A Harder mountain to climb
Being described in 2009 as the “worst climber in the Tour de France” immediately made a cult figure out of Kenny Van Hummel. Five years on, the affable Dutchman is thanking his new Italian team for the opportunity to forge a different reputation
Kenny Van Hummel arrives wearing the puppyish smile that will light his features for the next 40 minutes, except when he’s discussing the final months of three largely unhappy years at Vacansoleil or the 2009 Tour de France. Ah yes, that Tour. Van Hummel has taken 22 wins in sprint finishes in a pro career spanning eight years but it is for his climbing performances in that edition of the Grande Boucle that he is still best known. Or for what Tour competitions director Jean- François Pescheux called him: the worst climber in the history of the Tour de France.
It comes as a shock to learn that what seemed at the time like a charming underdog story has scarred Van Hummel. Already the lanterne rouge as that 2009 Tour reached the Pyrenees, the
Dutchman was soon waging a thrilling, against- the- odds battle against the terrain and the time limits, barely scraping by on every finish line and retaining his last place on general classification with ease. On the second day in the Pyrenees, he survived, he said at the time, only because his directeur sportif was relaying instructions from his car’s sat nav into Van Hummel’s earpiece, giving him a split second’s notice before every kink in the road. Lance Armstrong, whose opinion at that time still seemed to matter, felt moved to inform his three million Twitter followers that he had “a great deal of respect for Kenny Van Hummel” who was a “superman”.
At first, Skil Shimano’s caped crusader seemed flattered by the attention. “They will have to shoot me off the bike to get me home,” he quipped in one of many interviews. After a few days, though, probably around the time Dutch camera crews started camping on his front lawn back home, some of the media coverage took on a scornful tone. Pescheux’s “worst climber in the world” barb was simply an off- the- cuff soundbite that Van Hummel took to heart. By the time he had crashed out of the Tour on stage 17, thus ending the fairy tale, one fellow sprinter was sneering that Van Hummel had “one arm a yard longer than the other,” the inference being that his team car had been helping him with more than just directions.
As he sips a post- stage cappuccino on the second evening of the Three Days of De Panne ( his Italian team-mates would be appalled), Van Hummel admits that becoming cycling’s equivalent of Erik the Eel did confer significant financial gain, particularly on the lucrative post-Tour criterium circuit. But here his head droops to one side, his smile disappears and he sighs. “I didn’t want to become famous as the last man in the Tour. Also, money doesn’t buy you happiness.”
Within that second remark lies a mantra that Van Hummel had the good sense to heed last autumn. Having already accepted that his cycling career had ended with the demise of Vacansoleil, he enrolled in a sports coaching course at Johan Cruyff University. He and his girlfriend were knocking back cocktails on a beach in Thailand when Van Hummel’s agent called out of the blue with a proposition.
“He asked me how I would feel about riding for an Italian team,” Van Hummel recalls. “I asked him which one and he said, ‘Androni Giocattoli’. I knew the team manager, Gianni Savio – everyone does
“I didn’t want to become famous as the last man in the Tour de france”
– but not much else about them. So I said I’d think about it and we went off to do a bit of research on the internet. I saw that the team usually did the Giro and some other good races. My agent also mentioned that they had signed Johnny Hoogerland and were going to more races in France, Belgium and Holland, using Johnny’s national champion’s jersey to get publicity. We took a night to think about it, then called my agent to say that we’d go for it. Unfortunately, the holiday changed after that: I’d been drinking beers and eating nice food. That had to stop.”
Van Humm el and Savio seemed like a cross- cultural marriage made in Pythonesque heaven. Savio’s teams have always hosted Colombians and Venezuelans but until this year, Androni’s moustachioed ringmaster had never employed a Dutch rider. Savio and Van Hummel agree that they immediately hit it off, despite some rather alarming first impressions. “The first words I said to him, in my terrible English, were: ‘ Kenny, you’re fat!’” Savio remembers with a hoot. Directeur sportif Giovanni Elena then informed the new recruit that he “looked more like a mechanic”.
Van Hummel laughed it off. Early in his career, weight was a more persistent nemesis than even mountain roads until he began working with a former female cyclist turned dietician, Anouska Van Der Zee. These days, he says that his girlfriend is now his chef, superfood guru and nutritional headmistress. Cherubic as he looked, at his first meet with Savio he was already carrying less weight than in Thailand. When he turned up to Androni’s second training camp in January, jaws again dropped. “The other riders were like, ‘ Have you not eaten since before Christmas?’ he chuckles. All told, between Thailand and his first outing in an Androni jersey at the Tour do Brasil in midFebruary, Van Hummel had lost 10kg. Kenny Rob ert Van Hummel was surely destined for a life on two wheels from the moment his parents named him after 70s motorcycle racing legend Kenny Roberts. Their son grew up to prefer motocross while the family’s modest income meant he ended up on a pushbike. When, thanks more to hard work than talent, he later turned pro, young Kenny displayed some of the speed and all of the audacity of his father’s hard-revving heroes. ‘ Kamikaze Kenny’, Michael Boogerd dubbed his team-mate at Rabobank.
TODAY, VAN HUMMEL belongs to that realm of honest, yeoman sprinters who generally finish between fourth and 10th in a bunch sprint, bar the occasional surprise victory. Generalising too much and perhaps flattering himself slightly, he tells us in De Panne that, “Cavendish, Kittel and Greipel are out on their own, and I’m one of around 15 guys a level beneath them.” The next morning, we watch Sacha Modolo squeeze past him in the dying metres of the De Panne finishing straight. Van Hummel deals with defeat like the hardened journeyman that he is, collecting a drink and jacket from a soigneur then riding off in search of the team hotel.
