Van Aert crashed twice on Tuesday’s stage 16, with the second crash, in a sharp curve on a wet road, not only forced him to abandon the race, but has also ended his very unfortunate season.
“Wout van Aert will not race any more this season,” the team announced on its website. “[He] needs time to recover from his crash in the Vuelta a España. He suffered a serious knee injury that will require intensive care.”
Van Aert had placed third in the race’s opening time trial, just 3 seconds behind the winner, Brandon McNulty (UAE Team Emirates), and then won three stages, two of them via his trademark strengths of breakaway smarts, excellent climbing and raw speed. Coming into the first stage of the final week of the Vuelta, he owned both the green jersey and the King of the Mountains (KOM) polka-dot jersey.
His lead over his only real rival in the points classification, Kaden Groves (Alpecin-Deceuninck), with only one real sprint stage left, was insurmountable, 291 to 182 points. Though he was tied in the KOM competition with Jay Vine of UAE Team Emirates, he wore the jersey because he ranked higher in the general classification. He was not likely to keep that jersey all the way to Madrid, but the simple fact that he owned it for a while proved beyond any doubt that he had returned to top form.
And then, on stage 16, with about 50km left to ride in the 185.1km stage, as he was descending from the second of three categorized climbs in the stage, the Collada Llomena, on a rain-slick surface, he lost control of his bike in a sharp curve and crashed for the second time that day. Felix Engelhardt (Jayco-AlUla) had just crashed in front of him and the young Mexican Isaac del Toro (UAE Team Emirates) fell behind him, but those two riders continued on.
Van Aert had the misfortune of falling on some rocks at the side of the road and tore up his left knee. He got back on his bike and tried to race on, but the injury proved too serious and he quickly dismounted. He was treated by a staff member at the scene, but it was in vain. Visma later released an update on his condition, saying: “The three-time stage winner had to withdraw due to severe knee pain caused by a deep wound. That wound requires intensive care. Wout will travel back to Belgium to continue his recovery.”
He had planned to race in the UCI Road World Championships, which get underway on September 21. That is now also over. Belgium, the country he would have represented, is just collateral damage of the Visma Curse, which also caused him to tumble at the beginning of the stage, during the fast-paced jockeying for a breakaway.
I blame the Curse because van Aert – who is a three-time cyclo-cross world champion – is just too good a bike-handler to fall twice on a stage, especially during a breakaway attempt. And what else but the Curse would have caused Jonas Vingegaard’s crash in the Tour of the Basque Country in early April? Yes, he placed second in the Tour de France, but the two-time Tour champion was beaten by race winner Tadej Pogačar by over six minutes, an unlikely result if the Dane had been even near his best form.
Though Visma–Lease a Bike has an impressive 30 victories this year, until van Aert took three Vuelta stages the team had won only two Grand Tour stages this year, Vingegaard on the Tour’s stage 11 and Olav Kooij on stage 9 of the Giro d’Italia. That’s a far cry from last year, when Visma won all three Grand Tours and placed three riders on the Vuelta podium, both first-time accomplishments in the long history of Grand Tour racing.
Perhaps that’s the reason for the Curse. Perhaps the team had been too successful and suffered from hubris, a Greek term for arrogance and/or pride. The Greek gods struck down individuals who took themselves for gods, such as King Agamemnon, who walked on a luxurious pile of purple tapestries when he returned to his palace as a conquering hero. Visma-Soudal had every right to celebrate their marvelous 2023 – but perhaps they overdid it?
Or was it the name change, when Soudal dropped out as a team sponsor, replaced by Lease a Bike, that called downh the Curse on the team? Or was it the defection of the team’s long-time icon Primož Roglič to Red Bull–Bora–Hansgrohe? We’ll never know.
But a more likely explanation for van Aert’s unlikely Vuelta crash is that he had not quite recovered from his fall in late March and the heat of the first week of the race and his participation in many breakaways and sprints had put him in the red once too often, so that fatigue might have caused him to lose concentration as he rode into the curve on a wet surface. Whatever the reason, his exit has made the race much poorer.
