INTERVIEW: NIKI TERPSTRA

Quick-Step rider Niki Terpstra won ParisRoubaix in 2014. Now 33, the Dutchman looks back on his success on the cobbles so far

The last sighting of Niki Terpstra in the wild before this edition of

Procycling went to press was in Le Samyn, in early March. In a way, it was peak Terpstra. The day’s temperature hovered around freezing point and a biting, grabbing wind was blowing in from the east. Terpstra, wrapped in layers and layers of clothing, was off the front. A team performance of ice-cold ruthlessness from Quick-Step Floors had seen most of the squad represented in a mid-race break – six out of 16 riders away, after they’d levered themselves clear of the peloton in crosswinds with over 100 kilometres. Sixteen became five, which became three: Terpstra, his team-mate Gilbert and DirectEnergie’s Damien Gaudin. Gaudin would have known what was coming next: an attack from a Quick-Step rider, a chase, a counter from the other rider, another chase, and so on. In the end, it only took one go from Gilbert, then another from Terpstra to finish the Frenchman off. Terpstra was away, and en route to victory in a tough Belgian one-day race held in filthy conditions, just as he was in this same race two years ago, and the Dwars door het Hageland in the late summer. There seems to be something about crappy weather that brings out the best in Niki Terpstra. So it’s surprising when Terpstra tells

Procycling that at best his feelings on poor conditions are ambivalent. “I almost never cycle in the rain. I hate it. I hate it more and more,” he says. Then he adds: “Well, racing in the rain is fine. It makes the race tougher. But I don’t like it.”

Terpstra is primarily a man of the spring. He is most visible in the Classics and one-day races of northern Europe, though he’s at pains to point out that his wins have come throughout the year. He’s a three-time Dutch road race champion and winner of the Tour de Wallonnie, which are summer races, and he’s won the autumn Eneco (now BinckBank) Tour. Terpstra is also the most successful rider at the World Championships team time trial – he’s been part of Quick-Step’s squad every year the event has taken place (20122017) and has shared in three wins, a second, a third and a fourth.

But if Niki Terpstra has a specialism, it’s in the cobbled Classics. He’s a consistent performer across most of them – he’s been runner-up in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, E3 Harelbeke, GentWevelgem and the Tour of Flanders, and he’s won Dwars door Vlaanderen. If it hadn’t been for one April day four years ago, his career might look like a story of near-misses and minor wins (and, to be fair, of supporting team-mates, such as Tom Boonen, to some of their biggest victories). In the 2014 Paris-Roubaix, Terpstra missed the selection that happened over the last really significant sector of cobbles, the Carrefour de l’Arbre, but in one of those idiosyncratic tactical moments that are characteristic of cycling, the race came back together again. From the resulting 11-rider group (narrator’s voice: three were from the Omega Pharma-Quick Step team) Terpstra made a speculative but assertive attack and was never seen again. He’ll go into the 2018 race as one of only four current riders in ownership of a cobblestone trophy.

A PERSISTANT PRESENCE

Somebody, another journalist, once told me that the perception of Terpstra in the peloton depended on perspective. A rider had said, “If you’re on his team, Terpstra is the best team-mate you could have; if he’s a rival, he’s the most annoying guy in the bunch.”

I asked him about this, but he’d batted the question away by explaining he just liked his team to win, and that team spirit was important to him. But then we

started talking about his experiences of Paris-Roubaix in previous seasons.

“The first time I really rode in the final of Paris-Roubaix was in 2012, with Tom Boonen’s win,” he says.

Boonen had his best ever season in 2012, winning the unique quadruple of E3, Gent-Wevelgem, Flanders and Roubaix, but it was the last of these which confirmed his as a season for the ages. Terpstra had attacked after Arenberg, so he was off the front. It was textbook – Boonen bridging up, then the two co-operating to build a lead. Except the timing had been bad for Terpstra, and Boonen dropped him very quickly on the Orchies cobbled sector to go it alone with 52km to go. “I’ve still got mixed feelings. It was a great attack we did at that moment, and I’m happy that I helped him to that win. But I was too enthusiastic on the cobbles and I just blew myself. I just needed some recovery,” he says.

“Even now I have the feeling that, oh f*ck, if I could have kept his wheel I’d have been on the podium. But I was still a big help. I was in the group behind Tom and I was really annoying for the chasers. Just before a cobbles section I’d get in front and then slow the pace down. I was being annoying, disrupting their rotation. If you are in front on the cobbles especially, it’s not easy to pass, so they already lost some seconds. It still took a lot of power because I kept having to get to the front and I was completely broken at the end. It was a great day.

“Luckily, the year after I got on the podium and the year after that I won. I don’t have any bad feelings about it.”

