of a race.

The encouraging part is that Visma Lease a Bike has shown their ability to refine their riders in meaningful ways. Their transformation of Jonas Vingegaard heading into 2025, turning an endurance based climber into a far more explosive athlete, is a model that could suit Van Aert’s ambitions perfectly. The framework might be there. The question is whether Van Aert can respond in the same way, and above all whether it will be enough to bring him close to Van der Poel and Pogačar.

Next to physics there is the part numbers can never measure. Few riders in the peloton have overcome more in the last five years than Van Aert. Few have rebuilt their careers as many times or shown the same ability to return to the highest level after injuries that would have ended others.

So can he do it? Can he win the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix? Between the two Monuments, Roubaix is definitely the more realistic target. Its demands fall more heavily on his big engine, but he would still need to be able to call on his explosiveness in the moments where the race is decided.

And if there is one rider capable of finding that edge again when it matters most, it is Wout van Aert.