INTERVIEW: SAM OOMEN
At 22, Sam Oomen finished ninth at the 2018 Giro and has emerged as one of the best climbers in the world. Just before his season was written off through iliac artery surgery, he told us about the steps he must take to become a grand tour contender
The talented young Dutch rider tells Procycling about his ambitions, and we look at the injury that has curtailed his season
Sam Oomen’s stamping ground is Tilburg in south central Holland, and in that neck of the woods the easiest way for a cyclist to gain some altitude is to ride downtown and take the lift up the 22 floors of the Interpolis building.
Tilburg is where Oomen remains to this day. We suspect most 23-year-old climbers, and especially one whose track record includes finishing ninth in the Giro, would be itching to move away from the silted farm tracks and motorway overpasses of North Brabantse to Andorra, the Côte d’Azur or some other hilly haunt favoured by scores of pros who have scoured themselves into wraiths by living close to their work.
Not Oomen. Not yet at least. “Weird, huh?” he smiles when we remark on the incongruity of a pedigreed mountain goat voluntarily living out of habitat. “But you have to find a balance between training and the mental aspect,” Oomen explains. “And I feel so happy going back home after a stage race, having a couple of days back
home to get mentally fresh for the next race. All my friends and family live there and I feel super comfy there.”
More surprises around matters of altitude follow. After a spring in which the vibes coming off the most successful riders was that their secret lay in enduring semipermanent training camps atop isolated mountains, Oomen revealed he had done two altitude training camps. What, one in February and another in late March, we enquire? But no, two in total. “Last year 16 days in Sierra Nevada before the Giro, and the year before two and a half weeks in La Plagne before the Vuelta.
“It’s not like I don’t do any climbing, though,” and he tells us he frequently motors over to team leader Tom Dumoulin’s home in the Limburg hills. “You can do 2,000m in a day, easy.”
We meet Oomen in the dining room of a Basque Country hotel in early April. In the bar, football is on TV and a fug of smoke drifts through from the punters. “Here’s fine,” he insists when asked if he wished to move away from the miasma. He is dressed in a backwards baseball cap, billowing tracksuit and flip flops; we weren’t sure he hadn’t just been roused from a siesta. It was a hunch reinforced by his unconcealed tabby cat yawns. On first appearances, if there was a jersey for the most laid-back rider, Oomen would win.
In March, he finished ninth at TirrenoAdriatico. He described that as “not super, but just good”. He rode most of the Basque Country but abandoned after four stages. By that point, because Wilco Kelderman had crashed badly at the Volta a Catalunya, he was already set to reprise his role as best supporting climber for Tom Dumoulin’s Giro bid. That didn’t end well for either of them. Dumoulin’s early exit on stage 5 was well-covered, while Oomen crashed on the stage to Courmayeur on stage 14 and fractured his hip.
But the absolute kicker was that all through the period of training and racing and talking about ambition and hopes – there was a lot of that because at the end of the Giro’s first week, Oomen was lying 10th – he knew that he needed surgery to correct a kinked iliac artery. We suspected, but couldn’t ask because his team blocked a follow-up interview during his recovery, that it must have been a tough secret to conceal. After all, when Fabio Aru announced he was undergoing surgery for the same condition earlier this year, he told LaGazzettadelloSport that he cried upon hearing the news. In early June, when the news came out that his season was over, Oomen wisecracked to Dutch broadcaster, Nos, that it was his 200,000km service.
HIDDEN SUFFERING
Laurens ten Dam, a former team-mate and Yoda to Oomen’s Luke Skywalker, says that beneath the calm red-haired facade is a thinker. Driving to the Dutch nationals, the veteran climber, now with Polish team CCC, told Procycling, “Underneath the surface is a guy who sometimes worries a lot.” Ten Dam’s wife Thessa, who was travelling with him, concurred. She added, “He thinks a lot and reconsiders everything.”
Oomen confided in Ten Dam about the iliac problem. At first Oomen wanted to explore non-invasive measures to treat the artery with a chiropractor’s help or with massage. Ten Dam, who endured two years of racing with the same condition at a time
when it was underdiagnosed, said Oomen’s decision to race a grand tour knowing and concealing the issue was “brave”.
Ten Dam quit the Giro the day Oomen had found himself in a break. From a team car behind, Ten Dam watched Oomen for a while. “I knew when they started attacking in the final, one leg will be full of lactate and he won’t be able to follow the attacks. Then he’ll have to make up a story again for the press instead of telling the real story about this iliac thing.”
