An Inside Look at Wout van Aert’s 2026 Comeback ⋆ CyclingScoop

The line between winning athletes and legendary athletes is pretty thin.

Can we definitively say Wout van Aert now belongs to the second category?

The past nine months have been dramatic proof for cycling fans: despite bumps in the road along the way, Wout van Aert is actually on a comeback.

This spring, in the sport’s most chaotic and often painful race, the Belgian superstar achieved his best victory yet: a win on the cobbles of Paris-Roubaix. But did you know that this comeback was quite a few months in the making?

The road definitely hasn’t been easy for Wout, but this win might make it all worth the while! With this victory, he’s finally written a story centered on his perseverance, his belief in his ability to win, and his once-in-a-generation talent (yes, even among contemporaries like Tadej Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel) and cemented his legacy not just as a guy who comes in second, but as a real winner in the end.

A difficult path for van Aert through 2024 and 2025.

To understand what van Aert has achieved, you first need to really understand what he was coming back from.

His 2024 season was derailed by injury along with other setbacks, that all stripped away any momentum he built through training and preparation. His 2025 spring classics campaign told a frustrating tale: despite top-five finishes everywhere, there were Monument victories nowhere. He finished second at the Tour of Flanders, fourth at Paris-Roubaix, and second at Brabantse Pijl.

So while the podiums were there, the wins were not. For a rider of his caliber, he could be described as one of the most complete cyclists of his generation. Close is just not close enough.

Questions started to arise in the minds of cycling fans, and even in fans of Wout himself. Had Wout van Aert truly lost his capacity to win… especially when it mattered most?

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The role of a superdomestique?

To frame this purely as a slump would be to miss a deeper, more troubling idea about van Aert’s broader career.

For years, one of cycling’s most gifted all-rounders was asked (and notably, willingly agreed) to sideline his own ambitions for the greater good of his team. Unlike other riders of his stature, van Aert typically came to the Tour de France as a domestique for Jonas Vingegaard, with the yellow jersey as the team’s prime focus.

When Mads Pedersen or other punchers could sit up in the mountains and save themselves for the following day, van Aert had a job to do. And whenever van Aert did get the chance to ride for himself, he didn’t have a dedicated support around him like some he was competing against. That’s not even to mention carrying extra fatigue from his work in the mountains.

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What about the famous Hautacam stage of the 2022 Tour? Here, van Aert got himself into the early break and had a chance at stage victory, but instead waited for Vingegaard and delivered a monster pull (the stuff of legends!) to drop Pogačar. This alone was an act of extraordinary selflessness, followed by many more, but perhaps most emblematic of this trap van Aert found himself in.

He was really too good to be a pure domestique. Yet his loyalty to his team led him to facilitate such excellent results, and he so clearly had the talent to work as hard for himself as he did for Vingegaard. His palmarès, for all its brilliance, still carried the pain of “might-have-beens” over the years, including at the Tour de France.

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An Ode To the Domestique

Making his move on Montmartre…

The 2025 Tour de France did not immediately silence doubt about Wout.

After all, van Aert had not yet won a stage throughout the three weeks of racing, yet arrived in Paris with some ambitious plans for the final stage. For the first time, race organisers incorporated the Montmartre climb into the closing circuit. On paper, a classics-style stage in wet conditions is a perfect match for a classics-style rider who trains for exactly this kind of racing.

The problem is that you just can’t assume that van Aert will do what he looks like he can on paper, and a string of second places had proved that.

Here, for once, he proved that thinking wrong. Here, van Aert dropped world champion (yellow jersey) Pogačar and soloed to victory. It was the second time in his career he has won in Paris, but this time, it hit closer to home. And the emotions that overcame van Aert on the Champs-Élysées were real and raw, not a composed celebration of a rider who executed a plan, but rather of someone who had been fighting (even against himself and his own ability) for a very long time.

At the time, it seemed like this was the redemption. But turns out, the winning attack on Montmartre was not the final destination. And nine months later, Wout van Aert rolled into the famous velodrome at Roubaix and completed something far greater!

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… to the dream victory in Roubaix.

Longtime cycling fans will remember that van Aert has had a years-long pursuit of a win at Paris-Roubaix. This is a race where he had been very unlucky in the past.

What does the emotional weight of this particular race mean for him? Truthfully, it’s almost impossible to overstate. In 2018, he lost a teammate, Michael Goolaerts — who tragically passed away at age 23 in a fatal crash. It seems that for eight years, every time van Aert came to the start line of the Hell of the North, he brought a little bit of that grief, and wanted to win in honor of him. Unfortunately, it seemed never to be, especially when Wout had seemingly resigned himself to the domestique role.

Today started out no different… at least, until the very end.

Over the course of the race, van Aert suffered two mechanicals, including one which saw him lose over 30 seconds to the leading group. But around him, the race was tearing itself all apart. The three-time winner Mathieu van der Poel (and van Aert’s biggest conceptual rival) punctured on the Trouée d’Arenberg and fell irreparably behind. Pogačar, the world champion pursuing his unprecedented sweep of all five Monuments, had his own mechanical chaos to navigate through.

But van Aert refused to quit. On the cobbles, he matched the world champion sector for sector in a leading group of two, and then in the velodrome, he finally finished the job.

Was luck just finally on his side?

It’s easy and obvious to say he was just really prepared. But look at his tenacity, physical and mental. Every rider and team is liable to complain that they don’t know how to beat Pogačar. But when Pogi tried repeatedly to crack van Aert on the final kilometers, van Aert did not crack. He was strong enough to stay with the world champion, yet careful enough not to cook himself. When they arrived together at the velodrome for (as van Aert himself put it) a mano-a-mano sprint, fans did not dare to hope that his victory was certain.

When Wout crossed the finish line, he raised his finger and pointed to the sky, dedicating his victory to Michael Goolaerts. This was eight years in the making, no luck in play, but only one man’s effort. And it was completely worth it in the end.

Where can Wout go now?

Is this why the narrative arc from Montmartre to Roubaix matters so much? It’s not just that van Aert won two races… even races where he was tactically and physically strong.

It’s this: every time we count van Aert out, that we think he’s finally “washed,” he comes back and surprises us with a victory that’s not only spectacular, but also very meaningful. His win at Paris-Roubaix was the perfect example of this, after another round of classics second-places.

What about for van Aert himself, and not just his fans? Maybe it was that the Montmartre victory gave him back something that months and even years had quietly taken away: the belief that he can win when the stakes were highest, against the best riders in the world, and in some of the most difficult conditions imaginable. Even today, when luck was not on his side, he kept believing… and finally, the ultimate reward arrived.

Wout van Aert is the winner of Paris-Roubaix 2026.

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And in a sport dominated by a Slovenian superstar who makes everything look easy, we’re all reminded of something special: talent can get you to the start line, but resilience can get you across the finish.

And sometimes, the greatest victories really are the ones that take the longest to arrive.