"It was good to be away for a few months" - Wout van Aert on newly found motivation and ambition into 2025

Wout van Aert has had a year full of adversity, with two major crashes derailing most of his year's plan. In his first cross of the 2024-2025 season he has fallen once again, however he existed the Azencross Loenhout motivated, and talked about his motivation towards the spring classics.

“...It was good to be away for a few months. I didn’t have the stress of having to compete for a while, and that was good for me. I’m hungry again for the season to come," van Aert said in an interview with Wielerflits.

He didn't come back to cyclocross thinking of the big wins, but of getting some good racing and training in the cold winter months. “The race is a good training stimulus for me. It was the first time in months that I had to fight against myself for an hour. When you do a five-minute block of training, you look forward to the moment that you can push off. But now my predecessor had to decide how hard it was going to go. That is a completely different aspect. The goal is to suffer hard and gradually get better.”

Van Aert was never close to matching Mathieu van der Poel on the day, but in a course that proved to be very fast, he allied with Thibau Nys to fight for second place and always have the World Champion in sight until the final minutes of the race - more than what has been seen in previous races so deep into it.

He was asked how did he choose his schedule for the cyclocross season: “I didn’t want to compete too many times anyway, so that I could still train sufficiently in between. Then I looked at the races that suit me, and where there was enough time to recover and train. That's how we came to a bit of a compromise." Hence we still have van Aert present in the Exact Cross Gullegem and the World Cup races in Dendermonde, Benidorm and Maasmechelen.

It's not known yet where he will start his road season, but late February is likely the approach. "You don't just want to pin on a race number and not reach any level at all. The last few months, ever since we considered it realistic to make a schedule, it has done me good to have something to look forward to," he continues. "That made it easier to take good care of myself and to work towards these races. In that respect, I have been looking forward to it. In terms of training, I have simply continued the approach towards spring.”

He entered the classics with great form this year, and so his schedule will likely be very similar: “It is indeed not possible to copy that approach. That is to say, you can never copy an approach one-on-one anyway. But you can continue to follow the same idea, and that is a progressive approach in which more and more training is added and we want to improve step by step towards spring. Where I used to peak more to be good at those races, then take some rest and then build up towards spring, races now have to fit into the rest of the program," he concluded.