When you’re chasing a third successive Paris-Roubaix title, have won all the spring Classics – cobbled, Ardennes and Italian – except two (Gent-Wevelgem, 2nd – 2024; and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, 3rd – 2024), and have already settled the everlasting debate of who’s better between yourself and your great rival – six Monuments to one; nine world titles to three – what else is there really left to win? You’ve worn the yellow jersey of the Tour de France, secured GOAT status in one discipline (cyclo-cross) by ruthlessly and relentlessly laying waste to your opponents for the past decade, and latterly ruled a new discipline (gravel) because you own the patent to all bikes – past, present and future – and no one else is allowed to share equal pleasure, how on earth can you improve your palmarès?

Mathieu van der Poel has an answer, because he always does. “In the end, you will always have gaps that you would like to fill,” he says, six weeks into his 2025 season which already includes eight wins out of eight races. That hole, that blemish on his career as he would have it be, doesn’t refer to road, cyclo-cross or gravel, but instead to mountain biking, his other great passion, but the only one that hasn’t reciprocated his occasional flirtation, and has instead beat him back and punished him for his commitment to the other disciplines. 2025, he hopes, will be the year when he finally wins a mountain bike rainbow jersey, becoming a world champion in a fourth different discipline. “I’ve said it a few times: the mountain bike is something I would like to tick off. It is indeed a race I would like to win. For the rest, it doesn’t really matter to me,” he says.

This article was published by Rouleur on February 13, 2014. Click here to read it.