Mathieu van der Poel needed a mid-race No. 2 to be No. 1 at the worlds

It was a full day for Mathieu van der Poel and his road worlds win. There was the famous crash with 16.5 km to go, damaging his shoe and cleat, sure. But it turns out he had an even bigger problem earlier in the race. When the race was paused for a protest–which lasted 40 minutes, the Dutch rider had to use the loo for quite urgent reasons.

“I have to do a big massive message. So, I had to knock on the door of a couple’s house along the course. I really owe them and I would like to thank them so much. And I couldn’t have carried on racing without their help,” he said after the race. “It was the biggest race of my life and it was so kind of these people to let me in their house and let me sit on their toilet.”

Local family stunned to have the MvdP use their facilities

The Scottish outlet The Daily Record eventually figured who the hospitable family were. Davie and Shona Findlay were the couple on the course route that offered up their loo to the eventual world champ.

Mathieu van der Poel just broke the Internet on the road worlds course recon

“We did feel that it was a bit of an emergency because the team manager came first and asked if we could let one rider use the facilities, who I now take to be Mathieu van der Poel,” Davie said. “He was such a nice guy and extremely polite and he was so grateful. The next thing we knew there was another rider and then another and I think we had four of the guys from the Netherlands inside. I think they were just taking advantage of the lull in the race and enjoying the rest while they got focused for the restart.”

Clearly having some of the best pros in your house during the middle of a race that was temporarily paused was strange.

The break in the race was a relief for the Dutch team

“It’s all a bit surreal to be honest. We’re aware of what a massive race it was and the incident with the protestors made our home a real focal point in world news for an hour or so,” Davie said.

And to make things worse, it wasn’t just something MvdP could normally do on the bike. It was more of a Tom Dumoulin kinda stop, if you follow.

Koos Moerenhout, Van der Poel’s coach, said that it was something a little more complicated. “To pee? I think for something more than that,” he laughed. “Oh well, it makes for another nice story.”