Mathieu van der Poel has brought forward his return by a week. On Saturday he will return to the field for the first time in Herentals.
Tom Pidcock will also be present. Wout van Aert passes and that is quite remarkable, considering it is his home cross. He will spend the next two weeks in Denia, Spain, where he is at a training camp with the Jumbo-Visma riders.
According to Niels Albert, Van Aert would have really liked to race for his own people. “It’s a shame that Wout van Aert is not there. Wout would have wanted that, after all, Herentals is where he lives. But he was not allowed by the team, with whom he left for an internship to Spain on Monday.”
Flying back and forth
“If Jumbo-Visma had said: ‘Just fly back and forth’, he would certainly have been at the start. But they don’t think that way there, the internship with the team is much too important for that.” The next cross on his program is the Exact Cross in Mol on December 22, also the first confrontation with Mathieu van der Poel.
The shape is already excellent. Van Aert rode his first cross in Essen and won with more than a minute and a half ahead of number two, Jens Adams. “It was a piece of cake for him. So you can see that he is an athlete on a different level.”
