Mathieu van der Poel wins Paris–Roubaix: awesome competition

What’s going on on the street? There are hundreds of professional cyclists riding at a high level, ready for the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, the World Championships, for the big, monumental races of the spring like the Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix. Everyone has the best material, many are organized into highly professional teams made up of specialists, captains and helpers. But then, on the slopes, there are individual drivers who make the big spring races boring, for one reason only: because they are too strong, too fast.

At the beginning of the Tour de France, giants of the country road were called the unfortunate ones who struggled over the steepest Alpine and Pyrenees passes on the most primitive bikes. The giants are back, in modern form, and people are looking for explanations.

Lonely class

How can it be that the Dutch road and cross world champion, Mathieu van der Poel, wins the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix within a week, driving the last 40 kilometers alone on one occasion and 60 kilometers on the other ?

Or that the Slovenian Tadej Pogacar, who has set himself the goal of winning the Giro and the Tour this year, wins the Italian classic Strade Bianche with an 80-kilometer solo. The Dane Jonas Vingegaard and the Belgian Remco Evenepoel, both currently injured, are also riders who can dominate races at will.

As long as they don’t compete against each other, as long as they stay out of each other’s way in one-day races in the spring, the competition and the excitement will fall by the wayside. Using van der Poel’s example, reasons can be explored. Are his services legitimate? Can it be that one driver is so much stronger than everyone else in the toughest one-day races?

“It’s definitely not normal,” said van der Poel after his victory in Roubaix. He is now six-time cross country champion, world champion on the road, and king of the classics. The competition remains in awe, but no one wants to put him in the dirty corner of illegal aids.

It is something very special to drive in the same generation with van der Poel, who won Flanders and Roubaix in the world champion’s jersey, says Sam Welsford from the German team Bora-hansgrohe. “Hopefully we mortals will one day be able to follow him.” The competitors accept van der Poel’s lonely class. They look at him like everyone else: amazed, puzzled, perhaps a little disbelieving.

The Belgian classic season ends on April 21st with the Liège-Bastogne-Liège race. There, finally, the boredom could come to an end. Not because the competition is likely to have great chances, but because there could be a showdown between two stars. The race is on Pogacar’s racing calendar, and van der Poel also seems inclined to want to get on the list of winners.

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So far, a sixth place from 2020 is his best placement. With a win he would have won the fourth of five cycling monuments after Milan-Sanremo, the Tour of Flanders (three times) and Paris-Roubaix (twice). All that was missing was the Lombardy tour, which Pogacar has already won three times.