Dutch racer Mathieu van der Poel has decided to sit-out the road race at the 2020 Olympics. Having split this season between the disciplines of cyclocross, road and mountainbike, he’s promised to focus on the last of these in Tokyo next year.
Widely considered the favourite in this month's World Championships road race, he announced the decision to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf.
'It’s far too difficult to do both, so participation in the road race at the Games is not an option,' he explained 'I thought about it for a while, but that was at an early stage when the first data showed that there was a bigger gap between the road race and the mountain biking.'
With just two days between the road race and mountain bike events, he’s hoping the off-road course will provide him with a medal.
The move isn’t a massive surprise. With 4,865 metres of climbing, the road race had always looked ill-suited to the otherwise versatile Classics star.
It’s not the first time a rider has elected to race in the Olympic mountain bike event instead of the higher-profile road race. In 2016, Peter Sagan made a similar decision.
On that occasion, he suffered a puncture and lost out to Nino Schurter, the same man likely to be Van der Poel’s main rival.