"I tried to put everybody on the limit" - Mathieu van der Poel becomes Gravel World Champion after flurry of attacks
Cycling
Mathieu van der Poel is one of the most talented cyclists on the planet and he has proven that once again today. He has become World Champion in his third discipline. The Dutchman won the Gravel World Championships this Sunday in style and has taken on another rainbow jersey.
"It was a big goal for me. It's super nice to add another rainbow to the collection in another discipline as well, I'm super happy with this one. It's super nice also to finish the season like this, it's amazing," van der Poel said in a post-race interview. He was the main favourite to win today, and he sealed the deal with a stellar performance that included attacks all throughout the afternoon, just as he likes.
"I wanted to make the race as hard as possible because I knew that in the local lap, with a big group, it could be a difficult situation for me," he explains. It is a tactic that works for the explosive rider, who is used to this type of off-road racing. Eventually, amongst the many Belgians, he found an ideal attacking partner.
"So I tried to put everybody on the limit and when Florian Vermeersch went and we were the two of us, we had a good cooperation," he adds. However he will remember Vermeersch beat him in the sprint of the 2021 Paris-Roubaix, so he knows that he couldn't settle with taking the race to a sprint after such a hard event.
"You never know. My legs were also hurting, I tried one last time on the final hard part of the course and found myself alone so it's always nice to celebrate like this," he concluded. Van der Poel will take time to debut this jersey - the same way he hasn't yet debuted his cyclocross world champion's jersey - but he will eventually show off as he is clearly one of the best riders in the discipline. "Like I said I enjoyed it and I'm super happy with the title".
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Great! He stood on the podium of World Championships three times this year... (gold in CX, bronze in Road, and gold in Gravel). MVdP > Pogacar ;-)
Pogacar has 2 GTs, a World Championship, one (maybe two?) Monuments. MvdP has 2 Monuments, 2 World Championships. Evenepoel has 2 Olympic golds and a World Championship. Beyond saying they use different skill sets, I end up honoring how freaking accomplished each of them is, this year. Beyond Philipsen at MSR and Roglic at the Vuelta, one of these three has won every major race this year. Wow.
ITT championships are not "major races". Less than Paris-Nice, Tirreno, or Dauphine, at least. It's like small WT classics at best with about 30 decent riders. Gravel championship is not a major race as well.
> MvdP has 2 Monuments, 2 World Championships MVdP has 3 Monuments and 3 World Championships (CX, Road, Gravel)
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- i’m such a sucker for those group-hug, happy ending moments between competitors, largely because it’s so WASN’T that way in my younger, stronger days. (on that note, i have this hope that somewhere down the road, maybe fifteen or twenty years, a middle aged wout and mathieu will go for a pleasure ride together in flanders, and reminisce about the days when they were the young, strong monsters that stalked the cobbles.)OCexile05-04-2025
- Just like Dwars door Vlaanderen, the Ronde van Vlaanderen was/is NOT on MAX. Get your facts straight.Ben04-04-2025
- You might bounce more for the same power, but not the same speed. Sending 20 kgs over a jump at 20 kph will fly just as far as 10 kgs at the same speed. Again, Galileo demonstrated this.acem8204-04-2025
- So, you're saying that doing a bunch of small hops on a bike is easier if you're heavier? Why do people buy lighter bikes, then? Why do they generally feel better and faster? An appeal to "rhythm" is not helpful either, as the right "rhythm" might be on the lighter or heavier side of things, and as it varies, it's likely a wash either way. Then we are left with the physics truth that it takes less power to lift lighter things than heavier things.acem8204-04-2025
- No, weight doesn't affect the ability to go into the wind at all. It's all CdA vs power at that point. For example, it's "obvious" that a heavier object falls faster than a lighter one. But, absent wind resistance, it's not true (Galileo demonstrated this). An appeal to "obviousness" doesn't matter when the physics is clear. And yes, you have to be able to hold everything else constant, or you can't determine anything! So, imagine a 300 watt rider at 80 kgs with a CdA of 2.0, then imagine that same rider at 70 kgs with a CdA of 2.0. (Assume ideal tire pressure for both, same bike.) Which one can ride over a bumpy road fastest? The lighter one, as he doesn't have to lift as much. That's also why when they test bikes on 5 star cobbled sectors, the MTB goes faster than even a cobble-build road bike. Even though rolling resistance is higher on a flat road, and the CdA is junk, it smooths out the cobbles, allowing the person to not lift as much as they otherwise would.acem8204-04-2025
- I disagree. If you have lower weight, you will bounce more at the same speed, meaning that you will spend more time in the air and shorter time on the ground, as a consequence, when you are on the ground you have to produce more force for the same speedvappaxbipmv04-04-2025
- That’s not quite true, even steep climbs and sudden gradient changes can be considered as remaining tangential to the wheel whereas the occasional dip between cobbles a wheel drops into cannot, as such riding over cobbles can become like a permanent surmounting of small obstacles that hit back into your wheel slowing you drastically if you don’t have the right rhythm to “fly” on the mounds, here again the greater the momentum the less these obstacles reduce your speed. But, it is but one factor, you cannot decide on this alone. Like with natural surface ripple formation on desert tracks used by vehicles, there is an optimal speed range to efficiently pass over such surfaces, too fast or slow and your car gets shaken to pieces from the “harmonics” in the vibrations caused. Pretty sure the same applies to riding on cobbles.Mistermaumau04-04-2025
- I am saying I have an open mind at the moment for your cobbles theory but cannot agree with your wind statement (and by extrapolation sprinting since that implies speeds where wind is by far the limiting factor). Had you argued all things not being equal I could have agreed with you but if we thus assume 2 objets of the same size and speed but with differing weights, it is completely obvious that the lighter one will suffer faster in the wind. Extrapolate to the extreme, drop stuff off cliffs or just remember your momentum equations to verify. Now, obviously in real life we have to assume riders of different weights won’t have the same wind hitting surface but you cannot generalise at all then as you can have very unaerodynamic light riders and very aerodynamic heavy ones because it isn’t weight that defines CdA, Teslas have an incredible CdA and are ridiculously heavy, and someone like Harry Levreyssen is a Tesla in cycling.Mistermaumau04-04-2025
- When Roglic beat Geraint Thomas on the last day's TT at the Giro, I remember just how unbelievably emotional his team was. One guy, I forget who, German rider I think, was interviewed and was nearly speechless with a really drawn out "fuuuuuuuuuck it's incredible" comment. And then something even more amazing happened. Geraint Thomas came through the ranks of the Jumbo Visma riders and congratulated them all. True, honest, sincere, sportsmanlike, and celebratory of what had been achieved. Here he was, getting second, and he meant it. And cycling these days is like that, as you say - the way Pogacar hugged Matthews in Quebec, the way Matthews congratulated Pogacar in Montreal, on and on they honor and respect each other. It's pretty great.RidesHills04-04-2025
- Not sure exactly what you are saying, but if you're implying that being heavier is helpful if you're going against the wind or sprinting, then no, it isn't. Ceteris paribus (all else held equal) being a lighter cyclist is always better, save downhill. The reason why heavier cyclists do relatively better than lighter ones on flatter courses is because they will have to have a higher power than the lighter cyclist in order to have any chance at all against them, and flatter courses mean that the lighter cyclist has nowhere to display the better power to weight ratio, meaning that significant ratio is power to CdA, which is usually an advantage to the heavier cyclist.acem8204-04-2025