MATHIEU VAN DER POEL
The flying Dutchman might be related to cycling royalty, but as Adam Becket discovers, he has forged his own path to the top of cycling
The year is 2006, and a young boy by the name of Mathieu van der Poel has decided, aged 11, that playing football is not for him. The boy, who has a mix of Dutch and French heritage, but was born in Belgium, is playing at age-category level for a Dutch team by the name of Willem II. Despite the club producing various stars, from Virgil van Dijk to Frenkie de Jong, van der Poel already has his heart set on another sport: cycling.
His father, Adrie, explains: “Football, tennis, athletics. He did almost everything. He was someone who likes to do a lot of sports. He said, ‘I don’t think I’m going to play football. I’m going to be a cyclist.’ I said we had to finish this season, as we started it, and afterwards you’re going to tell them yourself that you don’t want to play football anymore, so that is what we did.
“The football coaches said that it’s very special that someone aged 11 or 12 knows what they will be later on. We already knew what he was going to be, what his goals were.”
Mathieu, with his Dutch father and French mother, was no ordinary 11-yearold boy from an ordinary family. His maternal grandfather happened to be Raymond Poulidor, the Eternal Second, the man who finished on the podium of the Tour de France eight times but never won overall, who took 189 race wins in the 1960s and 1970s. His dad, Adrie van der Poel, was a great bike racer too, winning Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Tour of Flanders, as well as becoming a world champion at cyclo-cross.
Not just genetics
The genetics were certainly there, but it was not as simple as relying on those; his brother David, while a professional bike rider, has never ascended to the same level as Mathieu, two years his junior. The 28-year-old has now been cyclo-cross world champion five times, won the Tour of Flanders twice, Paris-Roubaix and Milan-San Remo once, stages at the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia, and been European champion in cross-country mountain biking.
“He started when he was very young,” Adrie says. “He was always fascinated by the bike, even when he was not bad at all the football games… From early on I already saw that he had something special. Even when he was five or six years old. He was studying, and besides that it was the bicycle and nothing else. He was fascinated by it.”
However, despite his family’s cycling background, Adrie insists that Mathieu was never forced into the sport: “I can say I never pushed him, but I always supported him. I was for eight years, nine years involved in the footb
