Lotto Dstny DS on cooling down Arnaud De Lie's commitment to all-out racing: "He's a real fighter, that's why we had to intervene"

Despite cancelling few of his recent race appointments due to an illness, Arnaud De Lie should still make a race appearance before the end of the 2024 season. While De Lie takes a week off to recover, he's expected to appear in the Belgian tricolor on home roads of Binche-Chimay-Binche (October 1) and later at Paris-Tours.

"Arnaud got a bit sick. Not to say that he really had the flu or anything, but he had been feeling a bit off for a few races," Lotto Dstny team manager Dirk Demol explains to WielerFlits.

"We had already seen that a bit in the BEMER Cyclassics in Hamburg, it was also clear in the Grand Prix Wallonie," Demol refers to the sub-par results. "In Canada he was still really good on Friday in the Québec, on Sunday in Montréal he was actually not in order."

The team had to remove two more appointments from De Lie's programme to let him recover: "The problem is: Arnaud always shows a lot of commitment, he always wants to go for it. We really had to decide in consultation to cancel those two races for him."

But if the disease had been dormant for so long, how come De Lie was one of the few who could follow Tadej Pogacar on the final climb of the Grand Prix of Québec? "That actually makes what he did there even more impressive. I really have enormous admiration for the rider Arnaud De Lie is. He always has morale. That's why we had to intervene. He's a fighter, you know."

Perhaps an overload with the busy programme after Tour de France debut? "When you see that it is no longer possible and he is exhausted, the decision to take him out of races for a while is quite an easy one to make. Normally he will still start in his own region in Binche-Chimay-Binche and Paris-Tours, so that he can still end the season on a positive note."