THE HAGUE: Former Tour de France winner Andy Schleck will be hoping to use the Ardennes classics this month to complete his return to the top.
Schleck will line up today at the Amstel Gold race, the first of three Spring Classics in the hilly Ardennes region that will be followed by the Fleche Wallonne and then Liege-Bastogne-Liege.
And although Schleck may still be some way from the best he showed in winning the Tour in 2010 (after Alberto Contador was stripped of his original victory for doping), he is hoping the rugged, lumpy terrain of the Ardennes will help him rediscover his legs.
But he admits there may yet be some way to go.
“Things are progressing slowly,” he told Luxembourger magazine Le Quotidien. “I’ve had the wind in my face, as we say in cycling, but that will change.
“I think I’m on the right track.”
It’s been a tough last 12 months for Schleck, who also twice finished second on the Tour and won Liege-Bastogne-Liege in 2009.
He broke his sacrum - a triangular bone at the base of the spine - in a crash at the Criterium du Dauphine last year, forcing him out of the Tour.
Ever since he has been unable to recapture anything like his previous form.
“I don’t know when I will be well, I don’t know if it will be this year or next year,” he admitted.
“I now realise that it wasn’t possible to go from almost nothing to top level in just six months because with an injury it’s not like being able to keep training.”
REUTERS
