Wout van Aert recalls his past three Cyclocross World Championship titles - "The last time that I raced the Cyclo-cross World Cup as my main goal. I remember that very well"

In a recent interview, Wout van Aert has shared deep insight into his three victories at the cyclocross World Championships, which have taken place in 2016, 2017 and 2018.

"I released Lars on the last climb just before the finish. That was a stretch we had trained a lot on the month before," van Aert shared in an interview with Red Bull regarding the 2016 race. "We knew that the decision could fall there on that course. It gave me a lot of confidence to to get to that point on the last lap. I knew perfectly well where I was going to overtake him and how to get my shot home."

In Heusden-Zolder van Aert took his first set of rainbow stripes, and this season he has beaten Mathieu van der Poel already in the fast Belgian track. The following year in Bièles, Luxembourg, he took back-to-back wins in a snowy race which featured plenty chaos.

"During the warm-up I saw that there were a lot of loose stones. We had prepared a set of tires in advance that were more suitable for winter conditions," he recalls. "For ice and snow. But when I tested the tires during the warm-up, just to be sure , I felt that they were very hard on the rocky surface. Because I felt that I had nothing to lose due to the poor preparation, I still made the choice to start with these tires. That gamble turned out to be the right one."

"The tires had a very heavy profile that ran very badly, but in hindsight they were the right move. I was one of the few riders who only had a puncture once. The other guys had punctures. When I took the lead in the second half of the race, I really got wings. I drove the fastest lap times of the entire race. Extending my title was really special," he admits.

There it was a victory over Mathieu van der Poel despite the big gaps between the favourites. However, the following season in January of 2018 he took a hattrick of World titles in the discipline in Valkenburg, again under circumstances that weren't in his favour.

"It had been a difficult season. And it wasn't until the end of December, the beginning of January that I was able to turn the knob a bit. There was only one goal left in the field: the World Championships. I threw myself into it completely and did the best I could trying to prepare. In the end I got a circuit that suited me perfectly," he says. There, van Aert won with over two minutes over Michael Vanthourenhout and Mathieu van der Poel.

"With a lot of running gear. Mathieu was the big favourite. All the pressure was on him after a good season and a World Championship in his own country. My plan was to trump him. I had to try to create mental superiority. I remember very well that I in the first or second round. That was actually bluffing, because it went quite fast. But it was a good move, I think. In the following round I was able to build a big difference."

"It was the best day of my season. A cross with which I quickly made up for all previous ones. It was also my last winter in which I fully focused on the field. A few weeks after the World Cup, I contested the classics on the road. So it was the last time that I raced the Cyclo-cross World Cup as my main goal. I remember that very well," he concluded.