Landa Cleared: Thursday Evening MRI Comes Back Clean As Soudal-QuickStep Confirm Mikel Landa For Amstel Gold Race Start
A week of worry for Soudal-QuickStep ended with a two-line medical bulletin at 21:18 on Thursday evening. Mikel Landa's second MRI scan in six days — performed at the Policlínica Gipuzkoa in San Sebastián on Thursday afternoon — returned completely clean, and the Basque team's medical staff have cleared the 36-year-old to resume full training from Saturday. The headline news for the Amstel Gold Race organisers: Landa will be on the start line in Maastricht on 19 April as originally planned.
It is a dramatically better outcome than anyone inside the Soudal-QuickStep staff dared to expect when Landa was lifted into the race doctor's car 65 kilometres from the finish of Itzulia Basque Country stage 2 on Tuesday afternoon. The impact on the San Miguel de Aralar descent — caused by a race-doctor's vehicle that was subsequently expelled from the race by UCI commissaires — left Landa with a deep contusion to the left hip and a visibly stiff right shoulder he could not lift above horizontal at Wednesday morning's first assessment. The first MRI in Pamplona on Wednesday afternoon showed bone bruising and soft-tissue damage but no fractures. Thursday's follow-up, originally scheduled as a precaution, has now removed the last doubts.
Team doctor Yvan Vanmol spoke to Spanish broadcaster Teledeporte just after the bulletin was released. "There is nothing on the new scan that concerns us. The bruising is extensive and Mikel is going to be sore for another ten days — we told him that before he got in the machine, and he knows it. But there is no structural damage, and the timeline we want to build for the Ardennes does not require him to be painless. It requires him to be able to push full power on Sunday 19 April. He will be able to do that. He has already asked me about riding on the rollers on Friday morning, which I am going to say no to because my grandmother did not raise a foolish man."
Soudal-QuickStep CEO Jurgen Foré, who has spent Tuesday and Wednesday publicly demanding answers from Itzulia organisers, was markedly calmer in his post-bulletin statement. "We have our rider back on the programme we built for him in December. That is the only thing that matters to us now. The conversation about the race-doctor's car and what happened on that descent is not going away — we will continue to pursue it through the proper channels — but today is about Mikel getting back on a bike, and we are relieved and grateful that he can." The team confirmed Landa will travel back to his Vitoria-Gasteiz home on Friday morning and resume outdoor training with a short two-hour spin on Saturday.
The clearance reshapes Soudal-QuickStep's Ardennes week in a way that will quietly delight sports director Klaas Lodewyck. With Remco Evenepoel already confirmed for the full Amstel-Flèche-Liège triple and now Landa back in the frame as a climbing domestique for the Cauberg and the Mur de Huy, the Wolfpack can plan the final week of the build with the roster they wanted rather than the one forced on them by Tuesday's crash. Evenepoel and Landa are scheduled to train together at the team's pre-Ardennes base camp in Valkenburg on 15 April — three days before Brabantse Pijl opens the hilly campaign.
For Landa himself, the scan result closes a forty-eight-hour window that had threatened to derail the final chapter of a career quietly approaching its last act. The Basque climber confirmed in February that 2026 would be his "final full WorldTour season of hard targets" and has openly pointed to the Liège-Bastogne-Liège start line on 26 April as his emotional goal of the spring. A second abandon in four days would have put that start in serious doubt. Instead, he rides into the Ardennes with the same programme he left December's Calpe camp with — and, as Vanmol put it at the end of his Teledeporte interview with a small smile, "a slightly better story to tell the grandchildren when he is my age."
The news provides a rare moment of relief in what has become the most punishing April the pro peloton has recorded in a generation. With Mads Pedersen cleared for Paris-Roubaix earlier on Thursday, Longo Borghini symptom-free and returning at Brabantse Pijl, and now Landa on the Amstel grid, the medical news cycle has finally begun — tentatively — to turn.