He put his hand on Alaphilippe's shoulder, then collapsed onto the handlebars. Mathieu Van der Poel doesn't beat around the bush, so his first words were clear: "I had no legs, the story is simple".
An inconvenient legacy
Everything seemed perfect. The Fosse aux Loups was an unusual Qwaremont to attack in order to get to play for the Flanders. However, the magic did not repeat itself and the fairy tale of the victory and the yellow jersey to be dedicated to his grandfather Raymond Poulidor, for which the UCI had allowed the change of jersey, was shattered on that last climbAs if the grandfather's curse had also fallen on the shoulders of his grandson. There is poetry in this tooPoetry and the necessary analyses, so that it doesn't happen again.
The first Tour it's a centrifuge, with pressures and traps that cannot be seenAs in the first Roubaix, as in every place where the secrets outweigh the evidence. But one thing is certain: Mathieu learns very quickly and last night he will have already understood his mistake.
Wrong position
What did Van der Poel do wrong? Just watch the race film and compare it with his words after the finish. The secret of the stage finale Hirschi had told it yesterday, although things went rather badly for the Swiss too. The attack on the Fosse aux Loups climb was reached after a rather fast descent from a place called Le Stum. From that point and up to the first ramps of the final, it was necessary to have companions next to you who were able to keep you in front and then launch youA strategy that Alaphilippe has implemented it to perfection. So that at the bottom of the descent, the Frenchman was already in third wheel with Asgreen and Devenyns ready to do their part. Van der Poel was around 30th position.
Prodigious recovery
The boy is a marvel, there's not much else to say. Scrolling through the images you can see that in about twenty seconds he manages to climb back to fifth position, but we dare not imagine at what cost of energyFrom that moment until the finish, the race becomes a test of breath-holding and if the heart is already pumping at double the beats, it is not the about 30 seconds of recovery time that Van der Poel manages to grant himself to give him time to recover.
«Alaphilippe attacked in the steepest part – he says – the perfect spot for him, exactly where I expected himThe plan was to follow him, but my legs were gone. I exploded, impossible to follow Julian."
Double overrevving
The boy is a prodigy, we reiterate. And rather than give up, decides to explode againIf you're used to the intense acceleration of cross-country riding, what's the point of another over-revving in such a short space of time? It happens, in fact, that Behind Alaphilippe, the two stars of the Tour, Pogacar and Roglic, move, evidently intent on fighting even for crumbs. And Van der Poel tries again, but once again his legs and his heart, especially the big heart that in the past few days had been burdened with feelings and invisible and treacherous pressures, tell him enough.
"He's been thinking a lot about his grandfather," says his publicist. "I don't know how hard it was. He said he'll try to do it as little as possible today. If yesterday was a day conditioned by nerves, then today let's try to be more light-hearted.If it was his legs, then Alaphilippe will once again be the favorite for Mathieu. The stages are very similar."
