"De Lie should stay away from Spain more and train more in the Ardennes" - Homesickness named as one of possible reasons behind Arnaud De Lie's poor results
Cycling
The Classics campaign is once again a reason for wrinkles on foreheads of Lotto sports directors. The Belgian team's greatest asset - at least on paper - Arnaud De Lie is visibly struggling again despite solid early appearances in France, Spain and Portugal.
"Arnaud trained too much in Spain - two months - and less at home. De Lie likes to be with his cows too much. That is literally what Dirk Demol [Lotto sports director, ed.] told me," says Dirk De Wolf, winner of Liège-Bastogne-Liège 1992 and Dwars Door Vlaanderen 1989 in Wielerclub Wattage powered by Sporza.
Presenter Ruben Van Gucht then throws out the word homesickness. "De Lie should stay away from Spain more and train more in the Ardennes. And be with his cows more."
"Could that be it? If you are there for two months, you can't cross back to Belgium twice for a few days?" Tom Boonen wonders.
Arnaud De Lie is still in the provisional lineups for Gent Wevelgem (March 30), Dwars Door Vlaanderen (April 02) and Tour of Flanders (April 06) - races where he should ideally compete for a top-10 result. However if the string of poor luck and mediocre performances keep stacking up, it wouldn't be unwise from Lotto to withdraw the Belgian from these races and save his strength for another day...
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- Raymond Poulidor, Alfredo Binda.... where do we stop. If you want to retitle it is Primoz Roglic the bestr rider never to win the tour in the last ten or 20 years then that might be betterslappers6631-03-2025
- Let me help you. Alfredo BindaUpHill31-03-2025
- He'll certainly last it and prob ride his own race, at the front 😁
leedorney31-03-2025 - Gaio Primus Caesar Roglus, Rome is waiting for you, Imperator :-)).
maria2024202431-03-2025 - And he probably wasn’t even at the limit ;-) Have to wonder how much Mads could catch up if he’d tune his physique to be as sharp as MVDPs’Mistermaumau31-03-2025
- Respect for giving Van Eetvelt credit there.Mistermaumau31-03-2025
- He’s already a star for me for HAVING complained about it, the recent trend having been, let them then try to take advantage by making them sign NDAs ;-)Mistermaumau31-03-2025
- Agreed, but if it was a radio thing then all the riders should have the same story and it would be easy to call anyone out. Kind of surprised this isn’t cleared up half officially afterwards, just like the Alaphilippe divorce, seems like once something spreads on the net it kind of gets accepted that everyone wants to have their own truth so no-one bothers to contest anything that’s verifiable anymore, we all just move on.Mistermaumau31-03-2025
- maybe. what makes that a LITTLE fishy is that they suddenly hit the gas and started hammering it. even mathieu, who i’ve never heard complain about ANYTHING (other than teenage girls waking him up and being spit on by belgians) was pretty hacked off about the race tactics after the split. i think he was upset for what his teammates had to do, not for the fact he ended up isolated as a result.OCexile31-03-2025
- It seems that in E3 it wasn’t legit to criticise teams that « took advantage » because there was no radio communication about the incident so they couldn’t know to slow down. Only one source so far but should be quite easy to verify.Mistermaumau31-03-2025