Home favourite Wout van Aert and his Jumbo-Visma squad will have to do without Dylan van Baarle at Sunday's Tour of Flanders after the team did not include him in their definitive line-up.
The reigning Paris-Roubaix champion and runner-up in Flanders last spring, Van Baarle crashed hard at the E3 Saxo Classic last Friday and was forced to miss Wednesday's Dwars door Vlaanderen as a result.
The 30-year-old, who kicked off Jumbo-Visma's golden 2023 cobbled Classics campaign at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad last month, would have been a key lieutenant for Van Aert at Sunday's race as well as a contender in his own right. However, when Jumbo-Visma named their Flanders squad on Thursday afternoon, he was not in their number.
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Van Baarle went down at the entrance to the Stationsberg cobbled sector with 58km to go at the E3 Saxo Classic, falling along with Florian Sénéchal (Soudal-QuickStep) and Jhonatan Narváez (Ineos Grenadiers) just as Van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) launched the attacking at the front of the race.
Van Baarle's injuries are not the principal reason for his absence, with illness specified by his team, although that possibly stemmed from the after-effects of the crash.
"It's not that he has specific disease or something but he doesn't feel at the 100% you need for the Tour of Flanders," team director Maarten Wynants told Cyclingnews.
"He some abrasions at the hip and knee and to try to recover from that he got a little bit ill. When you have to recover from a hard crash it takes energy out of the body then it costs you through illness later on. That's just my opinion."
Wynants confirmed that Van Baarle completed a six-hour training ride on Sunday, two days after the crash, indicating that "he was coming along ok".
However, he failed to recover from that effort and was pulled from Wednesday's Dwars door Vlaanderen as a precaution. With no improvement on Wednesday or Thursday morning, he was then pulled from Flanders, with the aim of now salvaging Paris-Roubaix as the last race of the cobbled Classics.
"That was the main reason we skipped him for Dwars, to recover him 100% from the crash, but he gets ill and it's the end of the story for Flanders, to give him some space and rest to Roubaix," Wynants said.
"It's a big shame. It's an open door that you kick in. He's one of the big players that we miss in the final."
Van Aert leads the Dutch team at Flanders, with Gent-Wevelgem and Dwars door Vlaanderen winner Christophe Laporte, Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne winner Tiesj Benoot, Edoardo Affini, Tosh van der Sande, Nathan Van Hooydonck, and Tim van Dijke filling out the Jumbo-Visma squad.
