Roodhooft had already revealed after Van der Poel’s third-place finish that his team leader had messaged him on April 1. He ended up on a three-day course of antibiotics. Despite finishing on the podium behind Tadej Pogacar and Mads Pedersen, Van der Poel was still not at 100% in the days that followed. “Mathieu stayed in Belgium, kept training, but his recovery wasn’t optimal. Probably also due to the Tour of Flanders. When you’ve just been sick, it lingers in your system longer.” “But anyway: Roubaix on Sunday. A new opportunity,” says Roodhooft, preferring to look ahead. Because according to the Belgian, Van der Poel is perfectly fine with not winning sometimes. “If someone is better, Mathieu never has much of a problem with not winning. And let’s call a spade a spade—on Sunday, someone was better.” Moreover, Alpecin-Deceuninck already has a Monument win this year, with Milan-San Remo. “‘Relief’ is definitely the right word. Because it makes the spring season so much more pleasant. You’ve already won something big.”

Alpecin-Deceuninck and Van der Poel feel the pressure, especially heading into Paris-Roubaix Van der Poel has to win, every single year. This season, he’s already done so at Le Samyn, Milan-San Remo, and the E3 Saxo Classic. Philip Roodhooft, understands that the outside world expects those victories. “That’s the downside of what we’ve built over the past few years: the pressure. Every year, you have to prove yourself again. It’s not easy. We’d be very arrogant if we started the season thinking, ‘We’ll just do it again.’” And so, Christoph admits: “I’ll be honest, a weight lifted off my shoulders after San Remo. I sometimes fear the year when it won’t work out.” The bar is set incredibly high, the brothers say, but they warn that Van der Poel’s victories shouldn’t be taken for granted. “That’s not fair. How hard it is to win, we saw that again at Dwars door Vlaanderen. INEOS, Visma, BMC in the past, how many Monuments have they won? And they have or had plenty of talent. Even for Van der Poel, it’s not easy to avoid mistakes and win. Just like it isn’t for us, you constantly have to make sure everything around him keeps working perfectly.”

And then Van der Poel only started riding monuments at the age of 25…. The strange thing about the seven Monuments Van der Poel has already won? He might have had many more by now. The Dutchman only started racing the big one-day classics at the age of 25. According to Philip Roodhooft, that was a deliberate and logical choice. “It would be an exaggeration to say we had to force him into those big races, but he did start his road career with some healthy reluctance. He was perfectly fine with how things were: he had his cyclocross races, and he was winning smaller road events easily. That gradual transition is actually one of the things we handled really well.” Christoph agrees, and believes that slow build-up in road racing is exactly why Van der Poel was able to start winning right away. “He never had to go through finishing 24th, 18th, or 12th in the Tour of Flanders. Mathieu was fourth in his very first Tour of Flanders. It was very efficient instantly.”