Aurélie Sacchelli, Media365, published on Tuesday January 7, 2025 at 4:41 p.m.
While he will be aiming for a seventh cyclo-cross world champion title next month, Mathieu van der Poel also hopes that 2025 will allow him to be crowned mountain bike world champion for the first time.
On February 2, in Liévin in Pas-de-Calais, Mathieu van der Poel will try to win a seventh cyclo-cross world champion title, which would allow him to equal the record of Erik De Vlaeminck, the Belgian crowned seven times between 1966 and 1973. But later in the year, the one who has also already been crowned world road cycling champion (in 2023) dreams of wear the rainbow jersey while mountain biking. “If I could choose, I would like to become mountain bike world champion this year. I haven’t achieved it yet and I’m still thinking about it”declared the almost 30-year-old runner to the Belgian media Sporza. The Dutchman has only competed in MTB Worlds twice during his career, finishing third in 2018 before dropping out in 2023. This year, the cross-country Worlds events will be held in Crans-Montana, in Switzerland, from September 9 to 14, which therefore excludes participation of the Alpecin-Deceuninck rider in the Vuelta, which will end this that week.
Van der Poel also aims for the Los Angeles Olympics
Although he has never yet been crowned world champion, Mathieu van der Poel did, however, win the title of European champion in 2019. At the Olympic Games, he abandoned due to a fall in Tokyo in 2021, and preferred to concentrate on the road event last summer in Pariswhere he took twelfth place. But in Los Angeles in 2028, Mathieu van der Poel intends to try his luck again in cross-country mountain biking: “I still have a chance for that: Los Angeles will certainly be the last Games in which I will participate. It would be awesome to try to finish in Los Angeles on a mountain bike. » In LA, the mountain bike events will take place in either Santa Monica Park or Frank G. Bonelli Park, west and east of downtown, respectively. The right place to succeed Tom Pidcock?
