"To be beaten by a monster, that's okay" - Mads Pedersen does not rue being beaten by Mathieu van der Poel
Cycling
Mads Pedersen is a man that has shown stellar form over the past month, but an illness around Milano-Sanremo threatened to spoil his plans for the spring. Such doubts were erased today at the E3 Saxo Classic, but not even the very best version of the Danish classics specialist was enough to match a Mathieu van der Poel in his prime.
“I'm very happy. Today I had good legs, and this is the best result ever for me in this race. And to be beaten by a monster, that's okay," Pedersen said in a post-race interview. The Lidl-Trek man himself was the one to kick off the action in the Taaienberg with still 80 kilometers to go, taking with him Mathieu van der Poel - and later on Filippo Ganna who bridged across. The Dane looked spectacular on the climbs and looked like he could be a proper match for van der Poel as was the case at last year's Gent Wevelgem.
However when the moment came for the Alpecin rider to attack, Pedersen did not have the legs to respond. At the Paterberg he led the way, but in the Oude Kwaremont van der Poel's pace was too high, and he then rode solo all the way to the finish in Harelbeke.
"He went on the Kwaremont and rode really hard there, from the foot. There I couldn't keep his wheel anymore. He's incredibly good and it was impossible to come back. I had no answer to that anymore," he admits.
However the Dane, defending champion at Gent Wevelgem, will have the opportunity to turn the tables around and turn this form into a big win in this spring season... Dwars door Vlaanderen will be another opportunity, but with this form he will be a proper victory contender for both Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix despite the confirmed presence of all three of his main rivals.
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Direction 👉 podium! #E3SaxoClassic pic.twitter.com/nVPIyKNQTX
— Lidl-Trek (@LidlTrek) March 28, 2025
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- i wouldn't count Pogi out. Low probability of a win, but not impossiblemobk01-04-2025
- Right now it doesn't seem that his legs are there or that his head is in the racevappaxbipmv01-04-2025
- would have been nice to hear exactly WHY he thinks pog has zero chance in some greater detail. i mean, tend to agree that his chances aren’t GREAT, but some explanation from the expert with an opinion would be nice. MINE is that, in spite of the recon he did where tadej concluded that the course “wasn’t that hard” i think that doing the full route at full gas is really going to beat up pogacar’s 145lb body, to a degree that he maybe isn’t expecting. but hey, we’ll see in a couple weeks. like everyone else, i do think it’s supercool that he’s going.OCexile01-04-2025
- Go back to that era and look at the lousy mechanicals he's had at Paris-Roubaix. Take those away, maybe he has another Monument, Van der Poel has one less, and suddenly all the rules change. Those mechanicals preceded his awful crashes - and you're right, that Tour was amazing. Ventoux, TT, and Champs-Elysees?! Something that Pogacar and Van der Poel can't do, just Wout. It still amazes me.RidesHills01-04-2025
- Oh, the impossibility of this kind of comparison. A pre-WW2 Binda had amazing statistics, and that was one era. During what I think of as the romantic era, Poulidor had an incredible run at the Tour without winning, and Bobet won some grand tours and some Monuments. In this modern era (for me: after Hinault), we've had multiple Monument winners win a grand tour (such as Valverde and Kelly, with Kelly the better rider in general), and then we've got someone like Roglic, the true GC rider. Sure there was a Monument that was kind of a fluke (both Pogacar and Hirschi might have won, and twitchy Alaphilippe deserved relegation), but what matters are the 5 grand tours and all these wins across the 1 week GC races except for the Tour de Suisse (you'd think he'd race it to get the set of them all). In this era, since 2000 or so, maybe he meets the description as best non-Tour winner. How many GC riders have these wins and not the Tour? To compare to other eras really is not possible. He's his own unique rider, and it's been amazing watching him for the past many years. That's about all we can say.RidesHills01-04-2025
- Ease up on a brother!bobo01-04-2025
- Primoz finds ways to win. Too bad he'll never take Tour de France.awp01-04-2025
- I don't think I would ever count Wout van Aert out of a race if his head is in it. He is a serious talent.awp01-04-2025
- He's a great rider for sure, not sure if he the best to never win the Tour though.awp01-04-2025
- Hard to imagine that his confidence - that imperious flow state that great athletes operate in - hasn't been affected. But that is a different dynamic than the one you described. He has not become hesitant because he is fixated on his rival. He has suffered multiple traumatic injuries, and I have no doubt he is still 1% off both mentally and physically as a result. Football (both kinds) and basketball players who blow out knees go through a predictable cycle in which they are reluctant to do max efforts even after their doctors have cleared them. I myself went though a small version of that after a back injury. It's just hard once you no longer know where the line is. We saw in his TT a couple weeks ago that he still has power, and for all the hand wringing he is still finishing in the top 10-20 of big races. But as we have seen with others, getting *all* the way back is not assured. I'm not ready to say he is done, but few riders who have been hurt as often and as badly as him remain at the top.MidnightRider01-04-2025