Mathieu van der Poel romped to victory in the 2026 Omloop het Nieuwsblad using what appears to be an unreleased set of Shimano Dura-Ace C50 wheels with carbon spokes.
The Dutchman broke clear of the peloton with UCI Gravel World Champion, Florian Vermeesch, on the Molenberg with just under 30km to the finish – after narrowly avoiding a Tudor Pro Cycling Team rider who had crashed on the slippery cobbled climb.
After joining the remnants of the day’s main breakaway, van der Poel attacked again on the final ascent of the iconic Muur van Geraardsbergen and soloed to victory.
Prior to the race start in Ghent, we got a close look at his bike and spotted the unbadged wheelset aboard both his race bike and his spare bike on a team car.
Let’s take a look at what we can glean from our photographs, and what other tech choices van der Poel made for the first race of the Flemish Opening Weekend.
Dura-Ace hubs and carbon spokes
Although the carbon rims lack any branding, van der Poel’s wheelset was built up with Dura-Ace-branded hubs.
The most obvious difference between the wheels on van der Poel’s bike and existing Dura-Ace wheels is the carbon spokes, plus the hidden nipples at the rim.
On Shimano’s current range of Dura-Ace wheels, including the C60 wheelset his bike was equipped with at last year’s Tour de France, all options use steel spokes with external spoke nipples.
Carbon spokes have become increasingly popular on high-end road bike wheelsets in recent years, as a means of cutting weight and improving stiffness, without impacting aerodynamic performance.
Hidden spoke nipples should also confer another small aerodynamic advantage. The trade off is that the wheel’s tyre and rim tape must be removed in order to true the wheel, but that’s of little concern for a top professional like van der Poel (who has a team of dedicated mechanics to service his bikes).
Zooming in on one of our photos we can also see rim stickers that denotes the rim has dimensions of 622 x 23TC.
This means the rims are 700c and have a 622mm diameter, with a 23mm internal rim width and are ‘Tubeless Crochet’ – or ‘hooked’, as opposed to ‘hookless’ or Tubeless Straight Side (TSS).
In contrast, the existing Dura-Ace WH-R9270-C50-TL wheels feature a 21mm internal width.
Another sticker indicates the maximum permitted tyre pressures with various sizes, denoting the rims are designed for tyres between 28 and 45mm-wide.
Stop me if you’ve seen these wheels before
Although it’s hard to be certain, as we only had a few grainy race photos to ogle last time, these appear to be the same, or at least a very similar wheelset to the one van der Poel trialled last spring.
Certainly, the unbranded rims, hidden nipples and hubs appear very similar.
If that’s the case, these wheels could be set to launch in the near future – perhaps as part of the next generation of Dura-Ace, R9300.
Cycling’s governing body, the UCI, requires brands make prototype equipment commercially available within 12 months of their first use in competition, after all.
Manufacturers can request an extension to this “based on relevant justified grounds” (as per article 1.3.006 of the UCI’s technical regulations), but this can only be requested once and equipment must be available for sale by the time the extension expires.
Big chainrings, small cassette
Beyond the wheelset, van der Poel’s race setup was only subtly different to what he was using when he last saw his bike up close in Lille, last July.
He was using the same 30c P Zero Race TLR RS tyres, for example, and was on his favoured Canyon road frameset – the Aeroad CFR.
As at last year’s Tour, van der Poel is still using the Aeroad’s ‘classic drops’ rather than the interchangeable ‘aero drops’.
Canyon introduced the flared ‘aero’ drops as an alternative option to the straight ‘classic’ drops, with the launch of the current Aeroad CFR platform in 2024.
The narrower brake hoods and extra reach provided by the aero drops is claimed to offer a potential performance advantage of “up to 14 watts”, according to Canyon’s lead design engineers, Lukas Birr.
It seems van der Poel is content to leave such potential gains on the table in favour of his preferred setup, however.
One thing that has changed since Lille is van der Poel’s big chainring. His Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 R9200 groupset featured a 54-tooth big chainring in France, but he had a 55t on his bikes in Ghent. This was paired with a tight, 11-30t cassette out back, despite the day’s challenging parcours.
Up top, van der Poel continues with his favoured Selle Italia Flite SLR saddle, which is customised white – a rare sight amongst the sea of black saddles in today’s pro peloton.
