“I can almost walk normally again” – Wout van Aert offers clearest update yet on ankle recovery timeline

Four weeks before the spring classics begin, Wout van Aert has offered his clearest picture yet of how his recovery from an ankle fracture is progressing, speaking on the Live Slow Ride Fast podcast.

Van Aert broke his ankle in a crash at the Zilvermeercross in Mol in early January, a setback that abruptly ended his cyclocross winter and forced Team Visma | Lease a Bike to reshape his entire early-season build-up. Surgery followed, his remaining cross races were cancelled, and attention immediately shifted to whether his road spring would be affected.

Now, Van Aert says the basic markers of recovery are moving in the right direction.

“I can almost walk normally again, and also the cycling is going well,” he explained. “But full sprinting is still not possible.”

The early phase of his return to riding was defined less by fitness than by pain management, particularly around the ankle’s range of movement. “During my first rides, I had to take my foot out of the pedal, because unclipping caused a lot of pain,” Van Aert said.

That stage, however, appears to have passed as the swelling has continued to recede.

“Meanwhile, the swelling has gone down a lot, and I can almost walk normally again. On the bike, I can already accelerate a bit out of corners.”

As part of his rehabilitation, Van Aert joined the team for a ten-day training camp in Spain, a camp that Visma staff had already described as important for regaining lost volume rather than chasing intensity.

“Naturally, I did lose some time,” he admitted. “But in Spain I was already able to do a six-hour training ride.”

That workload lines up with earlier indications from the team that his inactivity window was relatively short, with Van Aert already back on the bike just days after surgery.

What remains missing, Van Aert was clear, is full sprint capability. “I still had some discomfort, especially when moving my ankle in the last degrees,” he said. “And full sprinting still didn’t work.”

It is a limitation that fits with what the team have consistently signalled throughout his recovery: that explosive efforts would be the final piece to return, but not one expected to delay his spring objectives.

Despite that, Van Aert stressed that his planned season start is not under threat. “The people who are guiding me have confidence that it will be fine,” he said. “And that I will be fully load-bearing again within a foreseeable time.”

With Omloop Het Nieuwsblad now four weeks away, the picture remains consistent with what Visma have communicated since Mol. The winter was interrupted, but not derailed. Endurance is back. Day-to-day function is returning. Sprinting, Van Aert insists, will come last.

For now, the trajectory remains intact.