De Bondt: "Mathieu van der Poel was the strongest man in the race — I saw it from the front row"

Mathieu van der Poel had a day of misfortune at Paris-Roubaix on Sunday, but despite the setbacks he still managed to reach the Vélodrome in fourth place. Dries De Bondt (Jayco AlUla) witnessed the chase of his former Alpecin-Premier Tech teammate up close and spoke about it on the Café Koers podcast.

Van der Poel punctured twice in the Arenberg Forest and came out of the sector with a two-minute deficit to the front of the race. Wout van Aert and Tadej Pogačar were among the leading group, and no one was waiting for the reigning champion.

After a furious chase, he closed to within twenty seconds, but never saw the front group again. "Mathieu was the strongest man in the race. Yes, obviously," De Bondt said without a shred of doubt. "I saw it from the front row."

"Jasper Philipsen sacrificed himself first, setting the pace on one of the cobbled sectors after the Arenberg Forest to bring the gap down," De Bondt said in his reconstruction of events largely missed by the TV cameras.

"On one of the next sectors, Mathieu decided: I'm going to give it everything. We could see a group riding ahead of us, with Politt among them. He just wanted to jump across to it," De Bondt continued. "He went, and by the end of that sector — which was only 1.4 kilometres — he had simply disappeared from view. He just left us behind.'

"That group ahead of us was riding twenty seconds up the road and he took them with him, so they vanished too," the Belgian explained. "Even though we could see forty seconds ahead of us. And then five minutes later I heard team director Matthew Hayman say: 'Mathieu is now riding at 1 minute 20 seconds from the front of the race'. I thought: how? He is one of the superhumans at the start," De Bondt concluded.