Never top again? Vingegaard’s rehabilitation is a major concern for the medical examiner

Remco Evenepoel, Wout van Aert, Jonas Vingegaard. The three riders all crashed during the spring and suffered a number of injuries. Some people’s rehabilitation will go much better than others.

Things will normally not turn out well for Wout van Aert and Remco Evenepoel, as sports doctor and chairman of the Association for Sports and Inspection Doctors Tom Teulingkx also confirms in Het Nieuwsblad.

“These are injuries of which you can say: if everything goes well, you can classify them, so to speak. You can already predict that Evenepoel and Van Aert will be able to reach a very high level within a few months. Those injuries will have no effect on the rest of their career,” it said.

However, the damage to Jonas Vingegaard worries Teulingkx. He even makes the comparison with Chris Froome’s heavy crash in 2019.

Not an easy rehabilitation for Vingegaard

“Vingegaard spent almost two weeks in hospital with organ damage. You almost have to compare that with what Froome experienced. These are multi-traumas: many injuries that come together and which all together give a much worse prognosis for recovery or where a much longer recovery period is in any case required.”

Vingegaard’s collapsed lung will recover very slowly. “That is part of your engine and not part of your bodywork. That’s a different story,” Tuelingkx concludes.