How Mike Teunissen survived this Tour: the crash only came in the hotel after his fall

It is Saturday evening around nine o’clock when Mike Teunissen gets it too difficult. He crashed that day during the fourteenth stage of the Tour de France. Matter of bad luck: he was in the peloton, the roads were slippery after a shower, someone in front of him crashed. Now Teunissen knows that you should not brake in such circumstances, but there was no space. A tap on his brakes and he immediately lost his bike.

There is a burn on his shin, as if his body is on fire. His right side is full of abrasions. His knees, which have cushioned the fall, are thick. Actually, the feeling with which he cycled through the stage is inexplicable, fellow riders know it. Damn, that’s pretty close.

After a day of suffering on the bike, Teunissen is ready to rest, hoping to recover. But when, after a two-hour bus journey, he arrives at his room on the second floor of the three-star hotel where his Intermarché-Wanty-Circus team is staying, he looks around in dismay. The ski hotel on a mountainside, overlooking Mont Blanc, has wall paneling and a fireplace in the lobby. The room has two simple single beds, one for Teunissen and one for teammate Adrien Petit, otherwise there is so little space that the suitcase can hardly be opened. The worst is the feeling temperature of forty degrees, there is no air conditioning. Teunissen knows: there will be no question of a good night’s sleep.

Cycling around at the top level for three weeks is tough. Sometimes that becomes very visible, like last Wednesday when Tadej Pogacar collapsed on the flanks of the Col de la Loze and lost minutes on his competitor Jonas Vingegaard. But more often it is barely perceptible along the course or at home on television. Gradually the level drops and riders get tired, both physically and mentally. For those who have never cycled a Grand Tour, it remains difficult to understand how the riders get through the Tour de France. Via Teunissen, who has asked a number of questions every day for the past few weeks NRC answered about his condition, it becomes clear how tough the Tour de France is.

All just a little less

Thirty-year-old Teunissen is a rider with experience. He cycled his first major tour in 2015, the Vuelta d’Espana. In 2019 he rode in the yellow jersey for two days, after winning the opening stage towards Brussels in the bunch sprint. This Tour de France is his seventh Grand Tour and his first for the current team.

Intermarché has a smaller budget than Jumbo-Visma, Teunissen’s previous team. Everything is still well organized for the riders, but it’s all just a little less: there is one chef instead of three, and they don’t have their own mattresses. In Teunissen’s eyes, it is inevitable that the difference over the course of three weeks will play a role.

Teunissen also has the misfortune that the airline with which he flies to the Spanish Basque Country, where the Tour starts, forgets his suitcase in Amsterdam. The first days he has to do without his personal belongings and his pillow. Important, because you won’t sleep well, or wake up with pain in your neck. That’s not nice when you have to cycle for five hours.

Already thinking that tomorrow he will sleep badly and suffer pain is disastrous

But Teunissen gets through the first stages well. Energy management plays a major role in this. If he notices that he can no longer do his job – sprinter Biniam Girmay or classification man Louis Meintjes well off in the sprint or at the foot of a climb – his pace immediately drops. In his seventh Grand Tour he knows that trying to catch up and then finish twentieth or sixtieth, as he used to do, is not efficient. You’re better off getting 100th and saving energy for the stages that are yet to come.

The evening after the second stage, Teunissen’s suitcase still arrives. Sleeping is no longer a problem, it rarely is with the Dutch anyway. He is good at eating and sleeping, the pillars to reach Paris, both in and outside the race. During the stages, he must consume 90 grams of carbohydrates every hour to prevent hunger pangs and weight loss. This is possible with energy bars, gels and water bottles full of sports drinks. Teunissen knows from experience that continuing to eat in the last hour, when you think you’re almost there, is also necessary. Otherwise, the recovery towards the next day will not be as good.

Heart rate of 91

In the flat stages it comes down to bunch sprints. Then heavy efforts are required from Teunissen to put his sprinter Girmay in good position. But actually such rides are also days when he can recover. Stage three Teunissen kicks an average of 200 watts, a number he also achieves during training rides, or more than that. And the day after, the wattages in the peloton are even lower. With an average heart rate of 91 he comes from Dax to Nogaro.

In the past, Teunissen shied away from mountain stages. Not getting in within the time limit, that was his biggest fear. But after years of racing in the professional peloton, Teunissen can climb better than before. From a top stage in Andorra in the run-up to the Tour and the Tour of Switzerland as a preparation race, he has naturally started to climb better. In addition, Teunissen tries to remember that he is not the only one who suffers uphill. When he’s having a hard time, so are other riders. As long as he is not the first to release, that ensures peace in the head.

