"He is one of the superhumans" - Dries de Bondt stunned with Mathieu van der Poel's Paris-Roubaix performance

Dries de Bondt is a specialist in races such as Paris-Roubaix however Sunday was not his lucky day and he couldn't contest for a result. However, he was well present in the race at the time Mathieu van der Poel was making a comeback after his Arenberg disaster, and he gasped at the speed the Dutchman had.

"Mathieu was the strongest man in the race. I witnessed it from the front row," de Bondt said on the Cafe Koers podcast. The Dutchman had two punctures on the Trouée d'Arenberg and left the sector two minutes behind the front group.

The sector didn't come late in the race and so within two minutes there were dozens of riders. The defending champion then rode through many of his competitors. "Jasper Philipsen sacrificed himself first, by taking the lead on one of the cobblestone sections after the Trouée d'Arenberg and closing the gap". Eventually, he made it onto the De Bondt group.

"On one of the following sections, Mathieu then decides 'I'm going to give it a go here'. We saw a small group riding ahead of us, including Politt. And he just wanted to jump onto that section. He took off... and at the end of that section, which was only 1.4 kilometers long, he was simply out of sight. He just left us behind".

De Bondt was a teammate of the classics legend in the past and it does not come as a surprise to him that he has such ability, however seeing it on display in such a dramatic was left him stunned. Van der Poel was riding group to group, cutting down the gap from two minutes to half a minute until he reached the riders who were chasing down Tadej Pogacar and Wout Van Aert.

"That group ahead of us was riding twenty seconds ahead of us and he took them along, so they had disappeared too. While we could see forty seconds ahead of us. And then five minutes later I hear team manager Matthew Hayman say 'Mathieu is now 1.20 minutes behind the front of the race. I thought 'how?' He is one of the superhumans standing at the start," he argues.

Despite his mishaps, he still managed to ride into a fourth place on the day, just narrowly missing out on the podium as Jasper Stuyven anticipated the van der Poel group in the final kilometer. De Bondt was 55th at the line.