Is Tom Dumoulin considering a return? The former Giro winner reveals he misses the pain of the peloton: "That was the ultimate"
Cycling
Tom Dumoulin has been retired from professional cycling since 2022, but the 34-year-old still finds himself drawn to the deep physical and mental state that elite sport provided him.
Speaking on the Der Cor Podcast, the former Giro d'Italia winner reflected on his continued love for pushing his limits, even after stepping away from professional competition. Recently, he put that into practice at the Egmond Half Marathon, completing the race in an impressive one hour, eight minutes, and 42 seconds, despite not training intensively for it.
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"It's not for a certain result, I don't earn anything from it either. I just think it's nice to get into that state of being where there's nothing else to do than challenge yourself and push boundaries. When I look back at the best moments of my career, those are the moments when I got into a bizarre flow. For example, when I became world time trial champion. You feel enormous pain, but you're in a kind of tunnel."
Dumoulin, who won three Tour de France stages, four individual Giro d'Italia stages, and two Vuelta a España stages, in addition to his 2017 Giro d'Italia overall victory, explained the almost addictive nature of endurance sports.
"There is nothing else in the world but you and your bike moving forward as fast as possible. That is your only goal in life at that moment. When things were going extremely well, I didn't feel that pain very much. But at other times my body kept saying: Tom, stop it. Every muscle fibre screamed to stop it."
The Dutchman described how he managed to push through the physical and mental battles he faced during his career.
"Then I thought: the next bend is important, or: now I have to keep up my pace on this climb. That's how I tried to distract myself constantly. Sometimes almost so much that you got a new stream of thoughts, which made that little voice that you had to stop stop. A wonderful feeling when that succeeded, because you had defeated that little voice."
While he still enjoys moments of intense effort and physical challenge, Dumoulin acknowledged that there are aspects of professional cycling that he doesn’t miss.
"That was the ultimate, but there's also a lot I don't miss about the sport. To beat that pain and get through that moment, you have to do a lot of things that I didn't really want to do anymore."
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- Nice though you have to ask why they call it a wildcard as it’s always pretty obvious who will receive them.Mistermaumau01-04-2025
- Absolutely, we are inundated by articles (not only in cycling or sport but everywhere from stocks to weather to elections) from self-called or popularly regarded experts making calls without reasoning. They basically know little more than any other informed or interested party and base everything on odds. The fact that they never have to justify their wrong calls post event but continue to get to make calls should get some attention. It would be cool if someone tallied up and recorded their predictions for future reference.Mistermaumau01-04-2025
- Yes, I agree but you’re taking risks writing such long posts here ;-) In that sense, the Tourless Primoz discussion is also pretty pointless as he virtually won a Tour (nobody would have counted on Tadej doing what he did at the last moment at that time and I guess it was bad karma for Primoz for so ofren cutting things so fine). I think you over interpreted my original thesis, it was not for trying to explain his current state, it was to suggest there was already mental material pre-crashes that has helped worsen his state, when it rains it pours. I really do remember having the feeling in that past he was more focused on not letting MVDP get better than him than doing his own thing. The seed of doubt was already planted and it doesn’t take much for doubt to grow in all sorts of directions.Mistermaumau01-04-2025
- i wouldn't count Pogi out. Low probability of a win, but not impossiblemobk01-04-2025
- Right now it doesn't seem that his legs are there or that his head is in the racevappaxbipmv01-04-2025
- would have been nice to hear exactly WHY he thinks pog has zero chance in some greater detail. i mean, tend to agree that his chances aren’t GREAT, but some explanation from the expert with an opinion would be nice. MINE is that, in spite of the recon he did where tadej concluded that the course “wasn’t that hard” i think that doing the full route at full gas is really going to beat up pogacar’s 145lb body, to a degree that he maybe isn’t expecting. but hey, we’ll see in a couple weeks. like everyone else, i do think it’s supercool that he’s going.OCexile01-04-2025
- Go back to that era and look at the lousy mechanicals he's had at Paris-Roubaix. Take those away, maybe he has another Monument, Van der Poel has one less, and suddenly all the rules change. Those mechanicals preceded his awful crashes - and you're right, that Tour was amazing. Ventoux, TT, and Champs-Elysees?! Something that Pogacar and Van der Poel can't do, just Wout. It still amazes me.RidesHills01-04-2025
- Oh, the impossibility of this kind of comparison. A pre-WW2 Binda had amazing statistics, and that was one era. During what I think of as the romantic era, Poulidor had an incredible run at the Tour without winning, and Bobet won some grand tours and some Monuments. In this modern era (for me: after Hinault), we've had multiple Monument winners win a grand tour (such as Valverde and Kelly, with Kelly the better rider in general), and then we've got someone like Roglic, the true GC rider. Sure there was a Monument that was kind of a fluke (both Pogacar and Hirschi might have won, and twitchy Alaphilippe deserved relegation), but what matters are the 5 grand tours and all these wins across the 1 week GC races except for the Tour de Suisse (you'd think he'd race it to get the set of them all). In this era, since 2000 or so, maybe he meets the description as best non-Tour winner. How many GC riders have these wins and not the Tour? To compare to other eras really is not possible. He's his own unique rider, and it's been amazing watching him for the past many years. That's about all we can say.RidesHills01-04-2025
- Ease up on a brother!bobo01-04-2025
- Primoz finds ways to win. Too bad he'll never take Tour de France.awp01-04-2025