While the final road races are still being completed, Thibau Nys has already set his sights on the cyclocross season. The 22-year-old rider, who will dive into the field on November 1st at the Koppenbergcross, ended his road season prematurely at the end of August. "My body was just screaming for rest," he says in the VRT program Sportweekend.
"It was really necessary," says Nys, who skipped the Canadian classics due to fatigue. "If I hadn’t eased off now, I would have run into serious trouble during this cyclocross season or next year. And then it’s hard to make corrections. We managed to avoid bigger damage. I feel like I’m coming back to life."
Struggling
Nys started his road season excellently with a win at the Gran Premio Miguel Indurain. Afterwards, he was also in the mix at the Amstel Gold Race (twelfth), the Flèche Wallonne, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, but after the latter, the best was already gone, he now admits.
"I couldn’t recover from my training anymore. It was more about cutting back or adjusting my training rather than executing everything flawlessly. After an hour and a half, I had to call my coach saying I couldn’t make it again, and more cutting and adjusting followed. In the spring or previous years, I never experienced that kind of struggling. It was due to one thing: mental and physical fatigue."
Van Aert and Van der Poel
Nys understands that people say he might be taking on too much by going full force for both cyclocross and road racing. "But apparently, they don’t understand me well enough. For me, cyclocross is still very important, and I still have so much to prove to myself and everyone else before I want to take a different direction."
"You can’t compare that to Wout van Aert or Mathieu van der Poel, who have already won countless cyclocross races and titles. Then you can shift your focus over time, but I am far from that. (…) I want to build something that people will say in 10 to 15 years has meant something for the sport. In cyclocross, that’s a little easier than on the road. But it is definitely a goal: to build something that gets people to come out and watch."
Thibau Nys
