For the second straight year, Greg Van Avermaet has had to face up to the disappointment of not making it into his team’s Tour de France selection - only on this occasion, with retirement now just months away, it is surely all the harder for the Belgian to handle.
A former Olympic champion and Tour de France stage winner and leader, Van Avermaet, 38, told reporters this week he had hoped for his team to show more sympathy for his predicament.
With a goal of being a team worker, he said, and what he saw as good form in recent races, he thought he might have a shot at selection for what would have been his tenth and last Tour.
But that did not prove to be the case. Furthermore, Van Avermaet already endured the same situation in 2022, when he was not selected for the Tour for the first time since 2013 by AG2R despite being in what he felt was good race condition.
"It's normal that I'm disappointed, otherwise, I wouldn't be ambitious anymore," Sporza reported Van Avermaet as saying. ”Especially because I knew it would be my last Tour. Then you hope for some sympathy from the team."
Van Avermaet added he was motivated to ride the Tour again. "It's always a tough race, but it's still the biggest bike race. So you want to be part of it.
"A stage win might have been difficult for me, but I would have been able to be a team worker and get in breaks.
"My level was good, I had some good results in the Classics, and that’s the point when you think you will make it into the lineup."
A winner for the first time in nearly four years this May in the Boucles de l'Aulne/Chateaulin one-day race, Van Avermaet recognised that it had not been an easy decision for AG2R. But when it came to his view of the rationale behind that decision, he pulled a few punches.
"I know it's not an easy decision for them. I had hoped to participate in the Tour based on my palmares and my experience. In other teams, riders have been selected because of those factors, but apparently, they didn't matter to my team," he said.
"I now have to swallow this bitter pill and hope for a good autumn."
One last Vuelta unlikely
Looking ahead at alternatives to the Tour de France, Van Avermaet said he was not overly enthusiastic about riding the Vuelta a Espana, where back in 2008 he took a breakthrough first stage win and the points jersey - the latter now set to be his only final classification victory in a Grand Tour.
"I will have more chances to get good results in smaller stage races and one-day races, such as in Quebec and Montréal," he explained.
"It's hard, but I have to be able to process this. Let's hope that within a week I can put my thoughts fully back on racing again."
It likely didn't help matters for Van Avermaet that back in June 2022, he already lived through the same non-selection scenario for the Tour de France, telling reporters at the time in a specially organised press conference, “it was a big disappointment because I was not really expecting it.”
“They never said I was 100 percent sure for the Tour but I had the feeling I was not really replaceable or not in the team, so it was a surprise.”
Last June Van Avermaet expressed his hopes that he would be selected for the 2023 Tour, saying “I know I had some great moments there and I know how special it is to be there, so I hope to be back and I’ll be able to stop on a good note.”
However, as he discovered this week, in terms of the Tour de France at least, that was not going to be the case.
