A mere seven days after losing one Worlds title, Mathieu van der Poel today gained another. Sure, the Gravel World Championships don’t have the same prestige or history as their road equivalent, but the Dutchman still had to overcome some tough opposition and what was challenging terrain even for him.
The result confirms him as a master of multi-disciplinary cycling. While Tadej Pogačar’s inheritance of the Road World Championships title last weekend reinforced the Slovenian’s status as king of the road, he can’t claim to have conquered such a diverse range of frontiers of the sport as Van der Poel has. Victory in Leuven can be added to his title on the road last year and his eight at cyclocross to make it 10 World titles in total for Van der Poel. That’s still short of his compatriot Marianne Vos, who in yesterday’s women’s race won what was her 14th title across all disciplines, but at this rate the 29-year-old might surpass even her.
Today’s men’s race played out in a strikingly similar way to the women’s race won by Vos yesterday. Once again a Dutch rider and a Belgian rider rode clear from the rest of the field together a long way from the finish, this time with Van der Poel in Vos’ role, and Florian Vermeersch in Lotte Kopecky’s. But there was one key difference: whereas Vos was one of several Dutch riders who vastly outnumbered all the other teams, this time it was the Belgians with the big numerical advantage.
Perhaps anticipating the problem these Belgian numbers might pose, Van der Poel set out to ride an aggressive race. His first move came very early in the race, with the opening third of its 182km total still to be completed, and he even went solo for a little while soon after. He was absorbed back into a large chase group, but his intention with this attack 120km from the finish wasn’t necessarily to channel the Pogačar long-range move that caught him off guard last weekend to claim the road rainbow jersey; but rather to wear out the opposition. “I just wanted to make the race as hard as possible,” he explained at the finish. “I knew on the local lap, with a group, it could be a difficult situation for me. So I tried to put everybody on the limit.”
That he certainly did. The group that bridged up to Van der Poel following that long-range solo move was made up of 15 riders. When Van der Poel accelerated again on a steep uphill section about 60km from the finish, that was sliced by more than half as only six riders were able to stay with him: defending champion Matej Mohorič, Connor Swift, Jasper Stuyven, Quinten Hermans, Gianni Vermeersch and Florian Vermeersch.
The problem for Van der Poel was that four of these riders were riding for the same Belgium team, whereas he was isolated as the sole Dutchman. These Belgian riders knew that none of them could individually match Van der Poel, but stood a chance if they worked together, and inevitably set about attacking him in tandem. Gianni Vermeersch attacked 50km from the finish, forcing Van der Poel to chase him down and drag the rest of the group with him. And then upon entering the final lap, his namesake Florian did the same.
However, it was this move from Florian Vermeersch that ultimately took the race away from the Belgians, and towards Van der Poel. The Dutchman was the only rider able to follow him, but, rather than sit up and wait for his three Belgian teammates to try and join him and reassert their numerical advantage, Florian decided to ride with Van der Poel. There were more attacks in the group behind, and at one point Gianni Vermeersch and Stuyven nearly succeeded in breaking clear from the others and forming their own chase, free of the representatives of other nations Mohorič and Swift. But when they were brought back by the others, and the group started to play games rather than work together, the two leaders’ advantage ballooned. It was clear they were riding for gold.
The race having come down to a mano y mano contest between himself and Florian Vermeersch, Van der Poel had worked himself into an ideal situation, but he wasn’t yet confident of victory. Perhaps remembering the 2021 edition of Paris-Roubaix, when a little-known Vermeersch got the better of him in a sprint to beat him for second-place, he was reluctant to bank on a sprint finish. “You never know” what the outcome might be in such a scenario, Van der Poel explained at the end. “My legs were also hurting, so you never know in a sprint, especially on the gravel bike.
“So I tried one last time on the hardest part of the course, and found myself alone.” That move came 13.5km, on the same climb he’d forced a selection earlier the previous lap. From the moment he accelerated, it was clear Vermeersch was not going to be able to follow him, and the Dutchman went on to solo to the finish to take victory by over a minute.
After the race, Florian Vermeersch admitted that he never held much hope of defeating Van der Poel. “It all came down to who was the strongest, and I think everybody saw clearly who it was…I knew I would get dropped when he accelerated, but I just tried to do the best I could. In the end, it was the strongest who won.” Yet he still shared turns setting the pace, when perhaps the better tactic would have been to sit on the wheel and try to frustrate Van der Poel, knowing that so many of his teammates were waiting in the wings in the group behind should they get caught.
The fact he didn’t suggests he was prioritising winning a silver medal, and that the Belgian team weren’t quite singing from the same hymn sheet. Hemans (after winning the sprint in the group behind for the bronze medal) hinted as much in his post-race interview. “I think everyone is fighting for themselves [in gravel racing], there’s almost no team tactics. It’s just the legs who speak.” It will have escaped nobody’s notice that himself and Gianni Vermeersch are in fact trade teammates of Van der Poel and Alpecin-Deceuninck.
Yet even if the Belgians had worked more clearly as a team, it still seems unlikely that they would be celebrating a gold medal. This was the same Dutchman as the man who routinely crushed everyone throughout the spring, to win E3 Saxo Classic, the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix with similarly long-range moves. When Van der Poel is in this kind of mood and this kind of form, he’s unstoppable.
