Tom Dumoulin still hasn’t raced in 2020, but he keeps training and thinking about the immediate and long-term future of cycling.
After missing the back half of 2019 having injured his knee in a heavy fall at the Giro d’Italia, 2020 was going to be the year for Dumoulin to make his comeback, heading up a trio of leaderswith new team Jumbo-Visma at the Tour de France.
This is a crazy situation,” said Dumoulin. “I came from a terrible year and had high hopes for 2020: now I am going full throttle after that knee injury. But this year has not brought any luck so far.”
“Cycling is also fun without a goal,” he explained. “It is still nice to take a trip to the Ardennes by bike. I just try to find a goal every day, not focus only on one race. Because that would be hard and can be disappointing.”
“I would rather have uncertainty now than to have the certainty that it will not go ahead,” the rider affirmed about the Tour de France. “If the organization has a bit of hope, then I also hope. I don’t think it is possible to move to September, but maybe it would be possible to do it before the Vuelta?”
“They should extend the season to mid-November and ride the spring races in the fall, in October and early November. We would keep the World Championships in the same dates, just after the Tour de France and the Vuelta. The Giro? It would be difficult to ride then another grand tour.”
“But now that we are talking about it, I think that every season should move one month. In mid-November, the weather here in Belgium and the Netherlands is often fantastic while in mid-February we sometimes still have snow or something. If we now extend this season to November, we will start a month later in 2021, and we could continue that period in the future. That sounds fantastic to me.”