Did he think Sunweb had put Oomen in an impossible position by putting him in a Giro team knowing that a) he was going to be sub-par and b) the serious reason why? “I don’t know if it was his team; it was also him. He’s just too brave to quit.”
STEADY STEPS FORWARD
At 23, Oomen’s rise up the ranks has been eerily smooth. First year: a couple of icebreaking WorldTour races augmented with a GC and a stage win at the Tour de l’Ain. Second year: GC top
10s at the Tour of California and the Tour of Poland, plus an assured grand tour debut at the Vuelta a España stymied only by a stomach bug on stage 14. Third year: ninth in the Giro plus two more top 10s in WorldTour stage races. This year was supposed to be much like last, with a concentrated mixture of support functions – notably at the Tour – and leadership responsibility. It will make the roadblock he hit this year so much more galling for him and the team.
In particular, his Giro performance in 2018 will have reassured Sunweb’s managers that their early hunch on his promise was well-placed. Oomen was Dumoulin’s most able support rider in a mountainous three weeks. He was present and correct on the last day in the Alps, helping manoeuvre his leader into a position from which to attack the pink jersey Chris Froome on the slopes to Cervinia. It didn’t pay off because by then Dumoulin had run out of terrain and legs, but the value was in the endeavour. And besides, Oomen chipped out ninth for himself.
He was however notably absent during Sky’s 100km assault the previous day on the Finestre. Dumoulin was expecting an attack to come. On the morning in question, in the race briefing, Dumoulin told the team: “Sky will put riders in the break, Poels is going to make a super-hard tempo on the Finestre and Froome attacks a few kilometres before the top and he will try to bridge up to the guys in front. That’s 100 per cent what will happen.” That came to pass, but Dumoulin did not have Oomen at his side. Why, given the youngster’s sure-footedness both before and after?
“The thing is, that day I was not super confident of myself physically, because the day before we finished on Prato Nevoso
and I was really not good. I was dropped earlier than I hoped and so I was doubting how I would be on the biggest day of the whole Giro. The shit thing was that actually I was quite okay. Afterwards I was thinking, ‘Ah f*ck, I was actually alright.’ Now I could say, ‘Yeah, I should have attacked on the first climb,’ but I have no idea.” He pauses. “No. I could not have done something differently, I don’t think.”
Almost a year on, any what-ifs are buried beneath an overwhelmingly positive heap of memories. “It was a super nice experience that I will remember for the rest of my life. The first thing I think about is the last weekend of the Giro, the Finestre and standing in Rome having a beer after a three-week adventure – that was super special. You cannot compare it to anything else. I feel really privileged to have experienced that.”
Oomen admits that the uncertainty about his capacities and capabilities linger. They surface most predictably at the start of stage races, when presumably his mind’s been taken off his métier by a spell in Tilburg and he’s about to go wheel to wheel with the best climbers. “I’ve always had that insecure feeling and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It keeps me sharp, I would say, so I don’t mind it.”
The gap between the groupings of, say, 10th to fifth and fourth to first in WorldTour stage races has arguably never been wider or harder to bridge. Oomen agrees. “Last year I ended up a lot between five and 10th on GC and you would say it’s only one step left to reach the top five, but it’s the hardest step. It can take a pretty long time.”
This was the year Oomen looked likely to complete his apprenticeship and finish taking the “big steps” in his development, by which he means those gains which are easiest to come by through more training, better resting and a degree of experience.
“Then you come to a point maybe around 25 when the steps you’re taking are getting smaller and you have to invest more and more in each one. You can see it with Tom and other riders: only once they turn 26, 27 do they really make it to the top.” Before this year’s setbacks, one would have chalked Oomen down as ahead of that schedule. That’s taken a knock now. But in midJune, three weeks before Oomen was scheduled to undergo the operation to correct the iliac artery, he was at the Ten Dam’s, looking lean and mean. Around the family firepit one evening, Oomen talked about whether, once he was recovered, he should move somewhere hilly.
“He was still looking so, so focused,” says zen master Ten Dam about that evening. “I told him not to be so hard on himself and not worry too much about what he ate – just to make sure he went into that operation totally fit. Basically, I told him to write this season off.”
It’s hard, it seems, to quell a professional rider’s racing thoughts, no matter if they come across in public as relaxed as Oomen. What is certain is that if the recovery goes well, there’ll be no one happier than Ten Dam to see Oomen zooming back to the front in the mountains.
“I knew when they started attacking in the final, one leg will be full of lactate and he won’t be able to follow the attacks. Then he’ll have to make up a story again for the press" Laurens ten Dam