Adrie van der Poel beaming with pride after Mathieu’s Tour de France triumph: "I speak from experience"

As usual, Adrie is traveling with the Tour as a VIP driver for the team. He parked next to Alpecin-Deceuninck’s gray bus to catch the final kilometer of the stage. And yes, you read that right. “I only watched the last kilometer. I just didn’t want to see the rest,” he said, admitting he generally avoids the chaos of days like these.

But that one kilometer told him enough. “Knowing Mathieu, he must have felt good. If you’re sitting third or fourth, you have to wait and can’t react yourself. This time he could, and that’s fantastic. How hard was it for him to win like this? It’s never easy. But it turns out it was perfect, he had everything under control.”

Two wins in two days, Adrie knows it’s historic. “Saturday’s win took a huge amount of pressure off the team and Jasper, and there was a lot at stake. The disappointment would have been massive if he hadn’t won. Mathieu didn’t have super legs on Saturday, but that was also the case in 2021,” he said, referring to the Tour where Van der Poel also took yellow on stage two, back then on the Mûr de Bretagne.

So now Mathieu is in yellow again. “How long he’ll keep it? Honestly, I haven’t looked beyond today. I approach the Tour like a rider: day by day, and we’ll see. Tomorrow (a sprint stage, ed.) should be fine, then there’s another tough stage, and then a time trial… he’ll give it everything, as always, but it’s never easy. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

“These are moments to cherish. It’s unique. Wearing the yellow jersey usually only happens once in a lifetime, and I speak from experience,” Adrie said with a smile. “He does things… two Milan-Sanremo wins, three Paris-Roubaix wins, three Tours of Flanders… winning once is already hard, but if you’re in this world, you know just how incredibly difficult it is.”