"A Few So-Called Experts Had An Opinion": Van Der Poel Defends His 446-Watt, 90-Minute Flanders Power Number At His Final Pre-Roubaix Press Conference, And Walks Into Sunday's Four-Peat Bid Without Changing A Single Line Of His Training Plan

On Friday afternoon in the basement conference room of the Holiday Inn Compiègne Parc de Loisirs, Mathieu van der Poel sat down for the last scheduled press appearance of his 2026 Classics campaign and spent the first four minutes of it doing something he almost never does: defending a number. The number was 446 watts — the normalised power Alpecin-Deceuninck say he held across the final 90 minutes of last Sunday's Tour of Flanders, a figure that surfaced in a performance-desk piece on Wednesday morning and has been picked apart all week by everyone from amateur power-data blogs to former professionals now working as television pundits.

"A few so-called experts had an opinion this week," Van der Poel said, in the flat, faintly bored tone he reserves for questions he considers already answered. "I don't know what to tell you. The number is the number. The Srm on the bike is the same Srm we have used since 2021. Jasper was with me for the first hour of that 90 minutes, and his number is the one that is one per cent below mine, in the same direction, at the same time. I am happy to share the file. I am not going to spend my Friday afternoon arguing about my own power meter."

The reference to Jasper Philipsen — whose file Alpecin performance chief Kristof De Kegel has confirmed will be released in a Monday-morning post-race transparency statement — is the key to why this week's "so-called experts" storyline has rattled the Dutchman in a way that a more direct personal attack might not have. Van der Poel is comfortable being doubted. What he is less comfortable with is being told that the training he has put in since the first week of January, and the seven-month build that produced what he describes as "probably the best full season of my career at this stage of the spring," is somehow mathematically impossible.

The number itself bears scrutinising. 446 watts as a 90-minute normalised power is not physiologically unprecedented — Tadej Pogačar's Strade Bianche ride in March produced a 90-minute NP of 438 watts from a lower body mass — but the specific context is what makes the Flanders figure striking. Van der Poel weighs approximately 75 kilograms. 446 watts at 75kg across 90 minutes translates to a sustained 5.95 W/kg, over the closing 90 minutes of a race that had already been running for nearly four hours, on cobbles and short-burst climbs that punish steady-state efforts more than any other terrain on the calendar. It is roughly nine per cent higher than the equivalent window from his 2023 Flanders victory and, if accepted at face value, suggests that the 650-watt Kwaremont burst that sealed Pogačar's Flanders win was not the only 30-watt jump on show in Oudenaarde last Sunday.

The scepticism, when it began on Wednesday morning, centred on two specific objections. The first was that a 446W 90-minute NP from a rider who finished third at Flanders implied a larger gap between Van der Poel and Pogačar than the two minutes 13 seconds that separated them at the line, and therefore either Van der Poel's number or Pogačar's was wrong. The second was that Alpecin-Deceuninck had declined to release the equivalent figure from 2024 — the year Van der Poel lost Flanders to Pogačar by one second after a cat-and-mouse final 20 kilometres — and so there was no baseline to calibrate against. De Kegel's Monday transparency release is intended to answer both objections at once: the 2024 file will be published alongside Sunday's Roubaix file, and Philipsen's hour-one number will be released immediately.

Van der Poel himself has refused to let the noise change anything about his Roubaix week. "As always, I will race by feeling and see how the race evolves," he said when asked whether the scrutiny had affected his preparation. "Anything can happen in Roubaix. The important thing is to stay attentive at the front and navigate the cobblestone sections as safely as possible." The line is almost word-for-word the answer he gave before his three consecutive Roubaix wins, and the consistency is deliberate. Since Tuesday afternoon, Alpecin have confirmed that Van der Poel's copy-paste 72-hour taper — ten 45-second Arenberg openings at 10:15 on Thursday, a Saturday morning spin of no more than 45 minutes, a 21:40 bedtime — has not been adjusted by a single minute. The Saturday morning spin went exactly as planned, at a peak heart rate of 119 bpm.

What the press conference did contain, in the quieter second half, was a more revealing answer to a question nobody in the room appeared to expect. Asked by a French reporter whether Pogačar's Milan-San Remo, Strade Bianche and Flanders triple had changed the way he thought about Sunday, Van der Poel paused, looked down at the lectern for a full three seconds, and said: "Tadej being Tadej is not a new thing for me. Him also being the best cobbled rider in the world would be a new thing. That is the thing we will find out on Sunday. I do not think about it as a rematch. I think about it as a different race." It was the first time this week he had used the word rematch at all.

Alpecin-Deceuninck's performance staff left the room looking relaxed. "Mathieu does not need to win an argument about 446 watts," one senior Alpecin figure said afterwards, off the record. "He needs to win a bike race on Sunday. He has said what he had to say. He has offered the file. Now the conversation moves. And on Monday morning, either the number is right and the race is won, or the number is right and the race is lost, but either way the conversation is over." Van der Poel signed autographs for nine minutes in the lobby, got into the back of the Alpecin car at 15:48, and was back inside the Holiday Inn media lockdown for the last time before Sunday's 11:25 départ réel.

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