Mathieu van der Poel remounts his mountain bike Sunday to ride the Olympic test event at Elancourt hill in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, the site for mountain bike competitions at the Paris Olympic Games next year.
Other elite athletes expected to participate include multidisciplinary World Champion Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, four-time French MTB champion Loana Lecomte, reigning women’s XCO European champion Puck Pieterse, Rio Olympics gold medalist and 10-time World Champion Nino Schurter and Tokyo Olympics gold medalist Tom Pidcock.
Just two UCI-sanctioned races will be held Sunday, one for women at 1:00 p.m. local time and one for men at 3:00 p.m. local time, on a 4.4km course. A total of 39 women and 43 men are part of the start lists.
Paris 2024 organisers offered the test events not just for competitions, but for feedback from athletes. Gerben de Knegt, the Dutch mountain bike national coach, said the team had special interest in the technical aspects of the course and how it matched abilities for key athletes, like Van der Poel.
“The [athletes] would like to be able to make an estimate in advance of the gravity of the climbs and experience for themselves how technically certain passages are. This is how you can get an idea of how the course matches your skills and if you want to add certain skills in the run-up to the Paris 2024 Olympics. We are happy that we can – relatively close to home – for a weekend to see how the route is,” De Knegt stated on the KNWU Instagram feed.
Van der Poel is one of the team’s headliners and in a quest to represent the Netherlands in cross-country mountain biking at the Paris Olympic Games in 2024. The newly-crowned road race World Champion comes into the test event from a road victory at SUPER 8 Classics a week ago. HIs last appearance on a mountain bike was in the cross-country race at the World Championships in Scotland, where he crashed out on the first lap.
It was a similar scenario for Van der Poel at the Tokyo Olympic Games where he crashed out of the XCO race on the opening lap. It was his only chance for a medal, as he had pulled out of the elite men’s road race. Van der Poel could attempt the road-MTB double-header in Paris, as the elite men’s road race is scheduled for August 3, five days following the cross-country mountain bike contest.
“We don’t have two Van der Poel-types. It remains to be seen what choices he makes,” Koos Moerenhout, another Dutch national team coach on the ground in France, told…
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