Tom Dumoulin -

Christophe Ena / AP / SIPA

Tom Dumoulin will not be riding a bike for the next cycling season.

The Giro winner and world time trial champion in 2017 announced he was putting his career on hold in a video.

The Dutch rider, seventh in the last Tour de France where he played the role of luxury team member of 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 out the weight of media and public pressure, "more difficult to manage than what" he expected.

He had to compete in the Flandrian classics

"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 time trial in the eight-minute video produced by his team.

The announcement is all the more surprising given that Jumbo announced on Thursday the provisional program of his rider for the 2021 season. He had participated in his team's training camps and said he was "very enthusiastic" at the idea of ​​competing in the Flandrian classics at the beginning of spring.

Less weight on the shoulders

"The team fully supports me and gives me the time I need to think about it", assures Dumoulin 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.

Despite the content of the announcement, the tone of the interview is light and Dumoulin, smiling, said he was relieved by his decision: “It's as if a hundred kilogram backpack had vanished from my shoulders.

"

The Dutchman, deprived in September of a stage victory in the time trial of the Tour de France at La Planche des Belles Filles by the striking performance of Tadej Pogacar, had sacrificed himself from the first Pyrenean stage for the benefit of the future big loser of the Big Loop, Primoz Roglic.

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