Prototype pedals add to Van der Poel’s Roubaix collapse, but Alpecin points to wider chaos

When Van der Poel’s race began to unravel on the cobbles of the Arenberg Forest, help arrived almost instantly. Alpecin-Premier Tech teammate Jasper Philipsen handed over his bike, something that looked like a standard emergency move in the heat of a Monument.

But the Belgian rider had been racing with a set of experimental pedals. Unable to clip in, Van der Poel hesitated briefly before conceding the effort, casting the bike aside in visible frustration as the race slipped further from his grasp.

Team director Christoph Roodhooft did not shy away from responsibility afterwards. “That decision was mine,” he said of the experimental pedals to Sporza. “We had tested them earlier in the season, Mathieu had even used them briefly himself. The idea was to keep evaluating them in race conditions.”

He paused before adding: “I never thought it would come down to something like that.”

Inside the team car, however, the incident was framed less as a single mistake and more as the culmination of a sequence that spiralled out of control.

“It’s easy to point at the pedals afterwards,” Roodhooft said. “But there was a whole lead up. Everything went wrong at once, at the worst possible moment.”

According to the team, the decisive blow had already come before Trouée d'Arenberg even began. A crash ahead blocked the narrow entry. A team car and race doctor were forced to stop in front of the bunch, bringing riders behind to a standstill.

“We were stuck there for more than a minute,” Roodhooft explained. “If that doesn’t happen, nothing is lost.”

The situation was further complicated by race regulations that prevented support staff from positioning themselves mid sector.

“For the first time, nobody was allowed to stand halfway with spare wheels,” Roodhooft said. “On a sector that long, that changes everything.”

What followed was, in his words, “improvisation.”

Tibor Del Grosso described the scene bluntly. “It was a bit of a mess,” he said to Sporza. “My rear wheel was broken, so I thought maybe I can at least give him my front wheel. My race was over anyway. It was the only thing I could try.”

It did not help. Van der Poel was soon dealing with another puncture. “Then it’s done,” he said afterwards.

Roodhooft insisted the focus on the pedals alone misses the bigger picture. “If the cars are not blocking the road, we are in position. If we are in position, we don’t have this problem,” he said. “And then you add the rule about no service in the middle of the sector… it all comes together.”

He trailed off briefly before concluding: “It’s one of those situations. You can say ‘if this, if that’, but it happened exactly when it shouldn’t.”

Eventually, Mathieu van der Poel found himself more than two minutes behind after the Arenberg sector. Yet over the final 90 km, he produced a remarkable comeback, weaving his way through the field and closing to within 25 seconds of leaders Wout van Aert and Tadej Pogačar by the Carrefour de l’Arbre.

However, he ultimately lacked the power to bridge the gap, and from the chasing group, he had to settle for fourth place, 15 seconds behind race winner Wout van Aert.