COULD THIS RIDER BE “THE GREATEST CYCLIST OF ALL TIME”?

Mathieu van der Poel is widely recognized as one of the greatest cyclists in history. He’s won World Championship titles in road, cyclocross and gravel racing. He’s worn the yellow jersey in the Tour de France numerous times. He won three World Cup XCO races in 2019 (a year when Nino Schurter only won two), and Van der Poel ended up as the number two mountain biker in the UCI World Cup XCO series in both 2018 and 2019, right behind Nino Schurter. Van der Poel even beat Nino Schurter nine out of the ten times they raced against each other in their 2019 World Cup matchups when you check their results from both the XCO (Cross-country Olympic) and XCC (short track) events from that year’s World Cup series.

Mathieu van der Poel has yet to win the Tour de France title, even though he has led the Tour de France numerous times, wearing the famous yellow jersey, so he decided to race the full Tour de France in 2024, rather than leaving that event early to get ready for the Olympic mountain bike race, as he did in the previous Olympic year. As it turned out, Van der Poel ended up finishing in 96th place in the 2024 Tour de France rankings, and he was clearly disappointed with how things turned out, especially since Tom Pidcock, Van der Poel’s biggest rival for the title of “the world’s greatest cyclist,” won his second Olympic gold medal in mountain biking in 2024. Both riders have been predicted to be two of the greatest Tour de France racers in history by the time they finish their careers.

Van der Poel has said that he’s thinking about racing some mountain bike events in 2025 so that he can have a shot at winning the UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in 2025 and taking home one of the only cycling world championship titles that he hasn’t won yet.

Van der Poel has one of the most popular Instagram pages in cycling, and it’s one that the MBA staff likes to check out from time to time. We recommend it to our readers.

Here are some screenshots of some of his more memorable Instagram posts:

Here’s Van der Poel’s crash in the first lap of the 2020 Olympic mountain bike race, which was delayed for a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and ended up being held in 2021 in Japan.

Here’s a photo of Mathieu van der Poel wearing the yellow leader’s jersey in the Tour de France in 2021.

Here’s one of Van der Poel competing on the World Cup circuit in 2018 at Nove Mesto.

Here’s another post from the World Cup series in 2018.

This post is from the Lenzerheide, Switzerland World Cup race of 2017.

This post shows Van der Poel racing in a road event in 2016.

The above post shows Mathieu van der Poel wearing the gold medal that he won at the Cyclocross World Championship in 2024.

Here’s one from the site of the Mountain Bike World Championships in 2023. It’s one of the few titles Van der Poel has yet to win.

Here’s one that Van der Poel shared for fun in 20i7.

Here’s one from 2015, where Van der Poel was wearing the rainbow jersey of a world champion while crashing badly in what appears to be a cyclocross race. You can see the curly handlebars on his bike if you look closely).

If you can see some of the comments in the above posts, you’ll see that he had over 278,00 likes for the top post. If you look even closer, you might be able to see that Spencer Rathkamp, Katarina Nash, Howard Grotts, and Emily Batty are some of the famous mountain bikers who have liked his posts. No matter what happens in the years ahead, we look forward to seeing more of Mathieu van der Poel’s Instagram posts.