“Take away the journalists and the crowds…” – Mathieu van der Poel’s father reveals the hidden burden pushing world champion away from cyclocross

There was a telling shift in tone this week when Adrie van der Poel spoke alongside Sven Nys in Het Nieuwsblad. It was not a discussion about mud, legs, or tactics. It was about time. Pressure. Obligation. And about what happens after the finish line.

“Mathieu gets home two hours later than everyone else after a cross,” Adrie explained. “How long did the ceremony in Maasmechelen take? Not normal. And then you get back to the camper, and it’s full of people.”

That is the part of cyclocross the public never sees. The bit that does not show up on lap splits or podium photos. The part that increasingly frames the rumours that this winter could, genuinely, be the last one in the discipline for Mathieu van der Poel.

The easy narrative is to assume Van der Poel is bored of cyclocross. That the mud no longer excites him. That the road has simply become more important.

Adrie’s words point in a completely different direction.

The issue is not racing. The issue is everything attached to racing when you are the headline act, the attraction, the world champion, and the man everyone has come to see. “I often say, take away the journalists and the crowds and those guys would race ten more crosses a year.”

It is a striking line because it flips the retirement conversation on its head. This is not about a rider wanting to do less cyclocross. It is about a rider who might happily do more, if the surrounding weight did not make it so draining.

This is not speculation created by outsiders. Van der Poel himself has openly acknowledged in recent weeks that there “has to be an end someday” to his cyclocross career. He has spoken about the idea of stopping on a high. He has wondered aloud what skipping a winter might do for his spring condition on the road.

That context matters.

Because the 2025 and 2026 winter has not looked like a farewell tour from a sporting perspective. Quite the opposite. It has looked like a carefully selected, high-level programme built around peaking for the World Championships and maintaining absolute dominance whenever he has pinned on a number.

Which is exactly why the timing feels significant.

If there were ever a moment where walking away would make sense, it is at the point where there is nothing left to prove in the discipline.

Nys added another layer to the discussion. “I can imagine him thinking: ‘What if I skip a winter of cross? How will my body respond in the spring?’”

That is not a romantic idea. That is a performance question.

Adrie agreed this is a realistic option, especially depending on how Van der Poel structures his road season. A calendar that leans towards the Vuelta and the Road World Championships rather than the Tour de France suddenly shortens the gap between road campaigns. A full cyclocross winter becomes harder to justify, not emotionally, but physiologically.

The combination of road and cross, as Nys put it, is “not straightforward”.

He referenced his son Thibau having only nineteen days of holiday last year. “On race days you are always ‘on’,” Nys said.

For Van der Poel, that ‘on’ switch is brighter and louder than for anyone else in the sport.

This is the key detail running through all of it.

There is no suggestion that Van der Poel has fallen out of love with cyclocross. Quite the opposite. The implication is that the love for racing is being crowded out by the obligations that surround it.

Ceremonies that drag on. Autograph sessions that stretch late into the evening. The expectation to be present, available, visible, every single time.

The very things that make him the sport’s biggest draw are, according to his father, the things that make the discipline harder to sustain year after year.

Which is why the retirement rumours have a different texture this time. They are not based on declining results or fading motivation. They are rooted in the human cost of being at the very top for so long.

Nothing has been decided. Van der Poel has not announced anything. He has not committed to this being his last winter, nor ruled out returning next year.

But when his father frames the conversation not around racing but around the weight of everything else, it becomes easier to understand why this moment feels like a genuine turning point.

The question is no longer whether Mathieu van der Poel still wants to race cyclocross.

It is how long he feels the rest of it is worth it.