Visma-Lease a Bike's team management have put a brave face on the loss of Wout van Aert for Omloop Het Nieuwsblad on Saturday, but they were the first to recognise that it constituted a heavy blow to their ambitions as well.
Van Aert has caught a virus, seemingly some kind of cold or 'flu bug, that has left him out for the count just days before Belgium's second biggest one-day cobbled Classic, where he was set to make his debut for 2026.
The winners of Nieuwsblad for three straight years between 2022 and 2024 with Van Aert, Dylan van Baarle and Jan Tratnik, this weekend the Dutch squad will now pivot much more sharply than expected on the performance of up-and-coming Matthew Brennan, in what is only the 20-year-old's second participation in Omloop. Last year, the British sprinter finished 69th, very early in his first full year as a pro.
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Visma-Lease a Bike's press conference on Thursday was originally designed to be both the launch of their European Classics season with Van Aert and Brennan and the announcement of a new sponsor, the French AI company Mistral, to their stable of backers.
Instead, much of the press conference was spent focusing on the reasons behind Van Aert's last-minute absence in what is the Belgian star's umpteenth setback.
One of the biggest silver linings is that the illness appears to be minor, and will only affect Opening Weekend, with a season start at Le Samyn still possible and his ankle injury that put paid to his 2025-2026 cyclocross campaign. But the blow remains a significant one in what is far from being the easiest of starts to the year for the Dutch team across the board.
"It's really unfortunate, of course, it's shit he has this [infection], but he's not the only one who has it these days," team lead sports director Grischa Niermann said.
"It's very bad timing, but not the end of the world. We hope he will be OK to ride Le Samyn, but we don't know yet; we will have to see that on the day by day.
"We were planning to start the season here with Wout, his training was going well, there were no more problems with his ankle injuries, and the rehabilitation was going very well. He could do everything he wanted. But now something else is a problem. He will not be there on Saturday."
Even if Omloop is not the absolute high point of Van Aert's season, with his plan to be in top form in four weeks for the main body of the Classics, Niermann insisted that Visma-Lease a Bike started every race they began with the aim of winning, and that obviously included Saturday's race.
But he also pointed out that with Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Premier Tech), a recent addition to the start list, "we're clearly not the big favourites, that's Mathieu and his team. Although we still believe that we'll play a very good role and there'll be a lot of black and yellow in the key parts of the race."
While Matthew Brennan will be "probably our best card to play," Niermann said, Nieuwsblad is, in any case, a hugely unpredictable event. Niermann recalled that if Norwegian sprinter Søren Wærenskjold (Uno-X Mobility) was a surprise winner last year, that just formed part of the way the first cobbled Classic of the season always tended to play out.
"Last year the race was quite hard, and it came back all the same, because Omloop is always a race when anything can happen. I just said to Matthew when I was watching a video of last year's race, you could see Wærenskjold was really far back on the Muur [de Geraardsbergen], and he still won.
"There was, of course, a headwind which will be different this year, but anything can happen. The year before we put it in the gutter with 140 kilometres to go and then on top of the Bosberg, there were 60 guys from the peloton coming back that we hadn't seen for three hours."
"Luckily [for Visma] one of these guys was Jan Tratnik - and he won the race."
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