Total Domination

Mathieu van der Poel wins another cyclocross
World Champtionship

   I know, it has been quite a while since I've written anything new, but there really hasn't been a whole lot going on during this long, snowy and brutally cold winter. I had been fortunate to sell a couple bicycles around Christmas, so I will be moving onto new build projects this spring, as soon as my icebox of a basement thaws out! I had actually moved a portable bike stand up to the living room for a few days when a couple of customers brought in bikes for service. It's the right time to do it before the spring rush sets in!

   Pro cycling doesn't go away completely for me during the winter, as I enjoy watching cyclocross races on the weekends and a few mid-week special races during the holidays. If not familar, cyclocross is essentially riding a knobby-tired road bike around a winding circuit over various types of terrain. There are usually very short, punchy climbs involved, some paved sections, sometimes sand pits (check out THIS nutty course in Zonhoven, Belgium), occasionally snow and often very much mud. The race is a challenge for the riders and their "pit crews", who swap in clean bikes every few laps and do repairs when bicycle breakdowns occur (fairly often).

   This brings me to one of the most dominant racers of our time, Mathieu van der Poel, who incredibly broke the all-time record for career World Championships by winning his EIGHTH a few weeks ago in the town of Hulse, Netherlands. The Dutch star entertained his home crowd by completing a perfect season, winning all thirteen races he entered in 2025-26. Van der Poel also easily claimed the overall World Cup title (accumulated points during the calendar's most prestigious races), entering eight of the twelve events and each time leaving everyone else to fight out the lower podium spots! The Alpecin-Premier Tech star also broke the all-time World Cup mark this year with 51 race wins during his career.

   Now in his early thirties and each spring facing a heavy road race schedule, "MvdP" has limited his cyclocross appearances. There are 30-40 significant European races each winter, and van der Poel has only entered a total of 34 the past three years. His opponents are perfectly happy when their Dutch rival stays home, since he won 33 of those. It was astounding to find out that over the 244 cyclocross race days in his career, van der Poel has won 183 of those and finished on the podium 218 times!   

   So I tuned in to see how MvdP would fare in the opening road race of the Belgian Classics campaign, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad (omloop means "circuit" in Flemish, and Het Nieuwsblad is the newspaper sponsor). The race is a typical cobbled classic, 200km (120 miles) or so, on narrow, winding roads of varying paved surfaces that are constantly going up and down steeply, in this case between the cities of Ghent and Ninove. Knowing the route well, and van der Poel's great form going in, I could have predicted he'd be near the front when the race reached the Mur de Geraardsbergen (read HERE about our visit in 2017), then he'd power away up the climb and finish the last 12km on his own. I would have been exactly correct!

The familiar site of Mathieu van der Poel
taking a victory lap on the Roubaix
Velodrome - he has won there three times
in a row!

   Casual viewers of pro cycling might comment how boring it is to turn on a race and have it seem that only van der Poel or Tadej Pogacar is going to win. Indeed, if you watched only cycling's Monuments (the biggest one-day classics), the Tour de France and World Championship, you would have seen one of the two win 18 of the 21 events over the past three seasons!

   However, the hardcore fan like me can only appreciate how incredibly masterful these two athletes are and look forward to the rare moments when they are matched up against each other. Pogacar is obviously slighter of build and able to cope better with the mountains of the Grand Tours and even the classics, like Flèche Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Il Lombardia, which feature more tortuous climbing routes. We seldom even see van der Poel line up for these races.

   Thankfully Pogacar is a bit of a freak of nature, perfectly capable of dealing with all terrains, and he is willing to give nearly any race a shot! In 2025 the Slovenian star became the first cyclist to ever finish on the podium at all three Monuments in a single season.

   Pogacar is ultimately tuning his season for the Tour, so it's understable that we won't see him lining up alongside van der Poel for the smaller cobbled classics, such as Le Samyn, Dwars door Vlaanderen or the E3 Classic. However, we can't wait for match-ups like Strade Bianche, Milano-San Remo, Paris-Roubaix and Ronde van Vlaanderen, when the two legends have their teammates primed to keep them near the front, so that they can eventually battle it out over the final miles of those races!

   It is very hard to compare eras, but I find myself thinking of riders like Merckx, de Vlaeminck and Kelly, who rode all of the races I've mentioned and were similarly dominant during their time. As much as these legends were hailed as champions, I'm sure during their time there were plenty of folks lamenting that they were "winning everything".

Pogacar and van der Poel at the front of last season's Paris-Roubaix