Moreover, mountain stages are not the hardest rides. When the climbing starts, a large group almost always forms quickly with sprinters and other non-climbers who have to let the peloton go. Riding together uphill, in the descent and on the flat to catch up on time, and thus arrive well within the time limit, is a great way for Teunissen to get through such days. This way he can even enjoy the view of the Puy de Dôme in the ninth stage, the climb he cycles up together with Mathieu van der Poel and Dylan van Baarle.

No, then transition stages such as stage ten and twelve, the days when every rider considers himself a chance. Then it is tough from the start, then you have to constantly push, because it does go up and down, but not steep enough to get a group to shape. On the climbs that are there, there is stalling upwards, finding a good pace yourself is impossible. There is no recovery in between.

Teunissen notices this in his power values ​​when he gets on his bike the day after the twelfth stage. After the tenth stage he feels like he has already taken off a jacket, now he sees it reflected in his performance. His maximum heart rate is lower than normal, he lacks some acceleration uphill, his legs fill up faster. These are concrete signs of fatigue, his body can no longer make the effort it normally can.

The heat also plays a role in this. In the first two weeks of the Tour, temperatures regularly rise above thirty degrees. In Issoire, where the tenth stage finishes, the thermometers show 42 degrees. With ice blocks on his neck, held together by tights, and drinking a lot, Teunissen gets through such days.

Teunissen has a steady rhythm for his recovery after he finishes. Cycle out, take a recovery shake, eat and drink, take the bus to the hotel, massage and then visit the osteopath if his hip is stuck, which sometimes happens to him. Then again (evening) dinner, it is now about ten o’clock, and lie down on the bed and go to sleep soon after. On the rest days he does as little as possible, apart from a bit of cycling to stay flexible. Most of the day he lies in bed, sleeping a little or reading a book. He can get through the day with an exciting thriller by David Baldacci or Jo Nesbo, and he sometimes dozes off nicely.

The Teunissen of 2015 would have been ridden in a heap, the level is now much higher

Without sleep, recovery becomes difficult. That is why Teunissen gets a crack when he arrives at his hotel room bruised and scraped after the fourteenth stage. He was already afraid of it, since the Tour organization determines where the teams sleep and every team is sometimes assigned a slightly less hotel. And that happens precisely on the day of his fall. Football players in the Champions League or tennis players at Wimbledon would never accept such a thing. But yes, he can stand on his head, nothing is going to change.

Teunissen is level-headed enough to see that after the first disappointment, all the extra energy he puts into it is wasted effort. It’s accept and move on, he has to deal with it. That’s not just a survival tactic, that’s how he lives. He doesn’t let it affect his mood; then he should have learned a trade, thinks Teunissen.

Negative mental spiral

A good night’s sleep is not an option in the following days. Together with Petit, who fell even harder than him, Teunissen is tossing and turning in his bed. When they are still staring at the ceiling at 1:30 am, they decide to open everything: the curtains, the doors to the balcony. It provides a breeze of cool air. But Teunissen needs a sleeping pill the following days, something he prefers to avoid.

Fortunately, there are two days to recover at the beginning of the third week: the second rest day and the time trial, in which Teunissen takes it as easy as possible. The trick now is to fool himself into thinking that he will recover in three days. Teunissen knows that it doesn’t work that way, but it prevents him from ending up in a negative mental spiral. Already thinking that tomorrow you will sleep poorly again and suffer pain is disastrous.

Teunissen manages to recover somewhat in the days that follow. He notices that he can suffer a little more again, push the pedals a little harder. And Paris comes into view. He also gets through the queen stage, with more than 5,000 altimeters, in the belly of the grupetto. He does start to cough and he gets a runny nose, signs that his immune system has been damaged by all the effort. All the surplus is gone.

It is a tough Tour, not only in terms of course, but also in terms of course hardness. Cycling was very fast almost every day. The Mike Teunissen of 2015 would have ridden in a heap, the level is now many times higher. But luckily Teunissen has grown along with it. It will take him at least a week after the Tour to feel a bit normal again, he knows, and maybe even more if he doesn’t do anything at all. That’s why he likes to drive a few criteriums in the days and weeks that follow. Nice to see the Dutch public, and good to keep in shape.

Even if he is tired, even if he has fallen, and even if his team has not been successful, Teunissen has enjoyed the Tour so far. It remains the largest cycling event in the world, it is special to be part of it.

It’s the little things that got him through: riding in the leading group in the thirteenth stage to the Grand Colombier, a pizza for dinner the day he fell, a good hotel with a nice bed and working air conditioning after the finish of stage seven in Bordeaux. Just as tasty. Just like the prospect of drinking a beer in Paris, after the finish on the Champs Élysées. He’s really looking forward to that.