Mathieu van der Poel won’t leave the 2024 Tour de France early to ride the mountain bike race at the Paris Olympics, with a possible debut at the Vuelta a España also on the cards, as he tries works out a complicated schedule for his busy multi-disciplined 2024 season. He faces some tough choices.
The road and cyclocross World Champion left the Tour de France after eight stages in 2021 to prepare for the Tokyo Olympics where his gold medal dreams were ended abruptly by a crash on the opening lap. He appears ready to give up on a chance of a mountain bike medal in 2024, as he focuses more and more on road racing.
The mountain bike event in Paris arrives eight days after the end of the 2024 Tour de France and that appears to be too close for comfort for the Dutchman.
“There are different options on the table at the moment,” said Van der Poel to Het Nieuwsblad in Spain, where is preparing for his return to cyclocross racing and doing winter road training for 2024.
“Either I'll ride the Tour and then I'll only do the road race at the Games. Or I don't ride the Tour and then I do the road race and mountain biking. What I am certainly not going to do is ride the Tour and then leave it earlier, like I did for Tokyo.”
Van der Poel believes he enjoyed a near-unbeatable season in 2023 which came to an incredible climax with his triumph at the road World Championships in Glasgow. He also won Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix after taking a fifth cyclocross world title at the start of the year.
Van der Poel only had two weeks to prepare for the 2023 World Championships after the Tour ended, making it much more plausible for him to ride the Tour and Olympic road race in 2024.
“The Olympic road race falls two weeks after the Tour and that is actually ideal. You can compare that with the World Championships in Glasgow this year, where I also achieved a very good level by riding the Tour earlier,” he said.
“But the mountain bike is too early, one week after the Tour. Then I can never reach my best level.
“If I don't ride the Tour, I would do the Vuelta to get to the World Championships on the road. The third option on the table is to do the Tour and the Vuelta. Ultimately I will decide myself, in consultation with the team.”
Van der Poel will ride a similar season to 2023 with “everything from Milan-San Remo to Paris-Roubaix” as major target for the spring.
He hasn’t ruled out a possible trip to the Ardennes to take another crack at Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
He’s raced the hilly Classic in the rescheduled autumn 2020 season, where he finished sixth behind a premier group of puncheurs up the road including Slovenian trio Primož Roglič, Tadej Pogačar and Matej Mohorič alongside Marc Hirschi and Julian Alaphilippe.
“There is a chance. It's an option, not a certainty. I am now trying to expand my base with a lot of endurance training so that I can stretch my spring longer,” said Van der Poel.
“In any case, I will aim to be in my very best shape in Liège, but I am realistic. When men like Tadej Pogačar or Remco Evenepoel start at La Redoute, it is almost impossible for me to join in. The difference in weight is too great for that.
“I rode Liège once before and then I also had to let go at La Redoute. Then the competition was strangely placed on the calendar, one day after the BinckBank Tour, where I had won in Geraardsbergen after one of the most difficult solos of my career.”
Van der Poel has been out riding with Evenpeol around the Calpe area in recent weeks, with the Dutchman saying his relationship with the Belgian is very different to that shared with his close rival in road and cyclocross, Wout van Aert.
“I often meet Remco in Spain to train together. The relationship with him is different from that with Wout because we aren’t competing so much. Maybe in Liège later, but I don't know if he really sees me as a competitor there,” he said.
