Father of Australian girls: Mathieu Van der Poel’s anger is understandable

The girls aged 12 and 14 stayed in the same hotel and in the same corridor as Van der Poel, who was in Australia for the World Cycling Championships. On the night before the road race, where the Dutchman wanted to go for the rainbow jersey, Van der Poel was kept awake by noise in the hallway.

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The girls, who were playing with two other sisters, also knocked a few times on the door of the room where Van der Poel and his girlfriend were staying. The cyclist eventually opened the door. He grabbed one girl by the arm and yelled at the other. One of the girls fell and injured her elbow.

Van der Poel, who was taken to the station by the police and this week was sentenced by an Australian judge to pay a fine of the equivalent of 1000 euros, expressed regret on his return to Belgium airport yesterday.

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The father tells Australian media that he was not at the hotel last weekend. His wife did stay there, along with a girlfriend with two daughters.

‘A bit naughty’

“Look, I used to do things like that when I was young,” he says of the game that the girls played in the hotel hallway that got out of hand. “The youngest recently had corona and this was their outing. They were very excited, but then they got a little naughty. I told them that they too were wrong.”

Due to the bad night’s sleep, Van der Poel had to get off after 30 kilometers on the final day of the World Cycling Championships in Australia during the road race. “This is a disaster,” he said.

The cyclist will soon have to answer for what happened in Australia in a conversation with the team management of his employer Alpecin-Deceuninck.