"At the moment everything is going well" - Amaury Capiot hopes to put his health struggles aside for some time

Relief comes to Amaury Capiot. After a season in which he only made eighteen appearances in the last three months of racing due to annoying problems with his knees, the Belgian was offered to stay with Arkéa-Samsic for two more years.

The culprit behind the season to forget was the ITB friction syndrome. "Not for the first time," Capiot explains to WielerFlits. "For the beginning of my complaints, we have to go back to the year 2017. That was when a stabbing pain on the outside of my right knee arose for the first time. To relieve the pain, they surgically removed a piece of my tendon. For prevention, they immediately performed the same operation on my other knee."

The elephant in the room is: will Capiot suffer from the same problem again in five years? "That is something no one can predict. If we think five years ahead, I will be 35. Then I will be at a different stage of my career, and then the question is whether I would want to go under the knife again. But at the moment everything is going well and we assume that the burden will not return in the short term."

"I still have a bit of trouble, but not to the extent that it hinders me from racing at 100 percent. It's mainly when I think about it a lot during training, or during the race when things aren't going fast yet. Then you are constantly thinking about it, but that will go away over time. The longer those operations are over, the better things are going every day. I even saw that in Guangxi, where I felt a lot better than during my first kilometers in Poitou-Charentes," Capiot concludes.