"Top talents like Wout Van Aert, Tadej Pogacar and Mathieu van der Poel only come once in a while" - Conti team manager not worried about alleged "downfall" of Dutch cycling
Cycling
Mathieu van der Poel's overwhelming success somewhat hides the elephant in the room of Dutch cycling - that besides the 29-year-old, there is no other big leader. Manager of Dutch continental team Metec - SOLARWATT p/b Mantel Michel Megens (a team that grew up 16 professionals in the past) sees this but quickly points out that despite the limited talent pool, the situation of Dutch cycling is not as dire as it may appear.
Megens is questioned by RIDE magazine whether there is indeed decline in Dutch cycling to which he resolutely replies: "I actually don't agree with that at all. I say Olav Kooij, Marijn van den Berg, Tibor Del Grosso, Arvid de Kleijn and Sjoerd Bax: you shouldn't exaggerate. And no, they won't become world-class cyclists like Tom Dumoulin and Van der Poel or Monument winners like Wout Poels and Bauke Mollema. But in the period before Dumoulin we also had a long time in which the Netherlands didn't win any Monuments."
Read also
"Top talents like Wout van Aert, Tadej Pogacar and Van der Poel only come once in a while. If you immediately state that it is a downfall of Dutch cycling, then I think that is going too far. Moreover, I do not agree with the fact that training teams nowadays only judge talents on the values they pedal. In my opinion, there are many more talents in a person than values. You also need those talents to grow into a world-class rider."
"I think it is a very bad thing that Dutch teams always give priority to foreign riders. All kinds of vague foreign riders get a chance, while they let the young dogs we have in the Netherlands suffocate. I think that is strange."
"Then you can say: 'Michel, then you should set up a ProTeam yourself'. Yes, maybe we should do that. Because our friends from Tour de Tietema also fail to give Dutch riders a chance. They are now going to ride on a French license, which is laughable. It makes no sense. But Team Picnic PostNL and Visma | Lease a Bike could also do a bit more with Dutch talent. The fact that there is only one Dutch rider in the training team of the latter team, that is really crazy."
Just in
Subscribe to our Daily Newsletter today!
Popular news
Latest comments
- Exactly, most cycling fans are also active riders, another difference with many sports, we can actually associate with these people and experience many of the same feelings.Mistermaumau18-12-2024
- Especially now that they claim to be stopping CO treatment, but what else have they (and others) been trying, before banning it starts to be discussed?Mistermaumau18-12-2024
- The article gives a lot of food but lacks much thought. Cycling was PERMANENTLY damaged by one guy’s quest for invincibility and lost a lot of followers that were helping to make it more mainstream. The days of British glory (track, Sky, Wiggins. Froome, Ineos) which were also permitting Anglo media (the dominant form for global influence) to sell the sport as mainstream, are also dead. Many sports don’t have a season’s worth of events to report on, the media focuses on one huge event WC/Olympics and that’s sll that counts, cycling is the opposite, the WC hardly counts whereas traditional races are considered more noteworthy and riders pick and choose races according to a personal agenda, there is no single culminating event and each is more important to some and most important to a few, how is a general reporter to make sense of comparisons in such an individualistic structure? Awards are usually consensus based and there are just not enough people following cycling for it to score high across the board. Sometimes there is not a single or simple reason for things, it is just the cumulative effect of many effects influencing things and in this case, there are dozens. In most countries’ media a sport like cricket or darts or rugby or even the whole Commonwealth results would be completely overlooked too, this may not be the case in the UK or at the Beeb but it does highlight how different perceptions are from different places and people, sumo or wrestling, kayak, judo, karate, have any of these ever even been considered? I don’t know but probably boxing has. A sport has to be commercially popular enough to count, the problem with cycling is, it SEEMS popular but isn’t that just a bias because it’s kind of free? How many fans would really remain if you had to pay a 50€ entrance fee to look from the sidelines, and that’s the thing, the majority of people don’t really watch the SPORT, they enjoy being part of the event and moment and know very little about things. True followers are very rare as the number of commentators on websites such as this one show. Riders also just aren’t interesting enough personalities to interest mainstream media, they have very few newsworthy incidents and even when, the murdering of a wife remained largely internal to the cycling media. It seems as if the cycling powers that be don’t promote cycling news to the outside world, perhaps from lack of budget to persuade general media to report (and we know some sport federations have huge budgets to convince media and reporters to make space for them, look how many pages of national newspapers were dedicated to lower league sports results or even horse racing compared to cycling, gambling companies also influence this as they obviously have more interest in promoting data their clients are likely to be interested in. Anyway, these are just some more aspects the cycling federations should reflect on before ordering an expensive audit to understand why we can’t pull our weight on the global sport scene.Mistermaumau18-12-2024
- Tadej, unlike Armstrong, does not have cancer. Whenever they found something strange about Armstrong, he and his complice system, explained that they were innovative procedures for cancer, which is why he was able to fool around for so many years.
maria2024202418-12-2024 - Oh, Always this frustrated hater present, poor soul, his happiness is defame with falsely rational arguments, pure cheap sophistry. Calm down, go to holidays, maybe you could obtain a genuine moment of happiness.maria2024202418-12-2024
- who cares about the BBC? Let them continue to reward the dirty and every year more violent football, actually, a BBC award is an insult.maria2024202418-12-2024
- Would it be wise to include Pogacar though? I don’t think so. In case he won they’d have to strip him of the award in a few years time anyway. Thermonuclear performances from March to October, no single bad day, 100km solo rides, beating EPO times by minutes, team principals involved in number of doping scandals in the past and most importantly massive improvement during one off-season. If cycling history had taught us anything, it’s that you can’t believe in miracles. Sorry Dopačar
UltimateOpportunist18-12-2024 - No one- aside from dorks like us- cares about cycling. Get over it, and enjoy the sport for what it is. External validation is neither necessary nor valuable.verve82518-12-2024
- The Three Doping Amigo's spouting their nonsense. They were only successful due to their doping.frieders318-12-2024
- Your diversity argument makes no sense. If it was a diversity push, they would be including cycling in order to diversify their nominees.Pogboom17-12-2024