Hirschi Out For The Rest Of The Spring After Flèche Wallonne Crash, Tudor Pro Cycling Pivot Their Tour de France Build Around Storer And Hayter
Tudor Pro Cycling have confirmed that Marc Hirschi will be unavailable for racing for the remainder of the spring after the crash he sustained at La Flèche Wallonne last month, reshaping the Swiss ProTeam's stage-race calendar through to the start of the Tour de France. Hirschi will not start the Tour de Suisse, his usual home-Tour build race, and the team have formally rerouted their June calendar around Michael Storer and Ethan Hayter.
The crash itself happened on the second ascent of the Côte d'Ereffe at La Flèche Wallonne, when Hirschi was caught up in a touch of wheels in the closing thirty-two kilometres. He was unable to continue and was taken directly to Liège for scans, which confirmed a fractured collarbone and significant ligament damage to the left wrist. Surgical fixation of the collarbone was carried out within 48 hours, but the wrist injury — a partial scapholunate ligament tear — has emerged as the longer-tail concern.
Tudor team doctor Dr. Patrik Noack told the Swiss press on Wednesday that Hirschi has begun light home-trainer work but is "still some weeks away" from returning to outdoor training, and that the squad's preference is to give the wrist a full eight-week reconditioning window rather than chase a Tour de Suisse start. "Marc has done everything we have asked," Noack said. "But we are not going to compromise the wrist for a single stage race when the Tour de France is the larger objective."
The injury has visibly reshaped Tudor's spring. Hirschi had been pencilled in to lead the team at Tour de Romandie and the Tour de Suisse, where his classics-style accelerating and one-day finishing power had been considered the team's clearest two-day stage-win window. With Hirschi out, that responsibility now falls onto Storer — fresh from his Tour of the Alps title-defence campaign — and on Hayter, whose form line through the early season has been quietly building.
The deeper question is the Tour de France selection. Hirschi has been part of every Tudor Tour roster since the team stepped up to ProTeam status, and his absence from the spring stage-race programme leaves him without a single full block of June race-rhythm before the Lille Grande Départ on 4 July. Sports director Fabian Cancellara confirmed that Hirschi remains the squad's first-choice Stage 5 Roubaix and Stage 14 Mûr-de-Bretagne card, but admitted that "racing form is racing form, and we will only know in the second week of June if Marc has it."
Cancellara's contingency plan is built around two early-July altitude camps in the Sierra Nevada and a return-to-race start at the Adriatica Ionica in late June, which would give Hirschi five days of pre-Tour racing if his physiotherapy timeline holds. If it slips, the Tour selection rotates onto a young Swiss climbing card the team have not yet publicly confirmed but which is widely understood to be the choice between Fabian Lienhard and a wildcard slot for Sandrine Tas's brother Yves.
Hirschi himself published a single-paragraph update on his Instagram on Wednesday evening confirming he was "training, but slowly" and thanking the team for "letting me decide together" on the spring calendar. He stopped short of making any commitment to a Tour de France start, which is consistent with the team's preference for not building public pressure ahead of the late-June squad announcement.
The crash also feeds into a broader trend the WorldTour medical staff have raised at the recent CPA quarterly meeting: late-spring crash rates have climbed sharply through the post-Roubaix Ardennes window, and a combination of high race speed and tight, technical finishing circuits has produced a season-interrupting injury list that already includes Hirschi, Lorenzo Finn at the Tour of the Alps, Stefan Küng at Paris-Roubaix and Marlen Reusser at Strade Bianche.