The highly-anticipated return to racing for Egan Bernal is still up in the air as Ineos Grenadiers did not place the Colombian climber on its roster for the Vuelta a Burgos this week. He has not raced yet this year, having suffered major injuries in a training ride crash on January 24, 11 days after turning 25.
A report in La Gazzetta dello Sport in early July suggested that Bernal would be part of the Ineos team for the early August ProSeries event in Spain. However, Ineos Grenadiers announced their squad on Monday and it does not include the 2021 Giro d’Italia winner.
The Spanish stage race runs August 2-6 and starts Tuesday in Burgos. Ineos will line up Tuesday with Andrey Amador, Laurens de Plus, Omar Fraile, Tao Geoghegan Hart, Brandon Rivera, Pavel Sivakov and recently-crowned Spanish road race national champion Carlos Rodriguez.
Just under six months ago Bernal suffered serious injuries in a horrific training ride crash in Bogota, Colombia, where he spent two weeks in intensive care. Among his life-threatening injuries which required seven surgeries were a fractured vertebrae, a fractured right femur, a fractured right patella, chest trauma, a punctured lung and several fractured ribs.
Two months after the crash, he was back on a bike, and one month ago he was back to intense training in Andorra. There have been rumors that Bernal will race the Vuelta a España, but speaking on Vincenzo Nibali’s Twitch channel Squalo TV, he said he was aiming for late-season Italian Classics as his first foray into his racing comeback.
The focus on altitude camp with his teammates came after he cancelled a trip in early July to visit his mother in Colombia, as she had been diagnosed with cancer. While he stated “she is the most important person for me”, he remained in Europe to train at altitude in Andorra with Carlos Rodríguez, Pavel Sivakov, Laurens De Plus and Ethan Hayter.
Last year, he competed at the Vuelta a Burgos for the first time, his top performance a fourth-place finish on stage 5 to Lagunas de Neila. His teammate Sivakov was fourth overall. His last competition of 2021 was the Vuelta a España, where he finished sixth overall and was runner-up in the best young rider classification.
