MATHIEU VANDER POEL

Mathieu van der Poel won a stage and wore the yellow jersey on his Tour debut. Procycling looks at his huge impact on the race, and what sets him apart

Writer Kate Wagner /// Images Chris Auld

Images:Mahe De Waele

Van der Poel celebrates his stage win on day two of the 2021 Tour at Mûr-de-Bretagne

Getty Images.

We use the phrase ‘animating the race’ quite a bit in cycling journalism, to describe a kind of stirring, a moment of excitement, rather like uncorking a bottle of champagne or whacking a wasp nest with a broomstick. Beneath the surface of the term lurks the implication that a bike race is often static, something that requires a certain activation, a tension needing release. In the modern day peloton, that’s perhaps more true than not. For years, we have seen the increased professionalisation of cycling. Once a sport of individual glory, now it’s more a game of brinkmanship and marginal gains backed by technological, nutritional, and tactical arms races.Cyclists ride to control the race for their leaders, who often wait in the wings for hundreds of kilometres until their decisive moment arrives and they are delivered neatly on the doorstep of others.

Mathieu van der Poel does not ride bikes like that. Mathieu van der Poel is the broomstick holder to the peloton’s proverbial wasp nest. He’s a chaos agent in the lull of the processional punching of timecards. Sometimes his signature moves - long-range digs at the start of a sprint that force the others to chase, daring solo breakaways in one-day races, attacking often for what seems to be the hell of it - don’t always fit the tacticians’ bill; but they are always spectacular, and when they pay off, especially so.

There are plenty of exciting riders in our current World Tour peloton, and with the rise of aggressive GC contenders like Tadej Pogacar, who aren’t content to let moments go unseized, we could perhaps be seeing the beginning of a new, more dynamic era of cycling, an antithesis to the ‘train’ era begun by US Postal and perfected by Sky. If Pogacar’s a modern day cannibal, and the term panache is better lent to riders like Julian Alaphilippe, whose impulsivity is always coupled with an element of performance and a dash of emotion, Mathieu van der Poel is something else. He’s something he’s always been: a romantic. It runs in his family.

At the grand départ in Brest, before all of the insane, dubious, spectacular events that would come to define this Tour as one of chaos and carnage, the Alpecin-Fenix boys lined up, not in their usual navy and red kits, but in purple and gold. It’s an homage to the Mercier team, one of the most iconic institutions of French cycling, and specifically to its helmsman, Raymond Poulidor. In that kit, on stage, speaking in soft, modulated French, Mathieu van der Poel is the spitting image of his grandfather: square-jawed, thin-lipped, with sunken but sparkling eyes. For such a mischievous subject on the bike, off it Van der Poel is rather neutral and detached, almost demure. One suspects he’s thinking about racing even when he’s standing still. He is the son of Adrie van der Poel and the grandson of Poulidor. It’s what he was born to do.