Friday, April 26, 2024 at 10:01 AM
Arnaud De Lie will make his return this weekend in the Famenne Ardenne Classic. About a month ago, De Waal left the competition early, but it later turned out that he was unable to perform due to Lyme disease. But now De Lie is ready for a new start, says sports director Nikolas Maes HLN.
“It is difficult to say that he will compete anonymously in his first races. He will always be looked at,” Maes tempers expectations. “We don’t expect him to be great there. The match serves to get back on track in competition. He will then ride the GP du Morbihan, Tro Bro Léon and the Circuit de Wallonie. We then determine a new program, based on how he felt in those races. We hope that Arnaud will be racing at a high level again in a month’s time. It is important that he feels good again and feels good on the bike. It looks like he left for some good results.”
Lessons learned
Although the Belgian team also learned lessons from the spring, which never really turned out well for De Lie after the fall in Le Samyn. “The problem with Arnaud is that he takes everything lightly. Because of course the rider has to explain it himself. We have now understood: if Arnaud says he is not feeling 100 percent, we have to shut him down. Then it means that he is really not good.”
“From this perspective, he should never have started in Paris-Nice. Because he did not immediately indicate that there was a problem, he left anyway. Transparency and communication to the staff and to the performance cell are what Arnaud needs to improve at, so that we can help him optimally. It can happen that not everything is okay or that he doesn’t feel well at times. If he communicates more openly about this, we can also respond more proactively.”
The team does not want to express any further expectations for the rest of the year. “There is no pressure and no stress. To put it bluntly: whether he wins a race this year or not doesn’t matter to us. What matters to us is that he gets going again. We also leave the answer to the question of whether he will ride the Tour open. He is in the pre-selection and we will keep it that way. It is not that he has to go to the Tour or that we are removing the Tour from his program.”
