Mads Pedersen is already back riding in Mallorca and his teammates can barely believe it

The clearest measure of that progress comes from inside the team. On Anders Mielke’s Forhulslir podcast, teammate Mathias Norsgaard said doctors told Pedersen he wouldn’t be back on the road “within 12 weeks”, before describing how surreal the last few days have looked up close.

“A couple of days ago, I see him in the evening, and he’s standing there. He has to squeeze an orange – I don’t know if it’s part of his training or what – and I just see he’s writhing in pain and it hurts so damn much. Of course it does. It’s less than two weeks since he crashed, right?” said Norsgaard.

And yet, not long after, Norsgaard ran into the former world champion out on the roads.

“And then I’m out riding. We ride for four hours, and I have to do an extra hour. I’m riding a steep climb out back, then I turn around and I can see some Lidl Trek rider with a support car. I’m thinking ‘What the hell is that?’

“Then I get closer and I can just see the world champion stripes. And I’m telling you – he isn’t riding 300 watts, he’s riding at a pace I have trouble keeping up with. And I just thought, ‘That’s f*cking unreal.’”

Pedersen fractured his wrist and broke his collarbone in the stage 1 crash in Valencia on the 4th of February. After surgery, he returned quickly to the indoor trainer, trying to salvage as much of his spring as possible.

Last week, Pedersen himself struck a cautious tone on his Lang Distance podcast, saying that returning in time for the cobbled Classics “already looks really difficult”. But with the Dane now joining the training camp, it raises the question of whether the timelines are starting to shift.

Originally, Pedersen had planned to build toward via Paris-Nice towards Milan-San Remo, E3 and Gent-Wevelgem before turning his focus to his main targets, the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix. Now the question is where he might be able to pick up his schedule again.