There haven’t been many in recent years, but zero? That never happened before. Until now: Visma-Lease a Bike, the country’s most important cycling formation, plans to travel to the Tour de France next summer without a single Dutch rider in the team.
The provisional selection was presented last Monday in La Nucia, Spain. Danish leader Jonas Vingegaard, who finished second last year, wants to try to win the Tour for the third time. The team that has to help him consists of a Briton, a Frenchman, two Americans and three Belgians. Homegrown riders such as Steven Kruijswijk, Dylan van Baarle and Wilco Kelderman have so far been passed over.
Visma, which is considered one of the strongest cycling teams in the world, has chosen the “strongest imaginable team” for the Tour. Winning comes first, said team boss Richard Plugge to the cycling site Cycling Flash – especially after last year’s disappointing season. “If that doesn’t work for the Dutch at the moment, then so be it.”
Plugge’s choice fits in with a development that has been going on for some time in a team that – under various sponsor names – goes back more than thirty years. While in the 1990s and 2000s the team usually consisted of at least half of Dutch riders, in the last ten years there were never more than two or three. When Visma rode with one Dutchman (Steven Kruijswijk) in the team in 2022 – the year of Vingegaard’s first victory – Plugge said in NRC that the ambition to win with the Dutch had “shifted 100 percent”.
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“The Dutch feeling is no longer really there at Visma-Lease a Bike,” says former rider Tom Dumoulin, who rode for the team from 2020 to 2022. “And they don’t really want to radiate that.” He points out the role that Visma plays in the development of cycling talent in the Netherlands, with a promising team and ‘fat tire races’ for young children. “Then it is strange not to take a Dutchman with you to the Tour.”
Former rider and former TV commentator Maarten Ducrot sees the completely foreign Tour team mainly as a result of “robotization” – he is referring to the major role that wattages, calories and training schedules play in modern cycling. “No sentiment plays a role, except winning. They use a calculation model and see who does or does not fit in.”
Globalization
Visma’s decision did not come out of nowhere: cycling has rapidly globalized in recent years. Since 2011, the Tour de France has been won by riders from non-traditional cycling countries such as the United Kingdom, Australia and Slovenia. Last year, Eritrean Biniam Girmay was the first African rider to win a stage in the most important cycling race of the year.
With this globalization, cycling teams are becoming less and less ‘national’ in character – although French, Italian and Spanish teams are somewhat withdrawing from this development. The two Dutch teams at the highest cycling level – Visma and Picnic PostNL – have fully participated in the internationalization: less than a third of the men’s elite teams now consist of Dutch riders.
Steven de Jongh, sports director of the American Lidl-Trek team (one American employed), thinks it is “not a strange choice” by Visma not to take Dutch people to the Tour. “It’s a shame for Dutch cycling, but it is their right. The Tour de France is the most important race of the year, they have to enter with the best team.” According to De Jongh, the team’s decision could actually be “an incentive” for Dutch riders. “Like: damn, I’m not good enough, I have to be there next year.”
It is too early to draw far-reaching conclusions, say De Jongh and Dumoulin: there are still plenty of Dutch riders in other teams, they will not be completely absent from the Tour. De Jongh: “It may also be that Visma’s selection policy is simply no longer focused on Dutch riders.”
Few lap riders
However, according to Dumoulin, Visma’s decision says something about the state of men’s cycling. Although the Netherlands has classics king Mathieu van der Poel and top sprinters such as Olav Kooij, Fabio Jakobsen and Dylan Groenewegen, “the pool is thinner” in terms of lap riders, according to Dumoulin.
He himself stopped in 2022, ‘master servant’ Robert Gesink did so last year. Wilco Kelderman no longer participates in the rankings and is slowly approaching his cycling retirement; and this especially applies to Steven Kruijswijk (37) and Bauke Mollema (38). The only real Dutch classification man for the coming years seems to be Thymen Arensman, who finished fifth in the Vuelta and sixth twice in the Giro d’Italia.
Whether Visma will actually only have foreigners participating in the Tour remains to be seen. Illness, falls and lack of form in the spring can still seriously upset the Tour delegation – as happened to the team to an extreme extent last year. “I can already predict the falls,” says Maarten Ducrot. “Half of the boys selected now will not appear at the start.”