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Mathieu van der Poel wins MTB World Cup - the world’s most versatile male bike rider right now? (+ video)

World cyclo-cross champion and Amstle Gold Race winer is having a stellar season

 

Is Mathieu van der Poel the world’s most versatile male bike rider right now? With less than five months of the year gone, the 24-year-old has regained the UCI Cyclo-cross world championship, triumphed in three big races on the road – including a sensational victory at Amstel Gold – and now, this weekend, he’s won a round of the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup.

Second at Alsbadt in Germany last weekend, he won in Nove Mesto in the Czech Republic yesterday. You can watch the highlights of the race above.

It’s been an outstanding start to the year for the Dutch national road champion, who rides for the UCI Professional Continental team, Corendon Circus.

Cycling, of course, runs through his veins; his father, Adri, won two Monuments – the Tour of Flanders and Liege-Bastogne-Liege – as well as the rainbow jersey in cyclo-cross, plus two stages of the Tour de France.

His his maternal grandfather, meanwhile, is Raymond Poulidor, six times a podium finisher at the Tour – his great misfortune being belonging to the same generation as Jacques Anquetil, then Eddy Merckx – although Pou-Pou did win Milan-San Remo and the Vuelta during his career.

As for Mathieu the third generation of a cycling dynasty sans pareil? The move to a UCI WorldTour team will doubtless come, possibly as a “trainee” – use of inverted commas is deliberate – this August.

But right now, it’s the fact he rides at the level below that gives him the opportunity to ride ‘cross and MTB, as well as enjoying a stonking Classics season in which he also finished fourth in the Tour of Flanders.

Once he inevitably steps up to the top-flight, he’s unlikely to have the freedom to pursue different disciplines to the road, as we’ve seen with previous world cyclo-cross champions such as Deceuninck-Quick Step’s Zdenek Stybar; once you’re riding for a road team with a big budget, they want bang for their buck, and you have to focus on providing that.

Of course, when we asked at the top of the article whether van der Poel is the world’s most versatile rider right now, we should have perhaps qualified that by saying on the men’s side of the sport.

A number women, of course, have won across different disciplines in recent years – France’s Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, who has won the rainbow jersey on the road, in mountain biking and at cyclo-cross being one – with the limited calendar, and perhaps less pressure from sponsors, giving more leeway to diversify.

For the standout multi-disciplinary rider, male or female, in the past decade and a half of course, you only have to look at van der Poel’s compatriot Marianne de Vos, still only 32.

An Olympic champion on the track in Beijing in 2008 and on the road in London four years later, she is also a seven-time cyclo-cross world champion and has won three rainbow jerseys on the road and two in the velodrome.

Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.

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jobro | 5 years ago
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Nice to tack on Vos at the end.

IMHO Vos must be the greatest rider of all time. Yes, I know that accolade normally goes to Merx and with some justification, but I would argue that Vos has been more dominating based on the limited number of races available to women to race. And of course Vos has been at the highest level on the track,road,cross and mtb. Phenomenal rider.

Oh, and in my view, Beryl Burton would be the greatest UK rider of all time, again based on palmares.

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