"The documentary was ultimately made for the fans" - Merijn Zeeman excited for world to see 'All-In: Team Jumbo-Visma'

Today is the day that the much-anticipated Amazon Prime documentary series, All-In: Team Jumbo-Visma finally drops on the streaming site. Merijn Zeeman, Jumbo-Visma's sporting director, has already seen it and is excited for fans to get a behind-the-scenes look at the team.

“I haven't fully watched any documentary about us yet and I kind of scanned through this one. I think it is valuable that our Tour victory has been recorded," Zeeman revealed to In de Leiderstrui. "It's great that I can look back on that in twenty years' time. The documentary was ultimately made for the fans and not for the protagonists."

So just how did the documentary come about? "I saw a documentary about Feyenoord and enjoyed watching it, but you can never show everything in a documentary like that. If things are just taken out that don't go well, then you get another huge storm over you. Everyone then thinks something about it and that held me back a bit," says Zeeman. "On the other hand, I also thought: Cycling is always about the races, but this documentary also gave us the opportunity to show how passionate you are about something and what a huge amount of preparation is involved."

"Things are not black and white, as is often portrayed in the media or on social media. It's more nuanced," he continues. "If you can show things in the process that might make people softer and more understanding, then that was a very good reason to keep it going. It's also good for the team, to show what we actually do, what it involves and what we're all going through."

Alongside Jonas Vingegaard's Tour de France win, one of the key moments of Jumbo-Visma's 2022 and in turn the documentary, was the abrupt retirement of Tom Dumoulin, something Zeeman admits made him a little bit emotional.

"This is a confirmation of the struggle that we have seen with him for a long time," Zeeman reveals. "That's the advantage of a documentary: it was often said that Tom didn't suit us because we would have such a strict regime. That is completely debunked in this documentary, we have tried very hard to provide tailor-made solutions for him. In doing so, we completely deviated from how we normally work, in order to find the entrance to him, so that he could find himself again. Tom has been given the space to do what he himself believed in, only unfortunately for him and for us the struggle remained as it was. It came as no surprise that he decided to quit."

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