‘I told the team car he was going to win’ - Naesen explains why Van der Poel’s Omloop victory felt inevitable
Mathieu van der Poel’s win at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad unfolded with the air of inevitability that often follows the sport’s biggest names. Inside the race, Oliver Naesen says the conclusion felt clear well before the decisive phase, triggered not by an attack but by an unusually calm interaction in the bunch.
Speaking on the HLN Wielerpodcast, the 35-year-old Belgian pointed to a brief exchange in the bunch after a positioning incident with a rider from Uno X.
“I got cut off and shouted ‘Idiot!’,” Naesen said. “Then Mathieu rode up next to me very calmly and said: ‘Maybe he’s not the idiot, you know.’”
Naesen said the remark landed because of the way Van der Poel delivered it. “It was not what he said that struck me most. It was how he said it,” Naesen explained. “If you can sit there that relaxed while everyone around you is suffering, then you still have something left.”
That calm, he said, told him enough to make a call to the team car on the spot. “After that, I said in my earpiece that Mathieu was going to win the race,” Naesen added.
Naesen did not get the results he had hoped for, finishing 63rd at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and 35th at Kuurne-Bruxelles-Kuurne., but he said Decathlon CMA CGM left the weekend with reasons to be positive.
“We take two top tens, and in almost every attack, we could say we had two or three riders there,” he said. “This might be the strongest Decathlon team I’ve ridden in.”
All of that came without injured riders Tiesj Benoot and Olav Kooij, which made the overall performance stand out even more. Decathlon did not win, but Naesen felt they influenced the races rather than simply reacting to them.
Naesen also touched on the reaction to Florian Vermeersch’s podium behind Van der Poel, pushing back at the idea that working together with the strongest rider requires an apology.
“Florian is a fantastic rider, but he’s not going to win ten Classics,” Naesen said. “And if after a podium finish you have to apologise to the public because you rode with the god of cycling, that makes no sense at all.”
He added: “He should just be proud of the way he rode and that he was able to go that far. If at the end of your career you can look back on a number of podiums in Classics, you can be very satisfied.”
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