Cycling: Tom Dumoulin needs a "break" in his career
Tom Dumoulin, seventh in the last Tour de France.
REUTERS / Juan Medina
Text by: Farid Achache Follow
4 min
Tom Dumoulin, second in the Tour de France 2018, announced Saturday, January 23 "to take a break" for an as yet undetermined period.
The winner of the Tour of Italy in 2017 explains that he “clearly needs time to think”.
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It is not common to hear athletes questioning their life as a top athlete and the psychological wear that this causes.
“
I'm going to take a break for a while,
” announces Tom Dumoulin in a video posted on his Jumbo team's website.
"
The team fully supports me
"
The Dutch rider, 30, seventh in the last Tour de France where he played the role of luxury teammate for the Slovenian leader Primoz Roglic, stripped of the yellow jersey on the eve of the finish, explains that he "
clearly needs time to think
"by pointing to the weight of media and public pressure,"
more difficult to manage than what
"he expected.
"
Who knows where this will take me?"
In any case, I will talk a lot with people, think, walk my dog and find out what I want as a person, on the bike, and what I want to do with my life
”, develops the 2017 world champion against the clock.
Tom Dumoulin had taken part in his team's training camps and said he was "
very enthusiastic
" about the idea of competing in the Flandrian classics at the beginning of spring.
"
The team fully supports me and gives me the time I need to think about it
", assures the one who, before his resumption in August, had already known more than 400 days without a race, between left knee injury and the first part of the 2020 season turned upside down by the Covid-19.
Dumoulin, smiling, said he was relieved by his decision: “
It's as if a hundred kilogram backpack had vanished from my shoulders
.
"
Not the only cyclist tired of his sport
Tom Dumoulin is not the only cyclist to feel bored by his sport.
During the Tour de France 2019, the German sprinter Marcel Kittel did not want to embark on the adventure again, because he “
needed
” to take a break and “
take time
” to think about his future.
A month later, he announced his retirement from sports.
In 2016, after missing out on the Rio Games, Frenchwoman Pauline Ferrand-Prévot wrote: “
Cycling was what I liked the most, but it became my biggest nightmare
”.
She had been followed by a psychotherapist.
In April, in an interview with the British daily
The Times
, the British cyclist Mark Cavendish, world champion on the road in 2011, admitted that the last two years had been difficult for him.
“
I struggled a lot with depression during this time.
I was diagnosed with clinical depression in August 2018. I was gloomy.
And I'm on the other side, thank you.
I think I got out of it, and it's good to be out,
”admitted the man with 30 stage victories in the Tour de France.
If the subject is still very taboo, some runners now confide the depressive episodes they can go through, or the doubts that one of the most demanding sports generates.
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