'This wasn't on my list yet' - Mathieu van der Poel lives up to favourite status with stunning solo victory in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad

Omloop Het Nieuwsblad saw another big box ticked for Mathieu van der Poel, as he amply lived up to his status as major favourite for Belgium's second-biggest cobbled Classic despite a late decision to take part and this being his first race of the 2026 season.

Van der Poel is the first rider since Michele Bartoli in 2001 to win Omloop on his first-ever participation. But the power and speed which he showed throughout - not to mention some very nifty bike handling when a Tudor rider fell just ahead of him on the Molenberg - showed how much his opening victory of 2026 all but felt like the only outcome possible.

The 31-year-old barely demanded a turn from the six breakaway riders who trailed along in his wake for nearly 30 kilometres. Van der Poel had first bridged across to the one attacker ahead of him on the Molenberg, Florian Vermeersch (UAE Team Emirates-XRG); then, after he had been joined by Tim van Dijke (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), the trio easily made it across to the remnants of the lead move of the day.

The really staggering moment, though, came when Van der Poel dropped Vermeersch and Van Dijke with jaw-dropping ease on the Muur van Geraardsbergen - the original point where he had aimed to attack, the Alpecin-Premier Tech racer said later. His father, Adrie, was waiting at the summit and shouted that the gap was 15 seconds, but in fact, it was nearly 20.

From then on, although there was one narrow squeak when he all but overshot one corner, Van der Poel was seemingly dialled in for a lone victory in Ninove.

Now 31, there is simply no sign of the Dutch star slowing down, all of which makes his forthcoming Monument battles with Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) even more keenly anticipated, if that were possible, than in 2025.

"I trained hard, I think everybody is doing so, but I still enjoy the process in working towards that top form," Van der Poel said after his victory. "I'm getting older, but the engine is getting bigger, so you can train more and harder. And it's not a secret I enjoy training longer days."

Van der Poel explained that he believed the reason he still had margin to progress was that he saw riders aged 19 and 20 doing over 30 hours of training a week; that was not something he would have done at the same age. "That's not a criticism," he insisted. "It's just that I didn't do that myself."

If reaching a new peak of physical form in his 30s was one goal for Van der Poel, conquering Omloop itself was, of course, another. He said that despite the weather not being as good as he'd hoped for, he'd found it to be another race he enjoyed a lot—and not just because he won.

"The conditions were quite hard also with the wind, the stress and the cold, and for sure it's not an easy race, but I felt quite good. In the end it was cold, but it didn't affect me too much. We had a good strategy with clothing too, and this helped me to keep my clothing on until the final actually.

"And in the race itself, the Muur and the Bosberg are two climbs that suit me quite well; also the tailwind helped me towards the finish. I don't know if I'll come back, but everything went perfectly today, so that's a good sign."

Another new race for Van der Poel to conquer would be Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne on Sunday, of course, but Van der Poel initaly remained cagey about whether he would actually participate. Finally, it was later revealed on Saturday evening, he opted not to take part.

"Mathieu van der Poel is doing a training camp after his victory in the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. It's a shame we won't have him at the start of our race, but the field is strong enough to make it another exciting race," Peter Debaveye, the race director of Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, told Nieuwsblad on Saturday evening.

If Kuurne will have to wait for now, the end result of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad was very much what Van der Poel had wanted to achieve, he said that his pre-race strategy had not been to attack on the Molenberg. However, once he saw Vermeersch - a rider he knew a lot from racing off-road back in the day - had gone up the road, he realised it was the moment to strike.

"Without him this move would not have been possible," Van der Poel said. "The Molenberg was the crucial point, and sometimes that happens in the Omloop, but most of the time the race isn't decided until you get to the Muur. With the big roads that followed the Molenberg, my plan was to wait until the Muur. But because of circumstances, things played out differently."

He said that it was logical that Vermeersch should collaborate at least a little with him because "if he didn't do that, he wouldn't have got on the podium. If you don't ride, he'd have been empty-handed, and this way he got a top three in Nieuwsblad, which is a good thing to have, too."

The first place, though, was all but certain to go to one rider once Van der Poel attacked. But if he has now become one of a very small number of riders to win Omloop on his first participation, when he was asked how often it had crossed his mind during his breakaway to Ninove that no rider had ever won Flanders and Omloop in the same season, he grinned and answered, "Not once."

"Everyone knows that Flanders is one of my big goals of the season, but Tadej [Pogačar] is very strong too, and he showed last year" - when Van der Poel lost to the Slovenian - "how difficult he is to beat. But I'll try anyway."

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