Thibau Nys wants to "build something" in cyclo-cross: "You can't compare that to Wout van Aert or Mathieu van der Poel"

Nys junior, who skipped the GP Quebec and GP Montreal in September, spoke at length on Sporza. “My body was just crying out for rest. It was really necessary. If I hadn't taken a break now, I would have run into trouble this cyclo-cross season or next year. And then it's difficult to correct.”

“We were able to avoid greater damage. I feel like I'm coming back to life,” said Nys. “I couldn't recover from my training sessions anymore. It was more a case of canceling or adjusting training sessions than completing everything flawlessly. After an hour and a half, I had to call my coach to say that I couldn't cope again, and then it was back to the drawing board.”

“I didn't experience that in the spring or in previous years. It was due to one thing: mental and physical fatigue,” he continues.

Now it's time for cyclo-cross. "For me, cyclocross is still very important, and I still have so much to prove to myself and to 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 races and titles. Then you can shift your focus in the long term, but I'm not there yet."

Nys rides more than twenty cyclo-cross races. “That's a lot, but when I make the calendar, I always see which races I'm skipping. Yes, that's the love for the field,” says the man who wants to follow in the footsteps of his father, Sven. “I want to build something that will make people say in 10 to 15 years that I have meant something to this sport. That’s a little easier in cyclo-cross than on the road. But it is a goal: to build something that people want to see.”