Mathieu van der Poel has emerged as the world champion after winning the Glasgow World Championship. He is the first Dutchman to do so in 35 years and admits it is his most important road victory to date:
"It means everything. It's one of the big goals I still had, I think it completes my career, I think it's my biggest win on the road and I can't imagine wearing a rainbow year." At the moment of the attack, he saw that van Aert, Pogacar and Pedersen were not going well and took the opportunity to try and leave him.
"I knew it was the hardest moment of the race because then there was a downhill and again the finish. I felt very strong and that the others weren't going too, not expecting to create the gap so soon but when I saw that the others weren't following me it gave me wings and I gave it my all, I flew until the fall," he explains.
Logically, for a moment after the fall, he thought it was all over for him, but he was able to get up and continue riding to the finish line. This is how he told the story. "For a moment I thought it was over. It's not that I'm stupid, I wasn't taking risks, in any case, in that corner, there was something on the ground. I felt really bad about myself, but I wasn't taking risks, I just had to not crash, before the crash I already had some tricky moments, it was difficult."
"The fact of winning with the crash I'm not going to say it makes the victory more beautiful, if this would have cost me the title I wouldn't have gone out in a couple of days," van der Poel concludes. He takes the win as a personal revenge after what happened to him in Australia last year. "The win means a lot to me. It's a revenge for last year. It's an incredible feeling."
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