“He needs to take a good look at himself” – Arnaud De Lie faces blunt warning after worst season of his career

Arnaud De Lie has been told he needs to “take a good look at himself” this winter after bringing the worst season of his professional career to an end, with Axel Merckx questioning whether the 24-year-old has been able to sustain his best level for long enough.

De Lie closed his Lotto-Intermarché chapter with 51st place at Paris-Tours, finishing 2026 with just two victories before his move to Tudor. “I think Arnaud himself knows that this season hasn’t been good,” Merckx told RTBF. “Especially in terms of results, I don’t think it was what he expected himself either.”

There were still flashes of De Lie at his best. He finished fourth at Gent-Wevelgem, won the Famenne Ardenne Classic and later took a selective stage victory at the Tour de Wallonie, where he also finished third overall.

His season was repeatedly disrupted around those results. Illness ruled him out of the Tour of Flanders, while both his Giro d’Italia and Tour de France ended in abandonment after health problems.

“He had his physical problems, which didn’t help. But I felt he wasn’t consistent enough over a period of two months,” Merckx said. “The problem is getting going again, reaching that level and then trying to maintain it for a longer period than he has in the past. Because as a professional rider now, you have to be able to stay at that level for quite a long time. If you want to be there in the spring Classics, you need to be at least at 90% of your capacity in February.”

Merckx pointed back to 2025 when discussing the foundation behind De Lie’s form.

“Last year, he had a very good end to the season because he had the Tour de France in his legs. At the beginning he wasn’t especially good, but he finished the Tour very strongly and carried that momentum forward,” he explained. "You can see that when the base is good and when he’s ready, he can sustain those performances for a little longer, as he did last year.”

De Lie’s late-2025 run was the strongest sustained spell of his career. He won the Renewi Tour overall before taking the Bretagne Classic, GP de Wallonie, SUPER 8 Classic and Paris-Chauny, five victories that followed a troubled first half of the season and put him back among the peloton’s most dangerous riders on selective one-day terrain.

That level surfaced only sporadically in 2026. “I hope he immediately takes a good look at himself and gets back to work fairly quickly this winter so that he’s ready for the spring next year,” Merckx said.

De Lie’s recent seasons have also contained enough health problems to make simple conclusions difficult. His 2024 campaign was disrupted by suspected Lyme disease, while illness again affected several of his biggest objectives this year.

RTBF journalist Jérôme Helguers was unwilling to separate those issues from De Lie’s results without knowing more about his condition.

“I really feel that we don’t have all the information needed,” he said. “I have absolutely no idea to what extent his Lyme disease has genuinely been treated or not. I don’t know how much his mental state has been affected either. But obviously we hope all of that is behind him. And it needs to be if he is going to return to his best level.”

De Lie now leaves the only professional structure he has known, joining Tudor on a deal through 2030 and entering Fabian Cancellara’s project after five seasons with Lotto.

He does so with 35 professional victories already behind him at the age of 24, including WorldTour successes in Québec and at the Bretagne Classic, but still without the Flemish Classic victory he openly identified as an objective heading into 2024. Almost three years later, that breakthrough remains outstanding.

Tudor will inherit a rider whose best periods have already shown the level required to win major one-day races, but whose last three seasons have each been interrupted before that form could become a lasting feature of his campaign.

De Lie will begin 2027 in a new team for the first time in his professional career. After the trajectory of the last three years, his first spring in Tudor colours should provide an early answer to whether the change of environment can finally give him the continuity that has so often been missing.