Europe 1 with AFP 19:31 p.m., April 11, 2023

French rider Julian Alaphilippe was forced to withdraw from the Brabant Fleche and the Amstel Gold Race due to a knee injury sustained during a crash at the Tour of Flanders on 2 April. The Frenchman had to settle for 51st place in the Belgian Classic.

Julian Alaphilippe, who has been suffering from knee pain since a crash during the Tour of Flanders on April 2, will not compete in the Brabant Fleche on Wednesday or the Amstel Gold Race on Sunday, his team said on Tuesday. The French rider "will be absent until Amstel", explained the manager of the Soudal-Quick Step team, Patrick Lefevere, at the finish of Paris-Roubaix on Sunday. "He injured his knee when he fell during the Ronde (the Tour of Flanders where he took 51st place) and since then it's been a bit of misery for him."

The Belgian team hopes to get the double world champion back for the Flèche Wallonne in a week, a race he has dominated three times (2018, 2019 and 2021). "It looks like someone is playing voodoo with us right now," Lefevere lamented Tuesday in the columns of the daily Het Laatste Nieuws.

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Transition between races

The Brabant Arrow, which Alaphilippe won in 2020, serves each year as a transition between the Flemish races and the Ardennes classics. After an almost blank 2022 season (only two successes), the 30-year-old puncher is slow to stop the negative spiral in which he is dragged.

At the beginning of the season, apart from his victory in the Ardèche Classic at the end of February, he has never been able to play a prominent role in the races that were close to his heart, the Strade bianche (43rd), Milan-Sanremo (11th) and the Tour of Flanders (51st).