Mathieu van der Poel – The King Of The North Lights Up Tour de France with Grit, Glory, and Attack. Mathieu van der Poel has delivered a thrilling first 10 days at the 2025 Tour de Francewinning stages, wearing Yellow, and attacking relentlessly despite fatigue. A true cycling showman.Mathieu van der Poel showed us why is he a three-time winner of both the Tour of Flanders and Paris Roubaix – as well as a World Champion over the opening days of this Tour. The Dutchman set up his teammate Jasper Philipsen for the Stage One win that came along with a Yellow Jersey, capturing it for himself the next day with a fine win over Tadej Pogaar.The high-speed classics nature of the opening stages, with wind, cobbles and twisting roads and crucially, some very tough climbs thrown in for good measure, affected even the mighty Van der Poel.It was during the sprint into Amiens on Stage 4 that the first signs of Van der Poels fatigue became visible. After a series of finishing climbs, VdP was in a group slightly detached from the field, one that contained all the big Yellow Jersey contenders, all of whom the Flying Dutchman outweighed by 20 to 40-pounds. The fact that he was able to haul that large carcass over those climbs with Pogaar and co. is amazing but there was a cost: he lost the sprint to Pogaar.It was a loss born of fatigue he simply sat down in mid sprint not of…
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