There is a chance that Mathieu van der Poel has ridden his last race in the rainbow jersey (road cycling). The Dutchman would then have owned the jersey for almost fourteen months, from August 6, 2023 to September 29, 2024. He showed his jersey 44 times in competitions, which critics thought was too little. UCI president David Lappartient believes that Van der Poel has done justice to his period in the jersey.
During his time in the rainbow jersey, Van der Poel raised his hands five times: he won the Super 8 Classic last fall, was the best in the E3 Saxo Classic, Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix in the spring and recently won the first stage in the Tour of Luxembourg. So a score of 11.3 percent. He also finished second in Ghent-Wevelgem and third in Liège-Bastogne-Liège. After that last spring race, he took a seventy-day break from competitions to return to competition at the start of the Tour.
Roger De Vlaeminck, among others, complained about the number of competition days of Van der Poel, who himself already had a statement about it in the spring. At the time, the Dutchman said that working towards the seven major competitions – as he did in the spring – is mentally demanding, while the choice to skip Tirreno-Adriatico, for example, came from within the team.
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Lappartient: ‘Mathieu sometimes also has to slow down’
As leader of the UCI, Lappartient does not immediately agree with the criticism that Van der Poel has ridden too little. ‘He also does cyclocross, so you can’t race on the road during the winter months. If you add those competitions, and he is also the cyclocross world champion, you arrive at about sixty competition days.’ Van der Poel indeed rode fourteen cyclo-cross races and therefore played a total of 58 times.
“And Mathieu is a one-day driver, not a man for stage races,” Lappartient points out. ‘Then you automatically ride fewer races than a rider who rides two Grand Tours in a year. There is also a trend that top riders ride less than before. That will never return to the times of, for example, Eddy Merckx, the average is now about 65 competition days. All fans love to see Mathieu and the other top players in action, but to achieve top form you sometimes have to slow down. We may see that again on Sunday,” the Frenchman refers to the World Cup in Zurich.
“Mathieu is a very good ambassador for the sport,” Lappartient concludes. ‘He has ridden great races and for him every race is a main goal. If you look at his way of racing, you will see that sometimes he doesn’t even know where he is going to attack. With him you never know what the scenario will be, although I wonder whether he always knows that himself,” concludes the UCI leader.
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