The possibility was already on the table and this morning it has been confirmed. Team Visma | Lease a Bike have lost another of their leaders in
Cian Uijtdebroeks who has fallen ill over the past few days.
It has been a virtual nightmare spring for Visma who have seen Jonas Vingegaard crash and suffer serious injuries that put the Tour de France at risk; Wout van Aert suffer serious injuries which took him out of the cobbled monuments and
Giro d'Italia... And at the Giro itself the team has already seen both Cristophe Laporte and Olav Kooij withdraw due to a crash and illness respectively.
The team was already fearful that Uijtdebroeks could be affected by the swarm of viruses that has been taking over a lot of the peloton over the past few days; which have seen the likes of Alexey Lutsenko and plenty sprinters also abandon in the last three days.
Already after the finale in Bocca della Selva yesterday, the leader of the youth classification admitted he was ill. "I felt that I was not completely healthy. To put it that way. I hope I can recover from it and that this was the bad day," were the words of the Dutchman. "Things (diseased, ed.) are going around in the peloton, so I hope it won't get worse."
However seemingly, it quickly did get worst. In the early hours of this Wednesday Visma confirmed the departure of their last remaining leader from the race, whilst he was sitting in fifth place in the overall classification. Another huge setback for the team.
“This is of course a huge disappointment, especially after Olav Kooij's earlier withdrawal. After Olav's stage victory we still thought that anything was possible, but now we can no longer count on our two leaders," team DS Marc Reef said. The team had already lost Robert Gesink due to a crash, whilst Koen Bouwman was forced to miss the race as well due to illness "This is a huge setback, after perfect preparation for the Giro.”
“We are now still racing with four riders but these guys are healthy. They are ready to race. The goal is still to fight for stage victories. Yesterday we showed with Jan Tratnik what we can achieve after a setback.”
