OPINION | Are Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert’s attitudes to cyclocross unsportsmanlike?

I’ve gone back and forth on this more times than I care to admit. The 2025/26 cyclocross season is about to light up, and with it comes the familiar question: is it fair, never mind sporting, for Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert to parachute into a handful of winter races, maul the field, and then vanish back to the road? The heart says yes, because who doesn’t want to watch the two greatest mud magicians of the era square off? The head says… it’s complicated.

Let’s start with the simple truth: their very presence supercharges the discipline. Sven Nys, who understands the sport’s pulse better than anyone, put it bluntly in 2023, “The fact that they continue to cross is a victory.” That single line captures the promotional power and cultural gravity those two bring; when they toe a start line, the barriers are five-deep and every rider in the call-up gets a more valuable day out.

But box-office isn’t a synonym for fair play, and that’s where the debate gets thornier. The UCI has spent the last few seasons trying to protect the World Cup’s integrity and visibility. In late 2023, President David Lappartient warned that riders who “pick and choose” World Cup rounds risked losing their path to the World Championships, “Every rider has to play the game.” The rules conversation continued in 2024 with participation requirements tightened to keep top names on elite start lines. The logic is obvious: a World Cup is only a “cup” if it rewards consistency, not cameo appearances.

And yet, here’s the paradox: the very stars the UCI wants on those start lines built their global appeal by not playing the game in the conventional way. Mathieu van der Poel has calibrated a short, surgical cross block for years, target the World Championships, pick a selective schedule, and turn every start into a near-certainty. Wout van Aert’s program tends to be even more compact. Last winter, Alpecin-Deceuninck and Visma confirmed what we all suspected: van der Poel around 11 events, Van Aert about six, enough to sharpen the blade for February, not enough to chase a series.

If you want to call that unsportsmanlike, you certainly won’t be alone. Should the champion really be someone that rides the sport part time?

But there’s an equally strong case that “unsportsmanlike” is the wrong frame for what is fundamentally a calendar-design problem, not an ethical lapse by two riders. Neither van der Poel nor Van Aert hides their intentions. Van Aert said it out loud when his team laid out a six-race plan last winter, “This winter, we’ve opted for a compact schedule of six races that fit well into my training plan. It will be a cyclocross season I approach purely out of love for the sport, but with modest ambitions.” You can quarrel with how “modest” those ambitions look between the tape, but you can’t accuse him of gaming an opaque system. He’s telling you the plan, and he’s honouring it.

On the other side of the ledger, ask any promoter whether their event was better off when the rainbow jersey or the Belgian materialized in the call-up. Crowds spike. Rights fees hold. Sponsors re-up. The television shot of van der Poel floating ruts at speed or Van Aert jet-washing the sand pit is effectively marketing spend the discipline could never afford. Again: “The fact that they continue to cross is a victory.”

So what, exactly, feels “unfair”? Three things, mainly.

First, the dominance without the ‘grind’. When van der Poel won his seventh world title at Liévin in February 2025, 45 seconds ahead of Van Aert on a muddy, technical loop, he was potentially at his best ever. He’d fine-tuned for a single apex while the rest of the field spent months logging hard Sundays in wind-whipped industrial parks. For full-time crossers, the message can land like this: you worked the whole semester, they aced the final. That sting is real.

Second, the tension with the World Cup’s identity. A series is meant to reward breadth, travel, weather, course styles, and form fluctuations. That’s why governing bodies floated stricter participation and qualification rules heading into 2024-25. If your two biggest stars are willing to skip rounds (or series altogether) to perfect a World Championships peak, the series risks feeling like a sideshow to the one-day crown. There have even been public musings from officials about penalties for habitual skipping, underlining the stakes for the World Cup’s prestige.

The intention is sound, even if the enforcement remains tricky. Because, let’s be honest, no one is ever going to ban Van der Poel or Van Aert from a race.

Third, the psychological tax on the rest. Eli Iserbyt has been candid about how tough it is to win when those two appear. He admitted earlier this year that every season you think van der Poel can’t get better, “then he arrives and he’s just phenomenal.” Those aren’t sour grapes, they’re a full-timer’s reality check. A bronze on a van der Poel-Van Aert day can be a career-best performance, but no elite sportsmen really looks at third as the pinnacle.

Still, the counterarguments are equally viable.

Firstly, part-time isn’t the same as easy. What looks like selective dominance is built on the most unforgiving road calendar in the sport. Van der Poel doesn’t turn up undercooked, he turns up sword-sharp from Monuments and Worlds on the road. Van Aert’s winter is often a delicate rebuild from a season that has already spanned cobbles, Grand Tours, and championships.

So it’s not as if Van der Poel or Van Aert are coasting!

Secondly, cyclocross, unlike road stage racing, is uniquely well-suited to star cameos. A one-hour race tolerates varied build-ups in a way a three-week Grand Tour never could. The World Cup is vital, but the highlight that converts a casual viewer is usually a one-lap demolition by a legend on a course that looks like a painting left in the rain. The sport needs both.

Thirdly, the rulebook is evolving in the right direction. Participation nudges were introduced precisely to balance star power with series integrity. If organisers enforce them predictably, and if the UCI avoids whiplash policies, a middle path exists: ensure teams field strong riders every round while allowing megastars the freedom to build toward the jerseys that matter to them. The stick is there if the skipping gets egregious; the carrot is that the biggest stage (the Worlds) still belongs to those who start it.

So yes, its tough for the other riders who race every World Cup race, only to then be trounced when the top two show up. But the reality is Van Aert, and Van der Poel in particular, are simply on another level to everyone else. Sometimes, you just have to appreciate greatness.

Where do I land? I don’t think van der Poel and Van Aert are unsportsmanlike. I think they’re rational. But I do sympathise with the other riders, it must be infuriating for them.

The most compelling dramas in sport are the ones with a clear villain (dominance itself) and an underdog who keeps coming, week after week, mud-splattered and undeterred. Van der Poel and Van Aert don’t make that story unfair, they make it necessary. Thibau Nys is planning a 22-race winter “geared up” to narrow the gap. He’s not opting out of the fight because two giants step into the ring, he’s adding rounds to fine tune himself. That’s the spirit I want cyclocross to amplify.

And if you still worry that the stars are disrespecting the discipline, listen (literally) to how they talk about it. Van Aert again: “Cyclocross remains my first love.” Then he explains why his program is compact: after the toll of his road year, “it’s essential to make the best use of the time I have to prepare for the road season.”

As for van der Poel, the best argument that his winter approach is fair is the one he delivers every time the tape drops. Nobody rides a course the way he does: lighter over the front wheel, calmer in chaos, savagely economical on the accelerations that matter. He’s built a career on peaking perfectly, and cyclocross has benefited from those peaks more than it has suffered from his absences.

In truth, Van der Poel is most likely the greatest cross rider we will ever see. He is likeable too, and the vast majority of fans (myself included) are in awe of him on a cross. No doubt, it is brutal for the other riders who 99% of the time will never beat him. But just like boxing fans watching Floyd Mayweather, or F1 fans watching Max Verstappen, sometimes you have to just accept you are watching an all time great.

So, is it unsportsmanlike for van der Poel and Van Aert to drop in, dominate, and duck out? I say no. It’s the honest byproduct of a calendar that still straddles two ecosystems, road and cross, without perfectly aligning their incentives. The officials’ job is to keep tuning the series so that consistency is rewarded and star power is welcomed. The riders’ job is to race the races that matter to them, as hard as they can, as often as their bodies allow. The fans’ job is the easiest of all: keep showing up, because when those two names are on the start sheet, you’re guaranteed a masterclass.