“If this is it, I’m riding away on the Kwaremont” - Expert envisions Tadej Pogacar watching Mathieu van der Poel’s E3 collapse scare

Mathieu van der Poel won the E3 Saxo Classic, but by the time he reached Harelbeke, the race looked very different to the one he had opened on the Paterberg.

“I think Pogacar was sitting in front of his television thinking, ‘If this is it, I’m riding away on the first or second passage of the Kwaremont,’” ex-pro turned expert analyst Thijs Zonneveld said on the In De Waaier podcast.

Van der Poel had done the hard part in the usual places. The Taaienberg split the race, the front re-formed, and once he hit the Paterberg, he rode clear again with roughly 50 kilometres left.

In a race he has made a habit of controlling from distance, it looked like another afternoon built on the same template.

“He knew it was happening in the same places as last year, and the year before,” Zonneveld said, with the Taaienberg again acting as the hinge point before Van der Poel forced himself into the winning move.

The difference came later. Once the climbs were gone, the race stopped rewarding repeated accelerations and turned into a long, flat drag to the line. That was where the gap began to come down, steadily at first, then sharply as the kilometres ticked away. “I don’t know whether it was overconfidence, whether it was an idea to squeeze in some extra training, or whether he thought, ‘Pogacar isn’t here anyway, so it’ll be fine.’ But purely in terms of winning the race, it wasn’t the best option to go alone with 60 kilometres to go.”

That is the uncomfortable detail inside the result. Van der Poel still won, but after the Paterberg the race asked a different question of him than the one he had already answered on the climbs. What had been a position of control turned into a long effort to limit losses. “That’s not where he is at his absolute best.”

The group behind never became a perfect chase, but it became good enough to drag the race back into doubt. With riders like Florian Vermeersch driving the pace, the gap began to fall rapidly, at one point dropping to little more than a handful of seconds as Harelbeke approached. “You can see that he is vulnerable when he goes from too far out, and there are riders behind him riding through and off.”

Moments of hesitation crept in for the chase at exactly the wrong time, with riders beginning to look at one another rather than committing fully to the effort. That brief loss of cohesion proved decisive. The gap stalled just as it looked certain to disappear. “I don’t think this would have happened to Pogacar, and it wouldn’t have happened to Evenepoel either. Unless there was still a huge climb to come.”

Van der Poel held on because the chase behind him fractured at the key moment. A few seconds of indecision were enough to turn a near-catch into a victory, allowing him to carry just enough speed through the final kilometres to stay clear.

That is why Zonneveld’s final questions carry more weight than the result itself. “Does he take a morale boost from this, or not? Is it actually bad for his confidence that he was basically getting reeled in?”

Van der Poel got the victory. Pogacar may still have taken something from the race.