Spring is over for Van Aert. He will miss the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, breaking his collarbone and several ribs. Stuyven also broke his collarbone

Wout van Aert sacrificed his best form on cobbled monumental classics Around Flanders and Paris-Roubaix starts on Sstrade Bianche and Milan-Sanremo, but in the end nothing came of it. In a fast downwind descent, he “licked” the rear wheel of teammate Tiesje Benoot, fell and broke several bones in his body.

“We were planning to attack Kanarieberg,” said Benoot after the race. “The Van Dijke brothers did a great job on the climb and Tim (Van Dijke, editor’s note) took over from the lead when they overtook us on the left. Wout shouted at me to speed up, which I did. But I think he tapped my rear wheel , when I got out of the saddle. Honestly, I feel bad about it. I hope he’s okay, I don’t know anything.”

Now even Benoot knows that Van Aert is not well and the Visma-Lease and Bike team lost a leader at the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, who will be almost impossible to replace. “At that moment I was riding in the lead,” he returned to the moment of the Tim van Dijke incident. “Before the Kanarieberg we were going full throttle. Everyone knows it’s incredibly fast there. In the last eight hundred meters I heard a bang. I looked back and saw Wout had fallen with the other guys. It was an incredibly horrible sight!”

“We drive there at eighty, ninety an hour,” Van Dijke continued. “If you fall there, you’re going to end up pretty bad. There’s gravel and everything… I go there every year with my ass pulled, no one gives you an inch for free. It’s no use, is it?”

“Unfortunately, the fall shows that we were right to withdraw this descent from Kolem Flanders,” responded Tomas Van Den Spiegel, CEO of the organizing company Flanders Classics. This section is no longer run on the big Ronde, but why was it included in the Dwars door Vlaanderen track? “Ronde is even bigger, more important and faster. There is even more pressure. Because of that we want to eliminate crashes as much as possible. But it is still a dangerous sport and we will evaluate it after this race. It could happen that Kanarieberg disappears from these spring races. “

Van Aert and the Visma-Lease and Bike team are not the only victims, the spring season at Dwars door Vlaanderen also ended for Jasper Stuyven, who was in great form and finished second behind the superb Mathieu van der Poel at the E3 Prijs Harelbeke. Stuyven broke his collarbone and the Lidl-Trek team will have to do without him. Mads Pedersen and Alex Kirsch also fell, who apparently have nothing broken, but especially in the case of Pedersen, it is certainly not an ideal situation before such a difficult and important race as the Tour of Flanders.

Biniam Girmay, the leader of the Intermarché-Wanty team, also gave up after the fall. Fortunately, the young Eritrean did not break anything, so he will probably be ready for the start of Kolem Flander.