If you want to win world championships, all it takes is one night in jail. Well, and a prodigous talent. While Mathieu van der Poel’s always had the latter, his brother David recently identified the former, specifically Mathieu van der Poel’s brief incarceration in Australia on the eve of 2022 world championships, as the career turning point.

Speaking with AD, David van der Poel says that night in jail (for which he was later exonerated, by the way) caused a shift in his brother. It turned him from a prolific talent that could win at will to a prolific talent relentlessly focused on achieving his career goals.

“He had been winning throughout his entire career,” David said. “Back then he would win races even when riding tactically foolishly. He was just so much better than the rest.”

Then came road world championships in 2022. An incident in the Dutch rider’s hotel led to him being briefly imprisoned. On the evening before road world championships. Mathieu van der Poel would drop out of the race the next day.

“I have never seen Mathieu so sad and insecure. He was in a very bad place,” David, who also raced professionally for over a decade, recalled of that period.

After watching 2022 worlds slip away, David said he saw a shift in how his brother approached his career.

“That’s when the realization hit,” David argues. “That event in Australia created disbeleive and a sense of injustice. But it also changed something.”

Apparently, faced with the possibility that he could actually lose a race he wanted to win was a jarring realization.

“That cell in Australia was the best thing that could have happened to him, in hindsight,” David argues. “He started training even harder and didn’t let any more opportunities slip away.”

The next year, Mathieu van der Poel won elite men’s road worlds in Glasgow. It was a stunning victory after a race filled with chalanges and misfortune for the Dutch rider.

Later that week, van der Poel would watch cross country mountain bike world championships slip through his fingers after an odd crash on the opening start loop. Maybe there are still more lessons to learn for the Dutch phenom. Hopefully his quest to win XCO worlds doesn’t involve another run-in with the law.