If he wants to beat Van der Poel, will Pedersen have to give in? "If he's open to it, we should do it"

Mads Pedersen wants to improve, and that might mean doing something he absolutely despises this winter: a high-altitude training camp. The Dane from Lidl-Trek has been vocal about his dislike for altitude camps, delivering a passionate rant to IDLProCycling.com last year, but it seems those words have fallen on deaf ears.

"I f*cking hate it. No, I’m not doing it, even if my coach says so. If it could give me a two or three percent improvement? I don’t give a f*ck," Pedersen said in December 2023. "I tried it once, somewhere in France, and it was the worst experience ever. I don’t want to sit on top of a mountain for three weeks, away from my family. Then you race afterward, and you’re away from them for another four weeks. That’s two months in total, and I’m too much of a family man to sacrifice that."

However, Pedersen might need to reconsider, as Ekstra Bladet reports he’s expected to head to altitude training this winter. That’s according to his coach, Mattias Reck. "Mads has publicly said he doesn’t want to, but we’ve been discussing it. I’m certain we’ll eventually do a proper altitude camp—you can write that down. Mads has said, ‘Okay, we’ll try it once.’ But the reason I haven’t pushed harder yet is that I’m still unsure how much benefit it will actually bring. Riders respond very differently to altitude training," Reck explained.

Read more below the photo.

Lidl-Trek won't take a gamble with Pedersen

And so, Pedersen might end up being right. Coach Mattias Reck wants to test the waters first. "If Mads is open to it, we should do it. Because we’ve never explored it, and it might actually work. It’s going to happen at some point, but I don’t know when or in which year. We don’t want to gamble with it," Reck explained.

There’s a lot at stake for Lidl-Trek, as Pedersen is their key leader for the spring classics. He proved his worth again in 2024, beating Mathieu van der Poel at Gent-Wevelgem. However, due to a crash in Dwars door Vlaanderen, we’ll never know if he could have delivered similar results at the Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix.

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