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Caleb Ewan’s rocky relationship with Lotto-Dstny has hit a new bump, with the Australian sprinter injured and more comments emerging about the distance between the 29-year-old and team management.
Comments in het Nieuwsblad have Ewan and Lotto-Dstny manager Stéphane Heulot again showing significant distance between each other, the rift formed during the Tour de France not having been healed. Ewan addressed whether he would be on the Belgian team for the following season, with Ewan presumably on one of the better contracts for sprinters in the peloton.
He signed an extension at the end of 2021, fresh off two victories at the Giro d’Italia forming the best of six wins that season, with his Tour de France being curtailed by a nasty crash. He has a deal through to the end of 2024.
"As we speak, I assume that I will still be racing for the team next year, but I don't know what's going to happen," Ewan said to het Nieuwsblad. "The team has made it clear that they would prefer me to leave, but I still have a contract."
Ewan abandoned the Tour de France on Stage 13 after a very close second-place finish and a third the top results, with Heulot questioning the Australian’s commitment to the team in the wake of the abandon and the previous day’s sprint where Ewan had been in a good position before being unable to muster a sprint.
"Caleb wanted to give up yesterday, but Jasper (de Buyst) supported him,” said Heulot in July. “We wanted to see him in Paris. A rider not only has rights, but also obligations. We have the right to ask for a different commitment."
Ewan’s camp hit back through agent Jason Bakker, calling the comments ‘insensitive’ and ‘dangerous’.
"What happened happened. What's said is said," Ewan said of the Tour de France and subsequent tension.
"Sometimes those things happen in professional sports. It is what it is. Have we talked yet? Stéphane and I don't speak that much, but we didn't do that before either.”
The Australian sprinter was unable to finish his last race, Sunday's Gooikse Pijl, due to wrist tendinopathy, and then didn’t take to the startline at Omloop van het Houtland, won by sprinter Gerben Thijssen (Intermarche-Wanty-Circus).
"He suffers acute tendinopathy of the right wrist and is currently being treated in Belgium. It is not clear yet when Caleb will return to action," Lotto-Dstny said in a press release.
For the Lotto-Dstny side of the dispute, it appears that Heulot is shouldering the load when it comes to criticising Ewan, from heaping pressure on the sprinter before the Tour de France, to leading criticism of his own rider, to now settling into an uneasy truce which seems unlikely to improve the prospects of either party.
“He has his idea about it, I have mine," Heulot told Nieuwsblad. "As chef d'équipe, I said what I wanted to say. But we're both professionals, it's not like we're at war with each other.
“The intention is not to further damage Caleb's career. We both want Caleb to end up in the best possible situation.”
Ewan recently celebrated the birth of his third child, Oscar, with wife Ryann, with further racing uncertain at present.
