S14 Ep10: Poel Party
The Cycling Podcast
The Cycling Podcast
4.7 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2026
⏱️ 81 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Classics season has truly commenced, with Opening Weekend out of the way and regular trio Daniel Friebe, Lionel Birnie and Rob Hatch back to analyse the key takeaways from two intense days of racing on the cobbles and hellingen of Flanders.
On Saturday, Mathieu van der Poel’s latest masterclass suggested it could be a long spring for some of his rivals. MVDP’s eternal antagonist, Wout Van Aert, was absent from Visma-Lease a Bike’s line-up through illness, but that team could at least console themselves with Matthew Brennan’s superb victory in Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne on Sunday. We review both races and what they said about the coming weeks, with help from the ultimate authority on springtime racing in Belgium, Hugo Coorevits.
It was also a busy weekend in France, and a delirious one for patriotic French fans. Paul Seixas’s dominant performance at the Faun Ardèche Classic on Saturday prompted former rider turned pundit Jérôme Pineau to hail Seixas as “already the third best rider in the world”. We evaluate those claims and look ahead to Seixas’s first clash of the season with Tadej Pogačar at Strade Bianche.
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Transcript
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| 1:29.8 | Now it's on with the show. |
| 1:35.3 | You are listening to the cycling podcast. |
| 1:49.2 | You are listening to The Cycling Podcast. podcast. Hello, welcoming you for the first time officially in springtime 2026. |
| 1:53.5 | So for a weekend, whose defining images were arguably Paul Sexas casually sipping from |
| 1:58.4 | a bidon while dismembering the rest of the field at the Fawn Aldesh Classic on Saturday. |
| 2:03.0 | And Matthew Brennan politely declining a glug of Belgian trappist beer to celebrate his victory in Coon of Brussels Coon on Sunday. |
| 2:09.9 | My name is Daniel Freeber. I'm the host of this episode of the cycling podcast in which we will attempt to drink in and swallow down everything that occurred in the world of professional cycling on Saturday and Sunday, including the two remarkable exhibitions of precocity. I've already mentioned, |
| 2:23.3 | joining me to do that on this Monday morning. His glass already charged is Lionel Bernie. |
... |
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