A mere seven days after losing one Worlds title, Mathieu van der Poel today gained another. Sure, the Gravel World Championships don’t have the same prestige or history as their road equivalent, but the Dutchman still had to overcome some tough opposition and what was challenging terrain even for him.
The result confirms him as a master of multi-disciplinary cycling. While Tadej Pogačar’s inheritance of the Road World Championships title last weekend reinforced the Slovenian’s status as king of the road, he can’t claim to have conquered such a diverse range of frontiers of the sport as Van der Poel has. Victory in Leuven can be added to his title on the road last year and his eight at cyclocross to make it 10 World titles in total for Van der Poel. That’s still short of his compatriot Marianne Vos, who in yesterday’s women’s race won what was her 14th title across all disciplines, but at this rate the 29-year-old might surpass even her.
Today’s men’s race played out in a strikingly similar way to the women’s race won by Vos yesterday. Once again a Dutch rider and a Belgian rider rode clear from the rest of the field together a long way from the finish, this time with Van der Poel in Vos’ role, and Florian Vermeersch in Lotte Kopecky’s. But there was one key difference: whereas Vos was one of several Dutch riders who vastly outnumbered all the other teams, this time it was the Belgians with the big numerical advantage.
Perhaps anticipating the problem these Belgian numbers might pose, Van der Poel set out to ride an aggressive race. His first move came very early in the race, with the opening third of its 182km total still to be completed, and he even went solo for a little while soon after. He was absorbed back into a large chase group, but his intention with this attack 120km from the finish wasn’t necessarily to channel the Pogačar long-range move that caught him off guard last weekend to claim the road rainbow jersey; but rather to wear out the opposition. “I just wanted to make the race as hard as possible,” he explained at the finish. “I knew on the local lap, with a group, it could be a difficult situation for me. So I tried to put everybody on the limit.”
That he certainly did. The group that bridged up to Van der Poel following that long-range solo move was made up of 15 riders. When Van der Poel accelerated again on a steep uphill section about 60km from the finish, that was sliced by more than half…