Wout van Aert: I was never at my top level in 2023

Wout van Aert (Jumbo-Visma) has pulled no punches about his 2023 season, saying he never reached his top level and that he never felt as good on the bike as in 2022.

Van Aert's highest-profile victory in 2023 was at the E3 Saxo Classic and he also claimed podium finishes at the Road World Championships, Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders. Outside the World Tour, he also clinched a second career win in the Tour of Britain and the Belgian time trial title.

However, Van Aert’s Tour de France was far less successful than in 2022, when he picked up multiple stage wins in a huge variety of terrains en route to the points jersey in Paris, a season where he also won Het Nieuwsblad and the Bretagne Classic-Ouest France along with a first victory in E3 and multiple stages in Paris-Nice and the Critérium du Dauphiné.

Van Aert was recently victorious in his opening cyclo-cross race of 2023 at Essen Exact Cross on December 9th. However, when talking to reporters at the Visma-Lease A Bike team launch on Thursday, Van Aert played down his chances of further success in his first cyclocross duel of 2023 with Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) at Zilvermeercross in Mol on Friday.

He did insist, though, that he was already feeling the benefits of a reduced 'cross program, with only 8-10 races on his 2023-2024 schedule rather than 14 as in previous years.

“I’ve already got the feeling of being fresher,” Van Aert told La Dèrniere Heure. “This discipline [cyclocross] maybe took up too much time on my calendar in the last few years.

“We’ve tried to create a more balanced program that avoids too many races in quick succession which reduces your chances of training.

“I’m not tackling my first duel with Mathieu this Friday with the best approach because I’ve just done a recon of Paris-Roubaix and had our first training camp in Spain, as well as the team presentation. But I’ll try to be up there on the front, where I usually am and where I want to be!”

Despite reducing his cyclocross program, after Mol on Friday, Van Aert will race four more times in 2023, the World Cup round in Antwerp on December 23, the Exact Cross in Loenhout on December 28, the Superprestige at Diegem on December 29 and the World Cup in Hulst on December 30. 

But regardless of whatever results he achieves in these final five events this year, Van Aert said that he never reached the peak of his condition in 2023 and that compared to 2022, his feelings on the bike were never as good.

“There’s not a single factor that explains it, it’s more a combination of causes,” Van Aert said. “For example, I got sick right in the middle of my cyclocross season. Then in the months that followed, it was too much of a rollercoaster.”

Van Aert explained that he was going to find it tough to miss out on the Italian spring WorldTour races like Milan-San Remo – his single Monument victory to date – as well as Strade Bianche, which he also won in 2020, and Tirreno-Adriatico. But it was, he argued, a necessary switch and one which would enable him to find those last few percentage points of form in a training camp, at altitude.

“I want to give the best of myself to try and get a first cobbled Monument,” he explained. “And the fact that [defending champion] Tadej Pogačar will miss out on Flanders will change the way that race plays out. As he’s more lightly built, he was always trying to put the Classics specialists in difficulty on certain parts of the course.

"However, if Mathieu van der Poel” – Flanders winner in 2022 and 2020 – “is in the same form as last year, then he'll be difficult to follow all the same, so it’ll be up to him to make the race for sure.”

A Giro d'Italia debut with Pogacar

If Van Aert and Pogačar will not cross swords in any of the Italian or Belgian Classics, the two will be stand-out names at the 2024 Giro d’Italia Grande Partenza on May 4. But Van Aert denied that he had ever thought of fighting, like Pogačar, for the overall in the Giro, and even though in the future he might consider sacrificing his options in the Classics to have a go at GC racing, for now, that option was not on the table.

Rather his primary goal would be to fight for stage wins in his Giro debut, while he was also looking forward to working alongside young sprinter teammate Olav Kooij, whose first Grand Tour will be in Italy next May. 

As Van Aert pointed out, he and Kooij had worked very well together in the past, with Van Aert leading the Dutchman out for no less than four stage wins in the 2023 Tour of Britain.

Van Aert’s absence from the Tour de France for the first time since 2019 will be made with a view to building towards the Olympic Games in Paris, most notably the time trial.

That wasn’t an easy decision to make,” he confirmed to La Dernière Heure, because it wasn’t like I was tired of the race. It’s more that I was keen to try a different race program in 2024 and the only way to restructure it in full was to miss out on the Tour, which had become one of my usual events. But it will enable me to prepare the Olympic Games much better with a training camp.

“It’s the very first time in my career that I’ll be able to prepare a time trial in so much detail. And I think it will be difficult for the riders who’ve done the Tour de France who go on to the Olympics not to take a bit of a nosedive. After getting a silver medal in Tokyo [in the road race],  for me to get on the podium in the time trial event in Paris would be both amazing – and pretty unusual.”

Last but not least in his very different 2024 program, Van Aert will be making his debut in the Vuelta a España.

Apart from seeing how he gets on riding two Grand Tours in a single year, his goal in Spain will be to take a stage win prior to heading for the Worlds, but arguably the biggest change for the Belgian in the Grand Tours, in any case, will be not doing the Tour.

“It was time to do something different,” Van Aert told Sporza. “The Tour de France is never boring, but at a certain point it becomes a habit.”