Wout van Aert snaps incredible Monument streak of Tadej Pogacar and Mathieu van der Poel

Since 2023, the Monuments and World Championships have belonged almost exclusively to Pogačar and Van der Poel. The numbers underline that dominance.

Before Paris-Roubaix, eighteen of the last twenty Monuments and World Championships had been won by one of the two, including a run of thirteen consecutive victories shared between them in the most recent editions.

The rare exceptions only reinforce the pattern. Jasper Philipsen claimed Milan-Sanremo in 2024 with Van der Poel riding in support in the finale, while Remco Evenepoel won Liège-Bastogne-Liège in 2023 after Pogačar crashed out of contention.

For the 2026 edition of Paris-Roubaix, it was again Van der Poel and Pogačar who were cast as the clear favourites. There was some nuance. Paris-Roubaix is often the hardest Monument in which to force a decisive gap, not because of a lack of difficulty but because of its nature. The cobbles, the positioning and the constant risk of bad luck make control more fragile than elsewhere.

Even so, riders like Van Aert, Mads Pedersen and Filippo Ganna were largely framed as challengers rather than equals.

But after a day of chaos, spectacle and constant twists, the pattern finally broke. For the first time in more than two years, someone else stood on the top step of a Monument podium, with Van Aert a fitting winner of a race that refused to follow a script.

From a records and streak perspective, this victory comes at a crucial moment. With Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Il Lombardia still to come this year, along with a hilly World Championship course in Montreal, it is not unrealistic to think that Pogačar could have added further wins to his tally, with the shared streak potentially stretching even further.

In the end, Van Aert’s victory does not erase the dominance of Pogačar and Van der Poel, but it does disrupt it. For the first time in a long while, the race did not follow the expected outcome. In a sport where so much has recently felt inevitable, that shift alone carries weight.