Patrick Lefevere passed on Van der Poel, says father Adri, and he 'still regrets it'

Adri’s first marker is not a win or a jersey, it is fixation. “He was four, five years old, on his first little bike. And it was bike, bike, bike, bike.” As a kid, he was “nervous,” “busy,” “always doing something,” and Adri shrugs it off as “the nature of the animal.” Then he lands on the trait that never changed. “He always had a determination, and it did not matter what it was about.”

That determination found a stage in the woods near home. “Every morning he left with the wheelbarrow,” Adri said to Sporza. “They took a few shovels, rakes, a bag of cement, ropes, I do not know.” 

The kids built their own course, shaped turns, packed sand, even raised a platform in a tree. They spent weeks on it, rode it for a short stretch, and then reality arrived. A forest ranger came by, and “everything had to be taken apart.”

Then he brings up the moment he tried to open a door for his son. Adri says he went to one man with a simple message. “I only told one man, I have a little talent. And he did not go for it.” This time he does not keep it anonymous. That man was Patrick Lefevere. 

The line that follows is delivered like a settled fact, not a grudge. “From the moment I told him until now, he has regretted it.” Adri adds, “I offered it on a silver platter.”

He pairs that story with a contrast, and pointed to the people that did act early.

“Christoph [Roodhooft] bit right away,” Adri says, describing how support showed up quickly in the form of bikes and continuity. That continuity became a family instinct. “We have had equipment from Christoph for ten years, so it is not proper to go to another team.” Adri told them it was allowed, that people might be disappointed but not angry, yet the reflex to stay loyal remained.

It also shows the way they approached the sport itself: steady and measured. The same thinking shows up in how Mathieu has always managed his racing. Adri says the rule was never more than around sixty race days a year, cyclocross included. “If you want to ride thirty crosses, fine, then it is only thirty races.” 

Mathieu’s view was simple. “I suffer more in training than in the race,” he told his father. And in today’s peloton, Adri adds, the training is so hard that the old idea of racing yourself into shape barely exists.

For all the talk about records around Van der Poel, Adri dismisses the idea that his son is chasing numbers. Eight world titles in cyclocross does not move him, he says. “Nothing at all. He is busy with one thing. That is winning races.” 

It is a simple line that cuts through the usual narrative, and it fits the portrait Adri keeps returning to: a kid who just could not stop riding.