The Quietest Taper: Inside Mathieu van der Poel's 72-Hour Build to a Record Fourth Paris-Roubaix
At 8:47 on Wednesday morning, Mathieu van der Poel walked out of the villa that Alpecin-Deceuninck have rented on the outskirts of Compiègne for every Paris-Roubaix since 2023, clipped into his Canyon Aeroad, and rolled out alone down the RD3 for the first of his final three pre-race rides. Three-and-a-half hours later he was back, showered, on the physio bed and — according to team staff who have watched this scene now for four consecutive years — doing exactly, and only, what he has done in the four days before every one of his three consecutive Roubaix victories. This is the copy-paste taper. And it is almost certainly going to deliver a record-equalling fourth straight.
The scale of the sameness is striking. Each of Van der Poel's three pre-Roubaix weeks, starting in 2023, has followed a schedule that reads almost like a mantra. Eight days out: last high-intensity block, including two race-pace openings on sectors 21 and 20. Six days out: eighty-kilometre recon with three teammates, pace strictly zone two, no data on the handlebars. Five days out: press obligations in Compiègne, limited to a 35-minute window. Four days out: full rest. Three days out: solo ride, including ten "Trouée d'Arenberg openings" of exactly 45 seconds at full gas. Two days out: final recon of the velodrome, bike check, signed autographs, pasta. Race minus one: two hours easy on the flat, media blackout, no phone.
"It is not a superstition, it is a framework," said Alpecin-Deceuninck head of performance Kristof De Kegel, speaking to Cyclingnews outside the team's makeshift service course in Compiègne on Tuesday evening. "Mathieu is a very rational athlete. He built this taper with the sports science staff at the Van der Poel Development Centre in 2022 based on the pre-race loading patterns of his best cyclo-cross world championship runs, and he has never deviated from it since. The reason he has not deviated from it is that, for three years in a row, it has produced the best single-day performance in the history of the race. Why would you change it?"
The only visible change this week is the level of monitoring. Alpecin have quietly added a second team physiologist — a signing from the cyclo-cross programme — who is collecting HRV, core temperature and sleep data every six hours. "We are not training harder. We are measuring more," De Kegel insisted. "If anything we are slightly more cautious this year. Last year Mathieu had a light cold on the Wednesday and we lost a day of preparation. This year the plan is: lock the door, remove the variables, deliver him to Compiègne on Saturday evening in exactly the same physiological state as he arrived in 2023, 2024 and 2025."
There is a deeper tactical reason for the conservatism. Van der Poel's coaches believe, correctly or not, that his three previous Roubaix wins were decided not on the Thursday hammer-fest or the Saturday recon but on the calibration of his final 72 hours — the ability to arrive at the start line with perfectly tapered legs, a perfectly fresh head and a perfectly rehearsed routine. "Roubaix is the race in which you cannot make yourself better in the last week," said Van der Poel himself at his final pre-race press conference on Tuesday. "You can only make yourself worse. The whole job of the last seventy-two hours is to not get worse."
Inside the Alpecin camp, the rest of the cobbled squad — Jasper Philipsen, Gianni Vermeersch, Silvan Dillier, Soren Kragh Andersen, Senne Leysen and Edward Planckaert — are on a looser schedule. Philipsen is doing his own final openings on the flat roads south of Compiègne, Vermeersch is riding the final 50 kilometres of the route every second day, and Planckaert has been handling the bulk of the team's equipment selection with the Canyon mechanics. "The team works in a circle around Mathieu," Dillier said. "Jasper runs his own programme inside that circle. Everybody else is there to deliver the two of them to kilometre 170 with the best possible position in the bunch. Then we let them race."
The stakes for this specific 72 hours are almost historic. A fourth consecutive Paris-Roubaix would place Van der Poel level with Roger De Vlaeminck and Tom Boonen on four career Hell of the North wins and would make him the first rider in the race's 128-year history to win four in a row. The psychological pressure of that bid has, for most of the spring, been publicly borne by Tadej Pogačar, whose monument sweep narrative has sucked the oxygen out of the room. Van der Poel has — deliberately, in his own words — taken the quietest path to Sunday available to him. He has refused the record framing at his press conference. He has refused to discuss Pogačar's recon. He has even refused to answer questions about the weather. "I don't know what the weather will be. I don't want to know. The weather is not in the taper."
That obsessiveness is, in the end, the story of this particular 72 hours. The peloton is obsessed with Pogačar. The press is obsessed with the four-peat. The weather models are obsessed with overnight rain. And inside the small rented villa on the RD3 outside Compiègne, the only man who can actually stop the Slovenian from writing history is going to bed at exactly 21:40 every night, measuring his sleep quality, doing his 45-second Arenberg openings at exactly 10:15 on Thursday morning, and pretending — with considerable success — that the race is not happening at all. If that sounds boring, it is meant to. Van der Poel's coaches believe that boredom, perfectly applied, is the thing that separates a third Roubaix from a fourth. Seventy-two hours from now, we will know if they are right.