Just a few hours after he won a third Tour of Flanders with a spectacular solo breakaway, Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) was already on a flight to Spain en route to half a week's worth of warm-weather training as the initial part of his final build-up for Paris-Roubaix.
Van der Poel caught the plane late on Sunday evening and his initial plan is to remain in Spain until Thursday evening, when he’ll head back north for the Queen of the Classics and a defence of his 2023 title.
The Dutchman will apparently be training in the Calpe region in SE Spain, a part of the country where he has frequently been based in the off-season.
According to La Dernière Heure Van der Poel did not go into too many specifics about his training program for this week, simply saying that "I will see what I can do day by day. But I do need to recover a bit."
“I went very deep in the race, it’s definitely the hardest Tour of Flanders I’ve raced. I needed an hour to start to get my strength back.”
It is not yet clear, either, if Van der Poel will do a recon of Paris-Roubaix on Friday or Saturday, prior to heading to Compeigne for Sunday’s start.
After Paris-Roubaix and Amstel Gold, Van der Poel is also down to possibly race both Liège-Bastogne-Liège for the first time since the ‘pandemic season’ of 2020, when he finished sixth in his only participation in La Doyenne to date.
“Liège is not 100% certain, but there is still a chance,” Van der Poel told Sporza.be, before pointing out that previous winners like Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) and Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-QuickStep) will “find a course that is made for them. It will be difficult but I would like to try.”
"I am realistic enough to know that I probably won't be able to follow when they are at the top. But the race still has to be run, you never know what can happen.”
Van der Poel was cagy about his chances of adding a sixth or perhaps even a seventh Monument to his palmares, telling Sporza that “The Tour of Flanders is the race that suits me best.”
