INTERVIEW: DYLAN GROENEWEGEN
Dylan Groenewegen is the in-form sprinter in the peloton in 2019, who won two Tour stages last season. But the Dutchman is a quiet enigma, who off the bike gives little away. Procycling meets the fastest rider in the peloton who prefers to let his legs do
The quiet Dutchman is the in-form rider of 2019, but far from your typical hot-headed sprinter
The yellow and black of the Jumbo-Visma bus contrasts starkly with the grey and brown brick of Boulevard Alexandre III in central Dunkirk. A handful of people wait outside. Most are retirementage locals taking a quizzical look over the temporary barrier put around the bus. Inside the perimeter, seven celeste Bianchis are set up on bike stands for final pre-race tweaks. A man with a camera around his neck takes a few pictures to document the alien invasion of his town. One woman walks past determinedly, shopping bag firmly in hand and headphones on her ears, barely taking a second glance at the string of coaches that have taken over the high street. It’s a Tuesday morning and life doesn’t stop because there’s a race in
town. At a quarter to midday, Dylan Groenewegen lowers himself down the bus’s steps, helmet and sunglasses on, to go to the race sign-on podium. News that some form of life has emerged passes around, but the crowd swells to no more than a dozen.
There are just over six weeks to the start of the Tour de France and all of the sprinters aiming to be on the start line in Brussels on July 6 are fine-tuning their preparations. Most have chosen the challenging Giro d’Italia as their testing ground: Fernando Gaviria, Elia Viviani and Caleb Ewan. Others have picked the warm sunshine and wide open roads of the Tour of California: Peter Sagan and Mark Cavendish. But away from the spotlight and away from the glare of the world’s cycling media, in a grey North Sea town, Groenewegen is making his racing return, after six weeks away, at the Four Days of Dunkirk. Unlike the concurrently running races his rivals are at, there aren’t hordes of international media here; there isn’t even a sign of one TV camera waiting to speak to him. It’s a low-key location for the sprinter who is the most successful of 2019 so far. But understated seems to be how Groenewegen likes things.
By the end of the week, the Dutchman will have won three times at the six-stage race to take his victory tally to eight by the middle of May – 50 per cent more than his nearest rivals Gaviria, Viviani and Ewan at the same point. Recent history dictates that the Tour de France tends to be dominated by one sprinter each year and if you follow the stats and form guide, the safe bet before the race would be on Groenewegen being that rider this year.
The Tour was the turning point in Groenewegen’s ascension from young up-and-comer to the sprinting A-list. In 2017, after a string of podium places and top 10s, the Dutch rider did what many of his rivals failed to do by surviving to Paris to win his first grand tour stage on the Champs-Élysées. In the two years since, the wins haven’t stopped. Twenty-four, to be precise - 14 last season to made him the year’s most prolific sprinter, including Kuurne, three stages of Paris-Nice, Driedaagse Brugge-De Panne and another two stage wins at the 2018 Tour.
Considering his palmarès, you’d therefore expect a buzz to follow Groenewegen wherever he goes.
But Groenewegen, at least the public version of him, doesn’t seem much like a typical sprinter at all. Sprinters inherently tend to have an ego. They’re the football forwards, the rugby try scorers, the rider who is expected to keep the victories ticking over, to win frequently, to win all season long. They’re the ones whose name gets written on the score sheet, the one that finishes off the job for the team, the one who the spotlight falls on. Being the centre of attention is often second nature. A sprinter’s job is quite literally about making as big and as quick an impact as possible. Fast, furious and full of adrenaline, they’re a pan of boiling
water simmering away waiting to bubble over at just the right moment. Keeping a lid on all that energy means that their personalities off the bike tend to be as explosive as their feet are on the pedals.
Not Groenewegen though. The man Procycling meets, and has encountered in post-race press conferences and mixed zones over the past two seasons, doesn’t appear to have any of that bravado. He’s not a temperamental hot-head like a young Mark Cavendish. Or a show-off like Mario Cipollini. He doesn’t do wheelies in front of the camera like Peter Sagan. He’s probably the fastest sprinter in the world right now, but unusually he doesn’t like to shout about it. Rather than make headlines off the bike, he seems content, and he prefers to simply to let his legs do the talking.
