New year, same old setbacks for Wout van Aert

New year, same old setbacks. After an ankle fracture on January 2 brought a premature end to his cyclocross campaign, Wout van Aert’s road season has now been delayed by the illness that has ruled him out of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on Saturday. 

It never rains, but it pours. Van Aert’s career – and, specifically, his hunt for Monument victories – has been buffeted by repeated cold fronts, and Thursday’s blow was simply the latest in a long, long series.

In 2022, perhaps the apex of his career, Van Aert was the favourite for the Tour of Flanders when he was forced out by a bout of COVID-19. In 2024, Van Aert missed both the Ronde and Paris-Roubaix when he crashed heavily in a mass pile-up at Dwars door Vlaanderen. 

At that September’s Vuelta a España, he was finally beginning to look like the Van Aert of old when another crash sent him back to square one. The long rehabilitation bled into the winter, and Van Aert was a shadow of himself come the spring, where a shock defeat to Neilson Powless at Dwars door Vlaanderen proved to be the nadir. 

Van Aert was a laboured also-ran at Flanders and Roubaix, races defined entirely by Mathieu van der Poel and Tadej Pogačar’s rivalry, but the clouds showed signs of parting in the summer. At the Giro d’Italia, Van Aert conjured up a stylish stage win on the gravel in Siena, and he then played an outsize role in helping Simon Yates to overall victory with his late heist over the Colle delle Finestre. At the Tour de France, he was the only rider to drop Pogačar over the three weeks, burning him off his wheel on Montmartre as he landed the final stage.

Those performances would give succour to Van Aert as he set about planning and preparing his 2026 campaign. True, the game had moved from 2022, with Van der Poel and Pogačar now way off in the distance when it came to the cobbled Monuments. But Van Aert’s belief – or at least his hope – was that a clear run at the spring could finally bring him back into the conversation.

His 2026 schedule was planned accordingly. As in his best years, his road season would not start until Opening Weekend, while Strade Bianche returns to his programme for the first time since 2021. Crucially, the much-questioned March altitude camps of 2024 and 2025 would be replaced by a return to a more traditional approach, with Van Aert set to ride Tirreno-Adriatico and Milan-San Remo for the first time since 2023.

There is a lot to be said for that back-to-basics approach, which obviously remains in place, but one has to wonder how much of a blow this latest setback will be to Van Aert’s morale and his condition as he faces into the spring. Like Thibaut Pinot at the Tour de France, Van Aert must increasingly suspect that the stars will simply never align for him at the Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix.

Van Aert’s travails are drawn into sharper focus by the eternal comparisons with Mathieu van der Poel, which have been a continuous presence since their first, youthful jousts on the cyclocross circuit.

The rivalry remains notionally intact, even if Van Aert knows that theirs is no longer really a duel and hasn’t been for some time. Since 2022, Van der Poel’s yardstick on the cobbles – and at Milan-San Remo – has been Pogačar rather than Van Aert.

The numbers bear that out starkly. Pogačar now has ten Monument wins to his name and Van der Poel has eight, while Van Aert remains stuck on one – his Milan-San Remo triumph during a dazzling spell of form in the pandemic-compressed 2020 season.

There have been some near misses since, most notably when he was pipped by Van der Poel at the 2020 Ronde and when he suffered a late puncture at the 2023 Paris-Roubaix. But in truth, the races that Van Aert covets the most look further and further beyond his grasp as the years tumble by.

Van Aert’s current travails are again underlined by the contrast with Van der Poel’s serene progress towards his goals. The Dutchman enjoyed a 100% record on the cyclocross circuit this past winter, including a record eighth world title, and on Wednesday morning, he confirmed that he would begin his road season at Omloop for the first time in his career.

Van der Poel’s presence looked set to provide Van Aert with an early gauge of his Monument prospects, or perhaps an early reality check about his chances of beating his old foe in a head-to-head contest in April.

Van Aert’s absence means that we will be none the wiser about whether he has managed to get any closer this winter to the level needed to compete with Van der Poel and Pogačar. Above all, the setback itself is hardly an encouraging sign for Van Aert, particularly given the problems that have beset the entire Visma | Lease a Bike set-up since the start of the year.

At the team’s media day in January, Van Aert struck an optimistic note about the new campaign, insisting that those flickers of his best at the Giro and the Tour last year had kept the flame alive through the winter. 

“These big moments really helped me to believe that even if not everything is going well – like, for example, now – I’m still one of the best bike riders in the world, and there will follow moments where I can show it off,” Van Aert said then.

After this latest disappointment, Van Aert will need to draw on those reservoirs of belief like never before in 2026. Already, his Classics campaign feels like one of hope rather than of expectation.