When Mathieu van der Poel announced his spring race program earlier this year, the fact that Amstel Gold Race was definitely on his schedule, that Flèche Wallonne was definitely off it and that Liège-Bastogne-Liège was ‘definitely maybe’ didn’t feel irrelevant. But almost.
Truth be told, it was hard to look beyond the Alpecin-Deceuninck leader’s 2023 defence of two Monument titles at Milan-Sanremo and Paris-Roubaix, as well as his new opportunity to join the record holders in Flanders with a third win in five years. And there’s no doubt that even if Paris-Roubaix, rather than Liège, concluded the 2024 Classics season, memories of what Van der Poel has now managed to achieve in the last 10 days will endure long in cycling’s collective memory.
But such astounding success also leaves us with an equally interesting question – short-term, where does Van der Poel go from here?
At this point in time, Van der Poel’s presence (or not) in the three Ardennes Classics, starting Sunday at the Amstel Gold Race, has something of the feel of encores at a very good rock concert. The main tracklist of Van der Poel’s one-day racing has been performed by now, yet even as the applause dies down, expectations and hopes of something special still to come in the following few minutes remain extraordinarily high. Essentially, nobody in the audience wants to get up and leave just yet.
This is true even if the Amstel Gold Race has featured in Van der Poel’s previous race repertoire. After all, his victory in 2019 was where he made his breakthrough major Classics triumph, courtesy of a blistering last-minute dash past a late breakaway and he got fourth, too, in 2022.
But…
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