Slovenian Tadej Pogacar, victim of a terrible fall on Sunday during the classic Liège-Bastogne-Liège, will have to observe about six weeks of recovery after having wrist surgery, but will continue training on an indoor bike, announced Monday his UAE team.
If this deadline is respected, his return will take place barely four weeks before the start of the Tour de France, which he hopes to regain after finishing second behind Dane Jonas Vingegaard in 2022.
“Tadej had a comminuted scaphoid fracture, which requires a small screw to realign the bone fragments,” explained UAE Medical Director Dr. Adrian Rotunno, “l The operation went well and he will begin his recovery period at home”.
“Given the nature of the injury, the recovery will take about six weeks”, specifies the doctor, “but he will immediately attack rehabilitation and train on an indoor bike in the coming days”. The 24-year-old champion felt on Monday that he did well: “I’m lucky it was just a broken wrist, considering the crazy accident that happened,” explained the double winner of the Tour de France (2020, 2021) in a short text accompanying the posting on his Instagram account of photos showing him smiling with his left forearm completely in plaster. Victim of fractures of the left scaphoid and the semilunar bone of the left hand, he was operated on Sunday in Belgium.
He was also concerned about the health of Dane Mikkel Honoré, who fell with him at high speed on Sunday after 85 km of racing and who “had a much harder fall than mine”. The abandonment of Pogacar, who was aiming for a hat-trick in the Ardennes classics after winning the Amstel Gold Race and the Flèche wallonne, deprived the race of a long-awaited explanation with the Belgian Remco Evenepoel, who won Sunday at Liege for the second consecutive year. “Congratulations to Remco for the victory, our battle will wait for the next time”, concluded Tadej Pogacar.