By Conor Verbruggen
In 2015 Tom Dumoulin exploded into the top tier of world cycling when he took stage 9 of the Vuela a Espana. It was a summit finish where he dispatched with a who's who of the time: Froome, Rodríguez, Aru, Majka, Quintana, Valverde. If the world didn’t quite take note, they should have.
Bad luck would see him fail to finish both the Giro and Tour the next year, before returning in 2017 to prove his 2015 ride wasn’t a fluke.
Dumoulin displayed time trial dominance all year in 2017 and the Giro was no exception. Combined with a stage 14 win to Oropa on a textbook w/kg summit finish, he took the overall honours. In 2018 he would find the consistency that evaded him in 2016; finishing 2nd in both the Giro and Tour - both times behind a Team Sky in it’s crippling peak.
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Those 2017 and 2018 seasons should have been the start of a golden run for the then 27 year old. Except it wasn’t. The summit finish to Oropa in the 2017 Giro is the last time the Dutchman won a non-TT bike race.
Four years on, and following a half season away from the bike entirely in 2021, why has the plain-talking and intelligent Maastricht native decided to return to Grand Tour cycling via a Giro with less TT kilometres than any edition for sixty years?
On another team, perhaps a decision to send Dumoulin to hunt TT stage wins would be logical. There are two such stages on this Giro, both with elevation, and neither Ganna or Bissegger are present. But Jumbo Visma do not hunt stage wins, and their utterances in the build-up to this year’s opening Grand Tour have focused on one thing - performing on GC.
Dumoulin said himself he is "here with the mindset of doing a GC”. Team manager, Addy Engels, has struck a similar note. “We start here with ambitions to ride a good classification”, he said. Engels then added a bit of a twist, saying: “We’ve been aiming for this since the winter as we have Tom and Tobias on our team.”.
Current Norwegian TT and - more than interestingly - road race champion, Tobias Foss was signed by Jumbo-Visma following his Tour de l'Avenir win in 2019. A surprise top 10 on GC in the Giro last year - following team leader Roglic’s exit - punched his ticket for this year’s participation.
A year on, and without the clear hierarchy established by the team’s Slovenian superstar, Foss will surely be looking to better his 9th place finish.
All this considered, it’s hard not to think that Jumbo Visma team management know how this one is going to play out. The older GC rider years on from his best results, the younger hopeful following on from a chance opportunity where he duly impressed.
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If the assumption Dumoulin was years on from his best results seemed harsh at the start of the season, there would be few who have disagree after the climb of Jebel Hafeet at the UAE Tour in February.
Cameras cruelly documented Dumoulin’s loss of almost five minutes on the 10.8km of steady 6.6 per cent incline. The commentators all but had the Dutchman's retirement confirmed as he dropped early from the pack that still contained his teammates Koen Bouwman and Chris Harper.
That performance in the Middle East, it seemed, was the answer for those who wondered whether some headspace was all that was needed for Dumoulin's return to the form of 2017.
As it emerged out of the pandemic earlier this year, and then seen Dumoulin struggle in UAE, the cycling world seemed to forget Dumoulin had already proven he still had the goods to get back to his best. He had already taken a silver medal in the Olympics, coming off the couch to finish behind a nuclear Roglic last summer.
Instead of confirming any demise from the top flight, his struggles in UAE confirmed Dumoulin’s form simply does not follow the same trajectories of other riders. His preparation is more dependent, it would seem, on his mental state; not a criticism, far from it.
None the less, this year’s form leaves plenty to be desired and nothing to be expected from the Dutchman. But still, he has been selected for the Giro and the team has backed him publicly to ride for GC.
Is the team paying public lip-service to the last Dutchman to win a Grand Tour since 1980? Is it conceivable Jumbo Visma, one of the top teams in the world, has quietly given its home hero a support role without publicly saying so? No, Dumoulin must be given the chance to fail
We will not have to wait long before we find out whether the next three weeks might usher Dumoulin back into the select group of riders capable of winning a Grand Tour. If he falters, that will set the tone for the remainder of his career; a rider who may at times still impress, but just not like he used to.
After today's TT - where the first proof of his form will emerge - the race takes in a likely sprinters' stage on Sunday before a rest day. Then comes a true test back on Italian soil on Tuesday.
The riders will complete 130km of stage 4 without a categorised climb before reaching the foot of one of this year’s longest, most consistent, mountains - the 22.8km Mount Etna averaging 5.9 per cent.
There is no question that the climb would suit an on-form Dumoulin, should one be present. Far more than this year’s team leadership will be on the line when the road rises and those who can truly contend at Giro d'Italia 2022 emerge at the front.
- Conor Verbruggen is a racing cyclist from Ireland and contributor to stickybottle
