About forty kilometers after Tom Dumoulin said he was feeling fine at the start of stage 14 in the Giro, said he was relieved of previous back problems he suffered while getting dressed on Tuesday, promised that he would try to be at the front this Saturday and suggested that In cycling the chances can just turn for the better, he got off. “Out of power,” he said over the squad’s radio.
In the Giro it should have happened for the Limburger, the Jumbo-Visma team management had made it clear to him. Negotiations on an extension of Dumoulin’s contract, which expires at the end of this year, would start after this Tour of Italy, in which Dumoulin started in Hungary as a co-leader alongside the young Norwegian Tobias Foss. Not entirely sure of this duo job, the team management also named Sam Oomen, Dumoulin’s former adjutant, into third (!) leader.
Ranking ambitions quickly shattered
The Giro started poorly for the man who won the same round five years earlier. In the second stage, a time trial, he still finished third, but in the fourth stage to Etna and finally in the second mountain stage to the Blockhaus, his classification ambitions were lost. Dumoulin was out of the lap. That part, the part with the largest price tag, could be removed from the contract negotiations with Jumbo-Visma.
But who knows, Dumoulin said an hour before he got off, I could still be of use to the team with a stage win. For example today. Or better yet: the final time trial in Verona. Because whatever ups and downs his career has gone through, Dumoulin always had his excellent time trial to fall back on. Also witness his silver Olympic medal last year in Tokyo, after a career break of four months.
But a cycling team does not benefit much from the Olympic success of a rider, let alone a time trialist. Olympic road champion Richard Carapaz, who took over the pink leader jersey in the Giro from Juan Pedro López on Saturday, wears a gold-accented helmet and that’s about it. In addition, for the general classification, the importance of the time trial decreases in large and small stage races.
Missing classic victories
The question is whether Jumbo-Visma sees a rider in Tom Dumoulin who can win stages in large rounds, or whether, before or after the Giro, Tour and Vuelta, he can take on one-day races. The rider is on 22 wins. For the most part, these are time trials, but there are also so-called stages-in-line won: Dumoulin won one in every big round. Classic victories are missing from his palmares; he drove a so-called monument 19 times, with an 11th place in Milan-Sanremo of 2019 as the best result. He failed to finish five times.
Jumbo-Visma may strengthen itself with Dylan van Baarle. The 30-year-old winner of Paris-Roubaix should help the Dutch team to more success in the classics and has been a valuable master man in big tours in the past. Since this year, Jumbo-Visma also has a rider with Australian Rohan Dennis who can excel in time trials and who has proven with his previous team that he can help his leaders to round success.
Not finished cycling for a long time
As one of the most successful riders ever in the Netherlands, Dumoulin is unmistakably an eye-catcher for Jumbo-Visma. The pressure that comes with this made the rider decide to take a break to get an answer to the question whether he still liked cycling. On his return, he expressed an unconditional love for the bicycle and the profession. He didn’t think he was quite finished yet.
He and Jumbo-Visma may conclude that that love thrives better with a team with less great ambitions and, as a result, less pressure, fewer situations around it that have little to do with cycling. It will also mean less salary with the bonus for Dumoulin: less expectations. The demands placed on him then mainly come from himself.
Teammate Koen Bouwman, with whom Dumoulin trained in Colombia and helped him win the seventh Giro stage, was impressed by Dumoulin’s stepping down. ‘Cyclists don’t just do that. We’re definitely going to miss him.’
Sixth stage win for Yates in Turin
One stage earlier than expected, the general classification of the Giro d’Italia has been shaken up after the short (145 kilometres) fourteenth stage from Santena to Turin. Simon Yates, who discovered disillusioned a week earlier that he had lost 11 minutes in the mountain stage to the Blockhaus partly due to the heat, won an even warmer and therefore very difficult stage in Turin. It was his sixth stage victory in five Giro d’Italia and that was less than a plaster on the wound of the Blockhaus, he said with a shrug afterwards.
Yates climbed 15 places to 17th position, but is still virtually without a chance for the overall victory with almost 19 minutes on the new classification leader Richard Carapaz of Ineos. The Ecuadorian was third in Turin, behind Jai Hindley of Bora, Wilco Kelderman’s team. The Dutchman and teammate Emanuel Buchmann successfully completed the race by riding at the front at a high pace on the steep, short climbs of the course. Behind them, favorite after favorite dropped out resulting in a clear top-3 in the standings: Carapaz, Hindley and João Almeida of UAE. They are within half a minute of each other. Also Mikel Landa of Bahrain does not have to give up his classification ambitions in fourth place, one minute.
The best Dutchman in the general classification for the ride, Thymen Arensman, has to do that for the time being. He dropped from eleventh to 15th place, but in the remaining seven stages still has every chance of a top-10 listing in Verona, where the Giro ends with a time trial next Sunday.
