“I got cut off and shouted ‘Idiot!’… then Mathieu rode up and said: ‘Maybe he’s not the idiot’” – Oliver Naesen recalls moment he knew Van der Poel would win Omloop

Mathieu van der Poel’s Omloop Het Nieuwsblad victory may have looked inevitable from the outside. For Oliver Naesen, the certainty came much earlier and in far more surreal fashion.

Speaking in the HLN Wielerpodcast, Naesen described the precise in-race exchange that convinced him the race was already over.

“I got cut off by someone from Uno-X and shouted ‘Idiot!’ at him,” Naesen recalled. “Then Mathieu rode up next to me very calmly and said, ‘Maybe he’s not the idiot, you know.’ After that, I said in my earpiece that Mathieu was going to win the race.”

It was not what Van der Poel said that struck him most. It was how he said it. “If you can sit there that relaxed while everyone around you is suffering, then you still have something left.”

The anecdote neatly captured what the television pictures had suggested all afternoon. While crashes, punctures and positioning battles ripped through the peloton, Van der Poel always appeared composed, even playful. For those inside the race, that composure was as telling as any power number.

Naesen himself was denied a result after crashing in Omloop, but he still left Opening Weekend encouraged by what he saw from Decathlon CMA CGM.

“We take two top tens, and in almost every attack, we could say we had two or three riders there. This might be the strongest Decathlon team I’ve ridden in,” he said.

The numbers back that up. Tobias Lund Andresen delivered two top ten finishes across the weekend, and in Kuurne - Bruxelles - Kuurne, the blue and green jerseys were repeatedly visible in aggressive moves, even as bigger budget teams tried to impose control.

All of that came without injured spearheads Tiesj Benoot and Olav Kooij, making the collective strength arguably even more notable. Where previous seasons might have seen Decathlon riding reactively, this time, they shaped the race.

They did not win. But they were present.

Naesen also addressed the debate that followed Florian Vermeersch’s podium ride behind Van der Poel. “Florian is a fantastic rider, but he’s not going to win ten Classics,” Naesen said. “And if after a podium finish you have to apologise to the public because you rode with the god of cycling, that makes no sense at all.”

He continued: “He should just be proud of the way he rode and that he was able to go that far. If at the end of your career you can look back on a number of podiums in Classics, you can be very satisfied.”

The comments landed in the context of a weekend where Van der Poel’s presence once again dictated how others were judged. To follow him is sometimes seen as a tactical surrender. Naesen sees it differently. When the strongest rider in the race makes the move, survival is not weakness.

For Naesen, the moment of clarity came long before the decisive climbs. A casual remark, delivered without strain, told him everything he needed to know.

When the calmest rider in the peloton is the one everyone else is chasing, the race is usually already decided.