Savio tells us that he signed both of his Dutch imports, Van Hummel and Hoogerland, with impending reforms to the cycling calendar and division system in mind. Those changes were due to put an even greater premium on ranking points but will now only be implemented in 2017 at the earliest. Even without them, Savio says both riders bring experience to Androni’s roster and more international exposure for his sponsors. What he doesn’t mention, but is also true, is that both Van Hummel and Hoogerland came cheap.
At the time of writing, Savio considered himself a satisfied customer. In the Tour of Langkawi in February, he looked on in horror as his sprinter found himself at the bottom of a pile- up, 800 metres from the finish-line. Van Hummel’s body that night was a weeping, bleeding, throbbing monument to the abrasive properties of tarmac. Savio gave him no chance of starting the following day, then ordered him to take it easy when Van Hummel insisted. ‘ King Kenny’ would have none
of it. “I told Gianni that it was important to keep sprinting because it was a mental thing. When you don’t sprint, you get scared. The next day I came fifth, which Gianni was really surprised about, then two days later I won.”
“That win showed that he’s a really tough cookie,” Savio says, “and a really nice guy. A lot of sprinters are a little, shall we say, strange. But not Kenny. The way he thanked his team-mates at the end of that stage reminded me of Cavendish. He really felt that it was a team victory.”
Van Hummel’s altruism is evident when he recalls another significant stage in Langkawi, this one from 2011. He was riding for Skil Shimano and doing his best to mentor the team’s promising German neo- pro time triallist, one Marcel Kittel.
“We’d had a training camp in the winter in Malaga and done some match sprints. I was up against Kittel and, I must say, it wasn’t much fun for me. He beat me in the first one, then again in the second. By the third of eight rounds, I think he was feeling sorry for me and letting me win. Anyway, at Langkawi a couple of months later I’d sprinted in the first two stages and got fifth then eighth. It wasn’t great, so I pulled Koen de Kort aside before the third stage and said to him that we’d sprint for Kittel but wouldn’t tell him until late in the stage so he wouldn’t get nervous. Sure enough,
“I’m one of about 15 guys a level beneath Ca v, Kittel and Greipel”
30 kilometres from the finish I rode alongside Marcel and broke the news. As I expected, he was like: ‘ WHAT?! No way. I’ve got bad legs…’ So I told him that it didn’t matter if he finished 15th or 20th – we just wanted to show him what we expected from him in the lead- outs from now on. I ended up leading it out with Koen and of course Marcel won by about four bike lengths. The rest is history…”
Four years on, Van Hummel is a fan of Kittel’s sprinting and an even bigger one of his humility. “He’s exactly the same guy. I think that’s really important,” he says.
On the bike, he believes, GiantShimano’s blond adonis and his lead- out train have changed the shape of race finales. “Their whole philosophy is that you only hit the front once,” Van Hummel explains. “Personally, I feel that a lot of teams go to the front too early, then go back and have to come forward again.
That costs a lot of energy. I told the guys of Skil Shimano a few years ago that we only go one time and we stay there. It’s not always easy to manage it but 90 per cent of the sprints that Giant- Shimano do, they get right. I don’t think they necessarily have the best individuals in that train but it’s a real team. When Kittel wins, it’s not just Kittel’s victory, it’s the whole team’s – even the guy who’s riding at the front all day just to keep the break within catchable range. They also show their team spirit in public when they celebrate.”
Van Hummel enjoyed the happiest and most successful time of his career in Giant- Shimano’s former incarnation, Skil Shimano. Under Gianni Savio, he hopes to rediscover the form he enjoyed with Skil in 2010, when he says that “worst climber in the history of the Tour” label inspired him to train harder than ever. “I may not be very good at climbing mountains but I’m not a terrible bike rider,” he says. Even in the high stuff, Van Hummel’s record suggests that he is scarcely any slower uphill than the majority of his sprinting peers, and certainly no worse than Kittel.
Now, he says, he is relishing life in an Italian team not only as an opportunity to prolong his career but also as “a human adventure”. A few months in, his Italian is improving fast thanks to some unconventional learning techniques. Back home in Huissen, close the German border, he regularly drops in on his Italian neighbours for coffee, where the conversation is strictly in italiano. Even more helpful, he says, are the Italian Donald Duck comics that are now his stock nighttime reading.
Better communication will help him to become the same rallying point that he was once at Skil Shimano. He already chortles at the camaraderie that reigns at Androni, and which he says contrasts starkly with the situation he left behind at Vacansoleil.
“I may not be very good at climbing mountains but I’m not a terrible bike rider”
“Vacansoleil was a big henhouse with many roosters. You had many groups and it wasn’t a real team. You have so many good riders, everyone wants to go for his own victory, after his own agenda, consequently it’s very important to have good management above. Sometimes that was a bit of a problem. The difference here is that it’s one big family. I’ve said that a lot recently, so it’s not new, but you have Savio slightly above everyone else and then a flat hierarchy underneath him. Nobody feels bigger than anyone else.”
As he speaks, his gaze momentarily wanders over our shoulder and into the hotel restaurant where his team-mates are arriving for dinner. He laughs. “Ah, they’ve gone for the black tracksuits. Sometimes it’s blue. They have to be coordinated. They really want to show they’re a team…”
And with that, ‘ King’ Kenny scoops up the last froth out of his coffee cup and gets up to leave. With another one of those smiles and a wistful final reflection: “I’m just really happy here. How many times have I used the word ‘ happy’ already?”