"It is a shame" - Dutch national coach reacts to Mathieu van der Poel's MTB snub at Paris Olympics
CyclingThursday, 16 May 2024 at 09:21
With Alpecin-Deceuninck announcing the summer race schedule of Mathieu van der Poel, there was a big surprise. Contrary to what was initially planned, the Dutchman will not be taking part in the mountain bike at the Paris Olympic Games.
“This is the most logical choice to be able to prepare for my goals without time pressure,” said van der Poel, who will instead focus on the Tour de France and the men's elite road race. “The combination with MTB was too difficult. But who knows, maybe in LA ‘28 I can focus on mountain biking. My ambition for the Tour de France? I hope like last year to assist teammate Jasper Philipsen in his hunt for stage wins and a possible green jersey. And the goal is to also win a stage myself this year.”
Now, in conversation with NOS, Dutch national coach, Gerben De Knegt has given his first reaction to the disappointing news. “There is a risk in doing both. Then it can't work out twice. And we now know that if he focuses completely on something, he is often successful,” De Knegt explains, understanding of his compatriots choice.
“Mountain biking is a bit more difficult, he hasn't done it for a while. There are very few who can do that. Yes, one other person, Tom Pidcock. But between the two, Pidcock has won slightly fewer major road races and had more success on the mountain bike. In any case, it is a shame,” De Knegt concludes. “It's his own decision. He did tell me that he will definitely go mountain biking in the future.”
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Preparation for MTB is always going to be comprised at the expense of road. Due to this he has crashed in the 2 major events that he had targeted in the past for MTB. I would say that his MTB career is indefinitely postponed. At the same time, it is a complete waste of his talent to be the leadout for Phillipsen in the TDF.
His crash in the Olympics is completely unrelated to road whatsoever
No-one knows, if he hadn’t tried so hard to do both he’d have prepared more calmly, been less stressed and might have taken more time/care to scout or discuss pre-race. He seemed to be very much in a rush during those days and that’s when silly accidents tend to happen.
On the other hand his crash was very much related to reduced road results subsequently. Happy for him he “fully” recovered.
It may not be a waste if he ends up with the Gold in addition to being current World Champion.
What would be a waste is to crash in the MTB like he did last time. Ouch!
Or to get arrested or whatever’s next in life is what happens when you don’t make plans.
Or get arrested after he get some women into your hotel room for some woohoo sex time?
That is literally slander, that is not remotely similar to what happened. I'm sure it is an attempt to be funny, but nonetheless it is not ok IMO.
Well, the lazy way the media now “reports” (often no more than a copy-paste of someone else’s report which may have gone through 2 translators and interpreters unchecked), I’d not be surprised if one or two websites had reported the matter so it could be interpreted that way by anyone who didn’t continue to update or follow the story (and as almost no-one issues corrections or apologies post-publication anymore, society is left with facing the bills and inconvenience of ever more slander cases.
We saw it here with the Spanish race with mass abandons “due to unexpected doping controls” but as practically nobody followed it up better more visible example was the shooting of the Slovak prime minister.
Because media have few paid reporters speaking the language, most resorted to translators and some, trying to smartly cut costs, believed AI, Google etc were enough to do the job and mistakenly translated the name of the shooters village (similar in spelling) as a term for leftish.
That got a whole bunch of people excited (Orban and Fidesz in Hungary in particular), immediately accusing and attacking the radical left, even though in the same translation, the guy was also stated to have neo-nazi tendencies (the two contradictory claims then apparently not raising anyone’s curiosity as him possibly being bipolar or schizophrenic).
You wouldn’t have to bend a media title far from the facts to turn MVDP’s story into the slanderous one, I can show you if you want. It’s just like the choice of “snub” it completely changes the situation’s appearance.
The guy needs some slack, he's not a machine and has had major CX success..
Exactly, you can’t do EVERYTHING all year round at that level.
I’m sure if Olympic cycling included CX instead of MTB he would have chosen both and maybe foregone the TdF ((though the team might have sought some compromise on that).
Funny you don’t see many sprinters there for the track events, and there are only a few track riders who transition to road
Exactly. Even Merckx can't take part in every race days. Mdvd gotta be picky these days. As he is almost 30 yrs old. And, the recovery rate for atheletes over the age of 30 is pretty slow.
So, "snub" seems too negative to be used these days
It’s nothing to do with these days.
Generally snubbing something is when you consider yourself superior or the person or occasion below you.
It’s obviously not the case here, he would have liked to do it but doesn’t consider himself capable of being ready.
Gotta agreed on this
Snub is a really bad choice in this context