But the bad news didn’t stop there. Wielerflits reported that both van der Poel and Alpecin-Deceuninck teammate Sam Gaze, who also abandoned the race after crashing, were taken to the hospital to be examined. Another report by Sporza, yet to be confirmed, suggested that the reigning cyclocross and gravel world champion might be forced to give up plans to ride in the upcoming Tour de France.
Sporza went on to say that van der Poel had been scheduled to travel to La Plagne on Monday for an altitude training camp in preparation for the Critérium du Dauphiné, which starts on June 8, and the Tour, which kicks off on July 5. “There is now a very big question mark behind that planning,” the publication reported, without however providing concrete details.
Van der Poel’s problems in the race began with his place on the start grid. Not having ridden an MTB race in four years, he had to start far back on the 32nd spot, about eight rows from the front, which forced him to ride in catch-up mode. Two minutes into the start loop, at the foot of a climb, he tried to pass a rider on the outside by leaning into him, but the rider resisted and van der Poel crashed into the side netting.
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Soon after, riding near the back of the race, he was caught in a bottleneck on a narrow track leading to another climb. Then, coming off a rapid descent, the Alpecin-Deceuninck leader hit a rocky bump on the track and fell over his handlebars, hitting the ground hard. [See that incident here.] Apparently unhurt, he immediately remounted and tried to improve his position. But he was now in next-to-last place, some 1:40 behind the leaders.
While he improved his placement over the first two laps, he could make up no time and finally decided to call it a day on lap 3. As a result, van der Poel will earn no MTB points and will therefore be faced with the same problem on his next race, a bad placement on the start grid. And unless he starts picking up points eventually, he will face the same issue in the 2025 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships, which will be held in Valais, Switzerland, from August 30 to September 14.
Another multi-discipline rider returned to MTB racing at Nové Město, reigning MTB women’s world champion Puck Pieterse (Fenix-Deceuninck), who was coming off an impressive spring Classics season in which she won the La Flèche Wallonne Féminine, finished second in Liège-Bastogne-Liège Femmes and third in the Amstel Gold Race. Pieterse had a great start, easily winning Saturday’s Short Track race.
And she had an impressive start in Sunday’s Elite Woman’s race, fighting for the lead or leading for much of the first lap, when disaster struck in the form of a front-wheel flat tire at the worst possible spot on the course, far from the technical sector where repairs can be made.
By the time she had labored to that section on one good tire and changed the wheel, Pieterse had lost 1:30 to the leaders. Despite riding in the red for several laps in an attempt to catch up, she could get no closer than 1:05 and eventually tired, finishing 13th, 1:59 behind the winner, Mona Mitterwallner (Mondraker Factory Racing).
