A TT WIN AT THE TOUR
Dumoulin won the stage 20 time trial at the Tour. The day before, on the ! inal mountain stage, he tried in vain to drop the yellow jersey while also defending his podium place from Primož Roglic
Pro: The Tour ended on a high…
TD: It looks a bit like Primo Roglic’s pose when he celebrates his wins with the ski-jumping telemark pose. That wasn’t my intention! That was the best win of the season. I started to come down with something during the closing week and I felt like the end of the Tour couldn’t come quickly enough. In the days before, I felt myself start to deteriorate. It was very frustrating because I was still hoping to attack Thomas. To make it worse, my position was under threat from Roglic. Instead of being the hunter, I became the prey. I didn’t like that at all. I carried that anger over to the TT, but I’d lost the feeling of frustration by then; I felt calm once more and I would just have to see where the ship would land. Pro: You had a problem with your skinsuit, too... TD: My suitcase with my time trial kit was missing. During the Tour, no one feels like transporting and unpacking a 25kg suitcase every day. That’s why I always leave some of the time trial kit that I know I won’t need until later, in the truck. That bag went missing. I had sent the staff a message the night before: ‘I left two bags of my kit with you, please make sure they will be there tomorrow.’ ‘Yes, yes, it will be taken care of’, I was told. Then, the next day, I discovered that the bag wasn’t there. But I won the time trial by just one second – that was an incredible story. Everything came together in the end.
Pro: And then the timing during the time trial was wrong and they initially put Froome ahead of you...
TD: The incident concerning Froome’s time also accompanies that quite well. When I was looking back at the footage, for a while I thought they might have messed around with the time to let me win. But it turned out they had stopped the clock too early when Froome arrived. You couldn’t make days like that up.