CHAOS ON THE COBBLES

Terpstra’s Paris-Roubaix win in 2014 is a perfect example of how brains can often beat brawn in a bike race. Of course, you don’t come in the top two of just about every cobbled Classic without being strong, and Terpstra doesn’t pretend to be a grand master of tactical nuance, nor does he overcomplicate things.

“I’m just good on the cobblestones,” he says. “It’s physics. A climber is good on the climbs. I’m good on the cobbles.”

But that also detracts from the complexity of his win and how it came about. OPQS had crowded the top 10 of the previous week’s Tour of Flanders without ever looking like they were capable of winning and in putting Stijn Vandenbergh, a doughty cobbles rider but no sprinter, into the final selection of four they also guaranteed missing the podium. But in Paris-Roubaix, they dictated the shape of the race for the entirety of the final hour and a half – Boonen himself went away with 65 kilometres to go, along with Sky’s Geraint Thomas and Giant rider Bert De Backer, and they built a lead of a minute. Defending champion Fabian Cancellara’s Trek team was unequal to the task of bringing them back, so the chase consisted of riders going up the road on their own initiative – first Peter Sagan and Maarten Wynants, then Cancellara himself with Sep Vanmarcke in tow, and finally the remnants of the peloton, which by sector six at Cysoing, counted no more than a dozen riders, including Terpstra.

Sagan attacked just before Carrefour de l’Arbre, then Cancellara pulled John

Degenkolb, Vanmarcke and OPQS’s Ždenek Štybar clear on that sector. Five at the front, six more, including Terpstra, behind them, and the rest nowhere. Normally, that would have been that, but the composition of the front group wasn’t right – Cancellara and Vanmarcke looked the strongest, but neither wanted to tow Degenkolb and Sagan, both faster in the sprint, to the finish. And while they dithered, the two OPQS riders – Boonen and Terpstra – and the two Sky riders – Thomas and Bradley Wiggins – in the sextet behind smoothly co-operated their way back into contention.

With no really hard cobbles left, the composition of the group of 11 at the front became the decisive factor. There were three OPQS, two Sky and two Giant riders, while Vanmarcke, Sagan, Cancellara and Garmin’s Sebastian Langeveld were all isolated and outnumbered.

So when Terpstra attacked, the others should have seen the danger. Of course, his team-mates wouldn’t chase. Nor would any of the isolated riders. Sky, without a sprinter in the group, looked at the Giant duo of Degenkolb and De Backer. De Backer wearily went to the front of the group and so the entire 2014 Paris-Roubaix came down to a simple pursuit match: Niki Terpstra versus Bert De Backer. Terpstra’s move, deliberately or otherwise, had been tactically perfect – you could argue that at best he was the sixth or seventh strongest in the race, but he didn’t need to be stronger than Cancellara, or Vanmarcke, or Degenkolb. He just needed to be stronger than De Backer - a rider whose best result up to that point had been a win in the 2013 GP Jef Scherens.

“It’s the biggest prize in my career. It’s tough and it’s a real Classic. It’s something heroic,” Terpstra recalls. “I watched it on television when I was a child and it was a dream to start it. After that it was my dream to win it.”

Then he holds his finger and thumb just a few millimetres apart and says, “Sometimes the difference is like this. In the heat of the moment, you make the right decision. You make decisions in races in one second or less.”

He uses the 2015 Tour of Flanders as a counter-example to the 2014 ParisRoubaix. “I was second in that race, and after I attacked, if Alexander Kristoff had waited just one second, I’d have been away solo,” he says. “But I was unlucky – he came with me and was super strong. He’s also really fast in the sprint. In the end I was just waiting and gambling that the other guys would come back to us, but they didn’t come back. Sometimes you need to be lucky. Sometimes I make good decisions, sometimes I make bad decisions, but it’s always easy to say after the race. In the heat of the moment, it’s never easy. That’s the funny thing about tactics. If you make a move, if you win it’s brilliant, and if you don’t, it’s stupid.

“When I won Dwars door Vlaanderen, I went with 35 kilometres to go and with a big peloton behind. I didn’t think, I just went. I didn’t think, ‘This is the moment.’ People were probably, like, ‘What the f*ck are you going to do?’ But then I won and they were all, like, ‘That was brilliant.’”

Terpstra, like everybody else in the Quick-Step Floors team, is adjusting to life after Tom Boonen. Stybar is still around and Philippe Gilbert is the defending champion at the Tour of Flanders, but their cobbled Classics team looks a little less strong and a little older than it was in their heyday. Terpstra himself is 33, but as he demonstrated at Le Samyn, his resilience and strength have not abated. And nor has his ambition: “I can win Paris-Roubaix again,” he says.