Three Paris-Roubaix victories in a row. Only twice before has that happened, and not since 1980. Mathieu van der Poel is historic, a powerhouse, a cobbled crusher the like of which we haven’t seen for decades. Most bike riders see those horrible upturned stones of the Hell of the North as nasty, bone-shattering obstacles, but he sees them as launchpads to victory. Most bike riders just want to finish the race without losing layers of skin, but he enters the velodrome each and every time with nobody else for company. And most bike riders view the fabled concrete pistes as the end of their torture, but he sees it as another glorious homecoming.
He can’t even feign modesty – he recognises what he’s doing is extraordinary. “Just winning three times would already be super special and it’s not something you expect when you start racing, so to do it three years in a row in a race like Roubaix where you also need some luck is quite exceptional,” he said. Yup, it is. Of course, his manner of victory this time around wasn’t quite as epic as the two before, he capitalising on Tadej Pogačar crashing out of a corner, but all the same, Van der Poel was uncatchable, unsurpassable, unbeatable, yet again. He’s the first rider ever to win successive editions of Roubaix by more than a minute.
There can and will be no doubt that the Alpecin-Deceuninck rider is the greatest Classics rider of his generation – three wins in both the Tour of Flanders and Roubaix and two Milan-Sanremo victories is unmatched in the current era. The question now is if he is the greatest Classics rider this century. With his latest triumph, the 30-year-old moves onto eight Monuments – one more than both Tom Boonen and Fabian Cancellara accrued. And they didn’t have to fight off Pogačar, this century’s Eddy Merckx who can do absolutely everything.
But when you’re Van der Poel, you too can do more or less everything. Mads Pedersen, third once more, called him a “monster”, and his team manager, Philip Roodhooft, pointed out that Alpecin have now achieved a hat-trick at both Roubaix and Milan-Sanremo, as well as three victories in five years at Flanders. “It is more than we would have expected,” he said. “This is very big.”
Van der Poel, of course, was made to be a bike rider – it’s in his genes, his family history: his father, Adrie, was one of the best Classics riders of his time; but Mathieu is the best of his; his grandfather, Raymond Poulidor, won 73 races in a distinguished career, but is remembered as the eternal second; Mathieu is the eternal winner. His family legacy was already rich, but he continues to enrich it further. Even when he doesn’t feel at his best, he still wins. “Today I was really struggling with a headwind in the last two sectors,” he said, “and I was hitting every stone. Normally if you go fast enough you have the feeling of flying over them, but I certainly didn’t have that feeling today.”
He also didn’t have modern aids to assist him. “I had no power meter after one of the earlier sectors so it was a blind effort,” he said, revealing that his race radio was also not functioning. “I didn’t know the time gap or what was happening behind me so it was quite difficult to manage it, and then when I had a flat tyre [with 16km to go] I couldn’t call on the radio and I didn’t know how big advantage I had at that point, but in the end it turned out well.”
No matter what issues he had, Van der Poel was still superior. Him and Pogačar were alone out front after the five-star sector of Mons-en-Pévèle, but with 38km remaining the Slovenian tumbled off his bike and never again saw the front of the race; Van der Poel was solo, again – that’s just what he does in this race. “The speed was really high at that moment,” he said of the race-deciding incident, “and I saw that he was not able to take the corner, but I didn’t know he had crashed there. At first I was looking back and waiting a bit, but the gap was too big and I had to go for it. I didn’t expect to be alone from that distance and it was pretty clear that it would have been really difficult to drop each other, also because of the headwind on the last two cobbled sectors. I was really suffering toward the end.”
Only six riders have won more Monuments than Van der Poel – he’s tied on eight with Rik Van Looy (also a three-time winner of Roubaix) and Pogačar. His rivalry with the latter is an epic, as good as anything that has come before. It’s a sublime era of bike racing, one that will spawn books and films, and Van der Poel is once again the star of the spring. “I’m very happy I can finish this Classics season here by winning Roubaix again.” Win number four in 2026? That'd definitely crown him as the 21st century's best ever.
