Tim Merlier finally begins his spring on Sunday, but: “Gent-Wevelgem and Paris-Roubaix are out of the question”

Even so, Merlier is just happy to be a rider again. “That depends on what you call being a rider,” he told Het Laatste Nieuws. “I’ve only been training again for four weeks. It was only last week, at our training camp in Spain — my fourth camp ahead of this season, but the first one where I didn’t have to fly home early — that I managed to ride five hours in one go for the first time. That hadn’t happened since September 6.”

Because of a knee injury, the former European champion had to wait a long time for his first race of 2026, but that moment has finally arrived in the GP Monseré. “With a bit of fear, though. I lie awake at night wondering whether I’ll even be able to hold on. There’s even a bit of performance anxiety. I’m carrying a conditioning deficit. Basically, I’m an experiment.”

That all sounds rather gloomy, but it is not hard to understand when you hear what Merlier has had to deal with. The past few months have been extremely tough. This was not just any knee injury either, but one where nobody could initially pinpoint exactly what the issue was. The pain simply refused to go away, and as a result the sprinter went through a very difficult spell.

“After a while, I also started doubting myself. In my head, I began to fear that the people around me, or those in the team, would stop believing me because the symptoms were atypical and there was so little to actually see. At the first team camp I even joined the sign sprints out of pure frustration and won them, but it was the actual pedalling motion that caused pain. I could ride a bit, but you couldn’t really call it training.”

After a long rehabilitation process, he is finally back. The choice of the GP Monseré is no coincidence. “Next week you have Classic Brugge-De Panne, but that’s not a race where you can just roll around for fun. At this point in the season, GP Monseré is the least demanding race, and they’re forecasting nice weather. Coppi e Bartali was an alternative, but I’d rather do a one-day race than immediately start with a week in which every stage has 2,000 metres of climbing.”

Normally, Merlier would be the outright top favourite in a flat sprint on home roads, but do not expect him among the very best in Roeselare just yet. “I want to finish the race and try to position myself in the finale, but really standing out in the sprint? That seems unthinkable to me. I see this as a little test and as a chance to enjoy racing again, even though I know I’m going to suffer enormously.”

And what if he still wins? “Then I’m a medical miracle, and people in the peloton are training far too much,” he laughed. “Somehow I carry the label that Merlier is always good very quickly at the start of the season. But that’s with three to four months of training in my legs. This time I was only able to start training in mid-February, once the knee pain was finally gone.”

Merlier finished second in Gent-Wevelgem last year, with that race due to take place next Sunday. “Of course it’s somewhere in the back of my mind, but I have to be realistic: it’s not happening. Gent-Wevelgem and Paris-Roubaix are out of the question. I also don’t want to compromise the rest of my season. The main goals are the Belgian Championships and making the Tour de France squad. If all goes well, I’ll also ride the Tour of Hungary and the Tour of Belgium before that, so that I can hopefully be in top shape by the end of June.”