A year later than planned, but if all goes well, Wout Van Aert is finally set to make his Giro d’Italia debut in 2025. Last year’s brutal crash at Dwars door Vlaanderen, which left him with a broken collarbone and fractured ribs, robbed the Corsa Rosa of one of its most anticipated stars. It also denied Van Aert a chance he openly admitted he needed: a new goal, a new race, a fresh challenge.
But Wout is a man of his word. Twelve months on, he’s back with renewed pink dreams. And yes, a rider of his caliber isn’t coming to Albania just for the scenery. He’s coming with ambition. Team Visma | Lease a Bike will bring a strong squad – featuring Olav Kooij for the sprints and Simon Yates for the general classification – but Van Aert is still expected to shine.
“In the sprints, I’ll be the lead-out man for Kooij, so it’ll be tough for me to go after the Maglia Ciclamino,” Van Aert admitted this winter. “But my dream is to wear the Maglia Rosa in the opening stages – not necessarily to defend it for two weeks, because that could hurt my chances of winning stages later on. And at the Giro, I really want to win more than one stage”. When someone like Wout makes statements like that, you can be sure he’s aiming to hit top form come May. Let’s hope he finds that “form of a lifetime” – the same condition he said he had just before that crash at Dwars door Vlaanderen last year.
Some unfairly label him a perennial runner-up, but here in Italy, there’s no doubt: Wout Van Aert is a winner to the core. He’s claimed two of the most beloved and prestigious one-day races on the calendar – Strade Bianche and Milano–Sanremo – plus two stages at Tirreno-Adriatico. It was on the dusty roads of Siena that he truly announced himself to the world of road cycling. In 2018, in what remains the muddiest edition of Strade Bianche, he finished third wearing the jersey of Vérandas Willems-Crelan, and no one will forget his heroic ride up the Via Santa Caterina wall, where sheer exhaustion caused him to collapse to the ground. At that point, he’d already won a handful of Belgian semi-classics, but that ride in Siena was the moment the world really took notice, allowing him to step out of the cyclocross bubble for good.
Maybe that’s why Italian fans love him so much. If you want to bring Wout down, you pretty much have to knock him off his bike. And Wout seems to feel that love too – maybe that’s why he often chooses Italy for his holidays. A Giro raced in true Van Aert style, with attacks and fireworks almost daily, would only deepen that bond. So yes, we’re ready for him, maybe in the Maglia Rosa, maybe on the gravel, maybe right there in Siena’s Piazza del Campo, where it all began
