{"id":197804,"date":"2025-06-19T18:29:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-19T18:29:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/197804\/"},"modified":"2025-06-19T18:29:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-19T18:29:09","slug":"hes-the-best-after-pogacar-and-van-der-poel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/197804\/","title":{"rendered":"He&#8217;s the best after Pogacar and Van der Poel"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Van Aert has a reputation as an underdog, he has had the misfortune of being in the same era as <a href=\"https:\/\/cyclinguptodate.com\/tadej-pogacar\" title=\"Tadej Pogacar\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tadej Pogacar<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/cyclinguptodate.com\/mathieu-van-der-poel\" title=\"Mathieu van der Poel\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Mathieu van der Poel<\/a>, but the reality is that he is one of the best riders of his generation: &#8220;He is a true champion. If you look at his consistency? A lot of people say that his season has been weak, but for me it&#8217;s impressive. It&#8217;s true that he hasn&#8217;t won any classics, but he&#8217;s always in the top five.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Finally, he compared him to the other great cyclists of the moment, including 2019 world champion Mads Pedersen in the conversation: &#8220;I would say he&#8217;s probably the third best cyclist in the world, only behind Pogacar and Van der Poel. He&#8217;s in the same league as Pedersen. I&#8217;m amused by some of the criticism. Just look at all he sacrifices, the effort he&#8217;s made to recover from injury. That guy is elite, no doubt about it.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Van Aert has a reputation as an underdog, he has had the misfortune of being in the same&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4104],"tags":[4230,79,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-197804","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114711452971096004","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197804"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197804\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}