Mathieu van der Poel Eyes the 2023 Tour de France
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After an epic early spring that saw him winning Paris-Roubaix, Milan-San Remo, and a fifth cyclocross world championship, Mathieu van der Poel has enjoyed a very quiet late spring.
And according to new comments from the Dutch multi-hyphenate, that’s very much by design. The end goal of that design: to make waves in this year’s Tour de France and finally win a road racing world championship.
After a two-month break from racing, van der Poel told a collected group of reporters at his team’s altitude camp that he’s in great form and once again ready to race.
“I’m looking forward to racing again,” van der Poel said. “It’s been a long while.”
He and his teammates are currently in the French mountain resort of La Plagne, Alpecin-Deceuninck team’s homebase for their altitude training, turning the final few wrenches before the Grand Départ on July 1.
Van der Poel will test his legs in competition in the Dwars Door Het Hageland, a category 1.1 race he won in 2017 with his then-team Beobank-Corendon, and the Tour of Belgium. With those races completed, he’ll have a total of nineteen race days in his legs before lining up on July 1.
Compare that to last year’s Tour, which he entered with over thirty race days notched. He didn’t make it to the end of that Tour’s second week.
Perhaps Mathieu van der Poel is finally adopting the “train more, race less” mantra that is so endemic to his generation of racers, an approach that likely has much to do with data as it does this era’s style of full-tilt racing.
And while he’ll be a major draw in this year’s Tour, van der Poel’s focus is on August’s Glasgow World Championships, where he hopes to become the first Dutchman to win the rainbow jersey since Joop Zoetemelk won the race in 1985.
MVDP is already one of the greats
A road racing world championship is one of the few goals that has thus far eluded van der Poel. The twenty-eight-year-old’s palmarès already reads like one of the all-time greats.
In addition to the aforementioned Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix wins, along with his five cross world championships, van der Poel has also won the Tour of Flanders (twice), Strade Bianche (with one of the greatest attacks this writer has ever seen), Amstel Gold Race, Dwars Door Vlaanderen, and Brabantse Pijl, stages at the Tour and the Giro, and spent time in both the yellow and pink jerseys.
And though his gaze stretches a bit past this year’s Tour, that doesn’t mean we won’t be treated to some of van der Poel’s trademark attacks or his bulldog style of racing.
“I don’t think it makes sense to throw too much energy into the Tour, but I will also not hold back too much,” van der Poel said. “The classics and road worlds are the most important, but for sure I’m motivated to do a good Tour de France.”
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