Why Wout van Aert's Rumored Plan of Racing the Giro & Skipping the Tour Makes No Sense
Breaking down why it would be foolish for Wout van Aert to race the 2024 Giro d'Italia & skip the Tour de France in preparation for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris
A recent report in the Italian sports daily newspaper, La Gazzetta dello Sport, has claimed that Jumbo-Visma (soon to be Visma-Lease a Bike) plans to send Wout van Aert to the Giro d’Italia in 2024 as their GC leader as well as skipping the Tour de France to focus on preparation for the 2024 Olympic Games in Paris.
Should We Believe This?
Considering just how many pieces of significant cycling news have dropped recently via single-sourced stories that haven’t panned out in reality, it would be wise to view this with a healthy degree of skepticism, especially since even just the idea that Van Aert could show helps the Giro court sponsors and increase their TV rights value, and the owner of La Gazzetta, RCS MediaGroup runs the Giro.
With this in mind, it is important to remember that this news can be traced back to a single La Gazzetta piece, the team has officially released nothing, and concrete plans for the coming season likely won’t be in place until after the team’s mid-December training camp/sponsor reveal.
Why Would Wout van Aert Do This?
Taking a giant look and assuming this is true, this is undoubtedly a bold and exciting move that would deliver a much-needed star boost for the Italian grand tour, and allow members of the ‘Wout van Aert is actually a GC rider’ secret society to see our thought experiment play out in real life. And, even if he fails in his GC bid, it will show us just how many stages he can win at a grand tour if he isn’t on domestique duty for a GC leader.
There is undoubtedly a healthy debate to be had on whether the 2024 Giro’s relatively mild course and large number of individual time trials (68 kilometers) would allow the hulking Van Aert to compete for overall victory.
I personally believe that he could, but only if he was willing to lose a significant amount of weight, which would all but end his one-day Classics and stage-hunting career (see: Geraint Thomas) and, ironically, hurt his ability to win both the Road Race and Time Trial at the Olympics later in the season.
But, beyond the GC classification, I believe that if Van Aert did go to the 2024 Giro d’Italia, it would likely be less about chasing a GC result and more about freely chasing stage victories without the burden of acting as a domestique for a GC leader, with an added benefit of skipping the Tour de France to head off to dedicated altitude camps in June and July to prepare specifically for the Road Race and Time Trial events at the Paris Olympic Games in early August.
Why This Doesn’t Make Sense
Instead of debating if Van Aert can go to the Giro and seriously challenge for the overall win, I think it is more interesting to dive into whether or not he should and, most importantly, if his rumored plan of targeting the cobbled Classics (Tour of Flanders & Paris-Roubaix), racing the Giro and skipping the Tour de France to prepare for the Olympics makes any sense.
While racing the Giro d’Italia before decamping to a solitary high-altitude training camp to prepare for the time trial and road race at the Paris Olympics might, theoretically, make sense at first glance, upon closer inspection, the plan starts to fall apart.
Setting aside why a superstar rider would chuck aside the sport’s biggest race, the Tour de France, to focus on the Olympics, which, if we are honest, is a somewhat gimmicky one-off national-team race that doesn’t carry the same heft as cycling’s Monuments, the logistics of this plan leave something to be desired.
The first issue that arises is how Van Aert would transition from Paris-Roubaix, which requires contenders to be at their heaviest possible racing weight, on April 7th, to the startline of the Giro less than a month later on May 4th in condition to challenge for the overall title at the grand tour.
This obstacle alone renders any idea of a Cobbled-Classics/Giro GC double out of the question.
The next issue is recent history, which strongly suggests that racing the Tour de France, which usually ends between one or two weeks prior, is the key to winning Olympic titles in both the road race and time trial.
Olympic Road Race/TT Champions & Tour de France Participation Since 2008:
Olympic Road Race Winners:
2021: Richard Carapaz - raced 21 days at the Tour
2016: Greg van Avermaet - raced 21 days at the Tour
2012: Alexandre Vinokourov - raced 21 days at the Tour
2008: Samuel Sánchez - raced 21 days at the TourOlympic Time Trial Winners:
2021: Primož Roglič - raced 8 days at the Tour
2016: Fabian Cancellara - raced 17 days at the Tour
2012: Bradley Wiggins - raced 21 days at the Tour
2008: Fabian Cancellara - raced 17 days at the Tour
As we can see above, every Olympic champion in the road race and time trial, Van Aert’s targeted events, started the Tour de France. Every road race champion finished the Tour, while three out of the four started, but didn’t finish, the Tour.
In fact, at the 2021 (2020) Olympic Road Race in Tokyo, the top non-Tour racing finishers were Adam Yates in 9th place and Alberto Bettiol in 11th, who hit a wall late in the race and was dropped from the lead group, likely due to the lack of consistent racing miles in the month prior.
Even with his Jumbo-Visma team’s class-leading sports science department, training camp logistics, and backend staff, it still seems like a stretch, and frankly foolish, to think he could overcome this somewhat overwhelming evidence.
With this in mind, don’t be shocked to see these reports fall by the wayside when Jumbo-Visma and Van Aert release his 2024 racing schedule following the team’s December 2024 planning camp.
Spencer, in assessing van Aert's 2023, why is his work as the an excellent lead-out rider dismissed? Cycling, after all, is a team sport.
Amazing how powerful the Tour is, even on a rider's fitness.