Pogačar And Van Der Poel Saturday Morning In Compiègne: Two 40-Minute Spins, Zero Cobbles, Zero Photographs And The Quietest Pre-Roubaix Saturday Ride Either Rider Has Done In His Career
09:45 on Saturday morning in Compiègne and, for the second consecutive day, the two pre-race favourites for Sunday's Paris-Roubaix did the smallest piece of public riding either of them has ever done in the 24 hours before a Monument. Tadej Pogačar rolled out of the gate of the UAE Team Emirates-XRG Oise farmhouse at 09:32 for a 43-minute loop on the forest roads south of the Forêt domaniale de Compiègne. Mathieu van der Poel rolled out of the Holiday Inn Compiègne side entrance at 09:31 for a 41-minute loop on the Pierrefonds-Rethondes back road. Neither rider touched a single metre of cobble. Neither rider was photographed in motion. Neither rider spoke on the record. Neither rider raised a heart rate above 125 beats per minute. It was, according to both teams' own 10:30 bulletin, "a functional activation ride, nothing more".
The two rides were choreographed down to the minute and, on the evidence of both teams' internal training plans, deliberately timed to avoid any possibility of the two riders meeting on the same stretch of road. Pogačar's UAE Team Emirates-XRG loop took him south-west from the Oise farmhouse through the forest to the village of Saint-Sauveur, right onto the D546 for three kilometres of quiet tarmac and then back to the farmhouse via Vieux-Moulin — a 17.8-kilometre circuit the team had ridden three times during the 2025 edition and selected again this year on the same morning for the same reason. "The loop is familiar and it is flat and it is quiet," UAE performance coach Javier Sola explained in the short 10:45 UAE media statement. "Tadej needed fifteen minutes of Zone 2, five minutes of Zone 3 and no Zone 4. He did exactly that. The loop was the loop he chose in 2025 and it is the loop he chose again today. That is all there is to say."
Van der Poel's Alpecin-Deceuninck ride was if anything even more stripped-down. The defending three-time Paris-Roubaix champion left the Holiday Inn with three team-mates — Jasper Philipsen, Gianni Vermeersch and Silvan Dillier — all in matching Alpecin-Deceuninck spring training kit rather than race kit, rolled onto the D332 towards Pierrefonds, turned around at the Château de Pierrefonds roundabout after exactly eighteen minutes of riding, and came back the same way he had gone out. The group did not stop. Van der Poel did not touch the front of the four-man line for more than thirty seconds at any point. The heart-rate data from his Canyon Endurace race bike — shared by Alpecin-Deceuninck performance director Kristof De Kegel in the 10:50 team release — showed a maximum heart rate of 119 bpm, a maximum wattage of 232W and a total ride duration of 40 minutes 58 seconds. "I have done shorter warm-ups for criteriums in Flanders," De Kegel said. "That is the point. Tomorrow Mathieu needs to be rested. Saturday morning is not when you ride Paris-Roubaix."
The contrast with 2025 is sharp. A year ago, on Saturday morning in Compiègne, Pogačar rode a 90-minute ride that included a full recon of sectors 17, 18 and 19 in the company of four UAE team-mates and a French film crew. Van der Poel rode a 75-minute loop out to the Trouée d'Arenberg to touch the cobbles with his hand at the northern entrance. Both rides produced at least thirty photographs on the news wires by lunchtime. Saturday morning 2026 produced zero photographs. The only confirmed image of either rider between 08:00 and 11:00 is a single frame of Pogačar leaving the farmhouse gate at 09:32, taken by an L'Équipe photographer from across a wheat field with a 600mm lens, in which the Slovenian is visible only as a yellow-and-black silhouette. "Tadej looked up at me for maybe half a second," the photographer said later. "Then he put his head back down and he was gone. That is the only frame I have from the whole morning."
The Saturday morning silence is the most visible expression of what both teams now openly describe as the "Flanders lesson". Pogačar's own post-Flanders debrief concluded that his pre-race energy ledger had left him "no margin for the final 40 kilometres" of the Tour of Flanders and that the two days before a cobbled Monument now needed to be, in the Slovenian's own words, "as close to a rest day as a race week allows". Van der Poel's team has arrived at the same conclusion by a different route: the three-time defending champion has ridden the exact same 40-minute Holiday Inn Compiègne loop on the Saturday morning of each of his three previous Paris-Roubaix victories in 2023, 2024 and 2025, and team manager Christoph Roodhooft told Cycling Lookout on Friday evening that "nothing about that ride is going to change for 2026. Why would it? We have won the race three times on the back of it."
Inside the respective team buses, the morning was spent in the same way it has been spent at every Paris-Roubaix eve for the past decade: the final pressure discussion for the cobbled tyre of 2026. Van der Poel's Alpecin-Deceuninck mechanics, who had declined to name any figure at all on Friday evening, remained silent on the record on Saturday morning. Pogačar's UAE mechanics — who had told Friday evening's L'Équipe reporter that the final numbers would be put on the bike "at 09:30 Sunday morning" — confirmed at 10:30 Saturday that the final decision had been made. UAE chief mechanic Marco Amici will hand the team the Pogačar sheet at the 06:30 Sunday team briefing and not a minute before. "The number is on a piece of paper in my wallet," Amici told Het Nieuwsblad's Stefan Vermeersch. "I am not going to take it out of my wallet until 06:29 Sunday morning."
The 11:00 Saturday morning UCI technical commissaires' inspection at the Compiègne bus park proceeded on time and without incident. Fifty-one bikes passed through the bike-weighing scales, the handlebar-width measurement tool and the drop-test jig between 11:00 and 11:48. No bike failed. Three riders — Filippo Ganna (Ineos Grenadiers), Wout van Aert (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Florian Vermeersch (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) — were present at the technical check in person. Neither Pogačar nor Van der Poel attended. UCI technical commissaire Philippe Mariën: "This is the third consecutive year Pogačar and Van der Poel have chosen not to be present at the Saturday commissaires' check. The rule does not require the rider to attend. The rule requires the bike to attend. Both bikes attended. Both bikes passed."
At 12:30 Saturday lunchtime both teams were behind closed doors in their respective Compiègne bases. The Alpecin-Deceuninck floor of the Holiday Inn went to silent mode at 12:45. The UAE Oise farmhouse kitchen fed the entire eight-rider squad at 13:00 to a menu that had been pre-printed in the team chef's notebook on Monday morning — risotto with mushrooms from the farmhouse's own kitchen garden, a single 140g portion of chicken per rider, fifty grams of hazelnut gelato. Pogačar slept from 14:30 to 16:00. Van der Poel slept from 14:45 to 16:15. At 16:30 Saturday afternoon the twelve-hours-out story begins and the two rivals, for the first time since Thursday's final press conference, will be within thirty metres of each other at the same ASO-mandated 19:00 start-order draw at the Compiègne town hall. The Saturday morning ride is over. Paris-Roubaix 2026 is, at 11:00 Saturday morning, exactly 23 hours and 25 minutes from the départ réel at 11:25 Sunday morning in the Place Albert-Ier.