Prey Drive

I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past couple of years working with my Malinois, Hera. She began life as a K9 trainee, but upon their realizing that at 45-pounds she’d be too small for the job (perfect for us), my girl went on the market and we snapped her up. Her defining feature, besides the crazy athleticism, is her prey drive. Give Hera a mission, ball, frisbee, (human in her previous life) whatever, and she’ll go through walls to get to it.

Mathieu Van der Poel has that same raw prey drive - the only way I can explain him. He actually resembles a Malinois: an extreme mix of pure athletic ability, coordination, elegance, speed and power, and he even seems to share that same death stare that makes them so forbidding. The Dutchman was certainly on the hunt this Saturday, and his attitude during the race showed that nothing was going to escape his hungry jaws.

His supreme confidence was on display in Milano-Sanremo, from putting teammate Sylvan Didier on the front to command the race for the first 200-kliometers to his general demeanor in the peloton. Ever see Van der Poel take a sticky bottle? I’ve not; instead, he always grabs them hard and just keeps going, not wanting the slightest interruption to his prey drive focus.

There was a telling moment on the Cipressa: Pogačar was attacking, VdP was a few meters behind and there was a soigneur holding a bottle out. VdP actually slowed, allowing Pogi to gain five meters or so, and took the bottle before reaccelerating back up to the Slovenian. Now imagine, the Cipressa is being climbed at record speed (24” slower than the 1996 record), Pogačar is attacking as only he can do, and VdP has the confidence to lose the wheel, calmly take the bottle and then right back to the business of racing up the famed climb faster than any human has ever done before. He even attacked Pogie on the Poggio.

Van der Poel’s winning sprint was a marvel of aggression. Always keep ‘em guessing: this winter, knowing that he was considered a ‘short’ explosive sprinter, VdP worked on his long sprint. On the Via Roma, the Dutchman, looking back, seeing Pogačar setting up a run, launched, in a very big gear – Ganna was undergeared – from the front with 300-meters to the finish. They struggled just to stay in his wake. Instinct, confidence, extreme prey drive, all working together to gift us, the viewers, a most remarkable experience, one that opens the season in a perfect way.

One last observation: in watching the slo-mo of the sprint, VdP was the one with the most perfect control of this body. Look at how perfectly coordinated his hip and leg movements are, the power seemingly squeezing out of his center. Pogačar and Ganna are all over the place by comparison. A sign that he was the freshest as well as the fastest.