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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