The team's sports director publicly cited a 37.3°C fever; Uijtdebroeks later told Het Nieuwsblad it reached 40°C. The hospital heart exams cleared his cardiac function, which became Movistar's justification to continue — their internal reasoning, per Uijtdebroeks himself, ran entirely on time gaps and stage profiles: «If he only loses that little time now… Then it's just a matter of surviving the Tourmalet and then the rest day.» He arrived at the Vuelta a España 2026 incompletely recovered, crashed with a fractured ankle on stage 2, and finished stage 4 last. The protocol was real; the judgment wasn't.