Stat Attack: Mathieu van der Poel's milestones and Quick-Step's cobbled demise

At Paris-Roubaix last Sunday, Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) was ploughing through the history books as fast as he was smashing his way through the Arenberg forest. With his Monument Classic exploits this year, along with the fact that he is the current world champion, he has been emulating and out-doing quite the list of names.

To kick things off, here are a few of the milestones he has just reached.

• The 11th rider to have done the Flanders/Roubaix double in the same year.
• The second rider after Rik Van Looy in 1962 to do this while wearing the rainbow jersey.
• The first back-to-back Roubaix winner since Tom Boonen in 2008 and 2009.
• The first rider to win multiple Monument classics in consecutive years since Eddy Merckx.

Van der Poel's Alpecin-Deceuninck team were imperious in both cobbled Monuments, controlling the races as well as any team could reasonably expect to. With Jasper Philipsen also winning Milan-San Remo earlier this Spring, they are now the first team ever to win the three opening Monument classics of the year.

Read more: Alpecin-Deceuninck conquer Paris-Roubaix: ‘Mathieu is at the best level we have ever seen’

There is a slight caveat to that one. Raymond Impanis won Flanders and Roubaix for Mercier-BP-Hutchinson in 1954 and his teammate Rik Van Steenbergen won Milan-San Remo that year too. Teams worked a little differently back then, though. Belgian and French teams tended to enter Belgian and French races, and Italian teams tended to enter Italian races. Riders weren’t as contractually attached to teams the way they are now, so when Van Steenbergen won San Remo he was actually riding for the Girardengo team, rather than his more regular Mercier-BP-Hutchinson team.

Anyway, Mathieu van der Poel has also now won the fastest Monument Classic in cycling history with a speed of 47.8kph, beating the record of 46.8kph set in last year’s Paris-Roubaix. What is most remarkable about this is that every rider from Van der Poel down to Jonas Abrahamsen in 27th place broke the previous record for the fastest Monument ever.

And Van der Poel still beat Abrahamsen by over six and a half minutes.

Van der Poel’s winning margin of three minutes flat was also awesome. Since Eddy Merckx won by over five minutes in 1970, only two riders have won with a bigger time gap in Paris-Roubaix: Franco Ballerini in 1998 won by 4:16 and Johan Museeuw won with a gap of 3:04 in 2002.

Read more: Paris-Roubaix: Moments that have defined cycling's most-loved Monument

The emerging trends from Paris-Roubaix Femmes

It was a day of double rainbows as Lotte Kopecky also won Paris-Roubaix while wearing the rainbow jersey. It’s not the first time that’s happened at a Monument classic; World Champions Peter Sagan and Lizzie Deignan both won the Tour of Flanders in 2016.

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Lotte Kopecky became the first reigning world champion to win Paris-Roubaix Femmes

The history of the women’s Paris-Roubaix is just four years young now, but the winners have not been young. Kopecky is the first rider under the age of 30 to win it.

Only three riders have managed three top-10 finishes across all four editions - Kopecky, the incomparable Marianne Vos (Visma-Lease a Bike), and Pfeiffer Georgi (dsm-firmenich PostNL). That is some company for the 23-year-old Georgi to be keeping. 33 riders have started all four editions, only 13 have finished all four, and one of them is Georgi.

Read more:

• Lotte Kopecky on Paris-Roubaix win: 'Today was exactly as we planned'
• 'For me this feels like a win,' says Pfeiffer Georgi after Paris-Roubaix Femmes

Soudal Quick-Step's Classics demise in cold hard data

While Van der Poel, Kopecky and Georgi were all lighting it up at the front, the same cannot be said for the entire Soudal Quick-Step team and the same has been true in all of the big Spring Classics for a few years now.

If we take the six biggest cobbled Classics on the calendar - Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Gent-Wevelgem, E3 Saxo Classic, Dwars Door Vlaanderen, the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix – and consider Soudal Quick-Step’s best placed rider in each one, the best result they managed this season was an 8th place by Tim Merlier in Gent-Wevelgem.

In the 22 years that the team has existed, they’ve only had one other year in which they only managed a single top-10 in those six races and that was as recently as 2022. Over the last three years, the team haven’t managed a single top-five place in these races.

The average placing of their best-placed finisher this season was 23rd. Historically, this average figure has been much much better for the Quick-Step team. In 10 of their 22 seasons, this average best-placed finisher figure has been less than five. The graph below shows just how far they have been straying from the standards they had been setting for themselves.

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Charting Quick-Step's performances in the big cobbled Classics

In 2012, they managed an astonishing average of 1.17 by winning every race apart from the Omloop, where they were second. They were once habitual winners in these races that team boss Patrick Lefevere expects them to perform in. Since the team’s inception in 2003, they have won 35 of them, and even in the years in which they left empty-handed, they have always been close. In 2015, for example, they didn’t win any but they managed five second places and a fourth.

Before 2022 they had never reached the end of the cobbled Classics without at least a podium finish in one of these six races and now they’ve done that three years consecutively.

Their Classics season so far has been somewhat saved by Tim Merlier, who has performed admirably in the rather ‘lower tier’ of one-day races. He has won Nokere Koerse and the Scheldeprijs and finished second at the Classic Brugge de Panne. With all due respect to these races, the likes of Nokere Koerse are never going to be enough to butter Lefevere’s parsnips. But the days of Tom Boonen stomping around Belgium and northern France gobbling up Classics are long gone.

The team do still have three Monument winners in their midst. Kasper Asgreen’s best days seem to be behind him, tacitly illustrated by his peers in the peloton as he was afforded the indignity of being allowed in the early breakaway at Paris-Roubaix. Julian Alaphilippe’s best days also seem to be behind him and, besides, he’s more of an Ardennes guy, apart from the time he looked like he could win Flanders before he forgot to look where he was going and smashed himself out of contention from the winning move in 2020.

That leaves Remco Evenepoel, who unwittingly is very probably the reason for Quick-Step’s recent failure in the cobbled Classics. Evenepoel is something that Lefevere has never had in his team before: a potential Tour de France winner. Tenuous arguments could be made for the cases of Rigoberto Urán and Enric Mas, both of whom are the only other riders besides Evenepoel who have managed to finish on a Grand Tour podium while riding for Quick-Step.

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Without Remco Evenepoel at the start, UAE Team Emirates will be heavy favourites to win Liège-Bastogne-Liège

With his crash in the Basque Country, not even Evenepoel now can save Quick-Step’s Classics campaign. He has been robbed of his chance to go for a hattrick of wins at Liège-Bastogne-Liège and we as fans have been robbed of a tantalising showdown there with Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates).

Can Evenepoel recover and make it to the Tour de France? Will a Tour de France win for Evenepoel be the only thing that can now rescue the season for Soudal-Quick Step? Let me know what you think in the comments section down below.

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