Thibau Nys in 'Van der Poel trouble', or will training camp offer solution? "Hope to find that final five percent quickly"

"It didn't go great. It wasn't super bad, but I did feel my back again," the cyclo-cross rider began. "I didn't really have the strength I would have liked to have. So, it wasn't great. I don't know exactly what caused it." Fellow cyclo-cross rider Laurens Sweeck suggested last week that the many sharp turns might be to blame, but Nys didn't want to attribute his performance solely to that. "It could be due to the many 180-degree turns in the courses, but I'm definitely not going to blame it only on that. In Waterloo, it was also a very demanding course for the back, and I felt nothing there. Just nothing," he shakes his head.

"I'll be happy when I can leave for training camp, then I can try to get back to the level I had at the beginning of the season," says Nys, who will travel to Calpe with the Lidl-Trek road team. But are things really that much worse this this time than, say, in Waterloo? "I do notice that it's going worse than then, but on the other hand, I also had a really good day last week. It's about details, about that final five percent that I'm missing to really be at the top of my game. I hope I can find it soon."

The solution will have to be found in Spain, it seems. "Everything just needs to fall into place, I'm really looking forward to getting back to training. I will train very hard there and then try to rest again for the cyclo-cross race in Namur. I really need to completely reset my back and schedule two more good weeks of training."

A silver lining: teammate Joris Nieuwenhuis won in Boom. "Joris is a great guy. He really deserves it. It's his second win of the season on Belgian soil and the way he rides here, he's incredibly strong. Joris is a super nice guy within the team, you can't say anything bad about him. He perfectly complements us and is an incredible link within the team."

Like Nieuwenhuis, Nys will also race in Flamanville on Sunday. On Saturday evening, the cyclo-cross riders will already cover four hours of travel, and then on Sunday morning, they add about three more hours in the car to get to Normandy for the World Cup there.