Wout van Aert looks back for the first time: “The first half hour after the fall was really terrible”

Wout van Aert does this in a documentary by his team Visma | Lease a Bike – titled The Spring Classics: Road to Resilience – his story for the first time after his heavy fall in Dwars door Vlaanderen. “Paris-Roubaix was mentally the most difficult moment of the past few weeks.”

In a documentary lasting over thirty minutes, Visma | Lease a Bike never-before-seen images from the peloton, including Wout van Aert’s crash in Dwars door Vlaanderen. “It was quite a shock at first,” the unfortunate protagonist looks back two months later. “I then wanted to get to the side of the road as quickly as possible. When I tried this, I felt like something was wrong with my shoulder and hip.”

“I was really in a lot of pain until I was given strong medication in the hospital. The first half hour after the fall was really terrible. The broken collarbone was quickly diagnosed, but they also thought my ribs had been hit. The next doctor then came and announced that I had broken seven ribs. A little later it turned out that my sternum was also broken. I was actually quite calm at that moment. To laugh, I said: ‘I hope there won’t be too many doctors, because that will only lead to injuries’.”

For Van Aert there was the physical pain, but also the mental pain of having to pass for his two main goals of the spring: the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix. “I was allowed to go home again on the day of the Tour. You want to see how your teammates are doing. I didn’t get out of the seat at that time and then it was even more difficult to avoid the race.”

Confronting
“During Paris-Roubaix I was not at home and I followed it from a distance. It might have been a little more difficult for me then. The realization then started to come. I was still very tired and still needed a lot of care. I couldn’t train for a long time at that time. That was mentally the most difficult moment of the past few weeks. It is confrontational when you, in perhaps the best shape of your life, are knocked back to the worst possible condition.”

But Van Aert is now doing a lot better. “Things are going quite well considering the circumstances. In recent weeks I have been mobile again and can do normal things in life again. According to the people who guide me, recovery is going well. It is nice to put on the bib shorts again, although that was still quite a task.”