“On the first stage, I noticed how much was happening around the race" - Michel Hessmann reflects on the difference in riding a Grand Tour after Giro d'Italia debut

Michel Hessman was one of the unsung heroes of the 2023 Giro d'Italia. Part of the Jumbo-Visma team, the 22-year-old German helped Primoz Roglic to the Maglia Rosa on his Grand Tour debut.

“In November, sports director Grischa Niermann came to see me. He grinned and told me that something was coming up that I should prepare for," Hessman recalls to the official website of Jumbo-Visma. "I somehow understood what he was talking about.”

The first Grand Tour of a rider's career can often be a pretty brutal experience. For Hessman however, it turned out to be a beautiful three weeks of racing. “With Edoardo Affini, my responsibility was to perform a lot of effort at the front on the flat and the short climbs. The right positioning is to keep the guys out of the wind. Things like that,” he explains. “It was a surreal image for me too. I was at the front of a peloton of world-class riders and men who weighed around 60 kilos.”

“It was an amazing experience. It was such an adrenaline rush,” he continues before recalling the day every Jumbo-Visma rider will not soon forget, the stage 20 individual time-trial. “This script would undoubtedly be rejected if a movie director submitted it because it lacked credibility. That day, everything came together. My girlfriend warned me that morning that things might not go Primoz’s way. I refused to believe it. I was so nervous. I was sure that Primoz would finish it off. It just had to be so. It all came together on that one magical day on Monte Lussari.”