In fact, when Procycling meets him, Groenewegen is even quieter and more reserved than we expected. He’s polite, friendly, stops to take a selfie with a teenage boy who walks past and spots him, and smiles constantly. But his answers throughout our interview are short and succinct. Barely more than a few seconds long, just like his sprints. Trying to understand much about the man behind the fast sprinter that he is, proves challenging. Rather than cycling or sprinting, the most animated Groenewegen seems throughout our time is when he talks about watching his beloved Ajax football team crash out of the Champions League in the semi-finals to a last-minute goal from Tottenham.
But, to the cycling. How different physically does he feel this year compared to 2018?
“Yeah I don’t know, I feel good, but yeah…I think I am this year maybe a little bit stronger than last year but that’s a small per cent, so I think a little bit stronger in my body, I don’t know.”
Where does he think he fits in among his sprint rivals?
“They are also really strong riders, it’s good to ride with them, it’s also good to beat them. These are really strong riders, but every race is different. They are in the Giro, maybe they will be at the Tour de France, we will see them again.” Does he think he’s the fastest sprinter in the world right now? “I think one of the fastest, you have a lot of good sprinters. I think Viviani and Gaviria are really strong but you also have Caleb Ewan, he is really strong. I think those are the sprinters on the top this moment with me. Every race is different.”
What’s the biggest advantage you have over your rivals?
“I don’t know. I sprint as hard as
I can. I don’t know what our tactic is or something...you see the finish line and you sprint full gas and you hope.” Groenewegen’s understated personality in many ways sums up the ethos of the Jumbo-Visma team. He was signed by the Dutch squad in 2016 aged 22 from Roompot-Charles, when little about him was known outside the Dutch network. When he joined, the team - then LottoNLJumbo - had just endured one of the worst seasons in their history, winning just six races, and were cemented near the bottom of the WorldTour rankings. Hardly a tempting environment for a young rider. But then Groenewegen was keen to join a Dutch team, so met with manager Richard Plugge and coach Merijn Zeeman. The latter had been key to unlocking Marcel Kittel’s sprint potential at Skil-Shimano in 2011. The pair were rebuilding the team, and at the heart of that was developing a strong sprint and lead-out. The team has credited its success in recent seasons and strength in depth on canny signings and a focus on developing talent such as Groenewegen and Primož Roglic, rather than bigmoney spending on established stars.
Groenewegen’s lack of bravado, Zeeman says, fits into the team’s culture and ethos. “Everyone can be himself in our team but in the end there are a lot of people behind Dylan who also make it possible that he can win. He needs the fastest bike, he needs the best nutrition, he needs the best training, he needs the best team-mates. A lot of people are putting a lot of effort into his performances, so in the end if we only
have one guy who takes all the credit for it… it’s also very important for our team that everyone realises nobody can do it by himself. You really need all the people around you and all the energy put in,” he says. “I think we should all realise that nobody is bigger than the team.”
However, just because we don’t regularly see Groenewegen displaying his emotions on his sleeve like other sprinters past and present, doesn’t mean that a fiery personality doesn’t live underneath the composed, reserved outer persona. The 25-year-old admits that, unsurprisingly, he doesn’t like losing. “If I lose a race then I am angry, but after an hour it gets better and better and then I look to the next race. It’s more to myself, and then I am really still and say nothing,” he says. “I think everything I do, I do my best.”
Zeeman concurs that in Groenewegen’s early days with the team he’d often lose his cool if a result didn’t go his way, get angry, maybe throw his helmet. But the team coached him to channel his
He doesn’t do wheelies in front of the camera like Peter Sagan. He’s probably the fastest sprinter in the world right now, but unusually he doesn’t like to shout about it
frustration constructively. “Before, if he was very angry, he would go back to the hotel, calm down and then the post-race team meeting was kind of even boring, not critical enough,” says Zeeman. “But we coached in his personal development plan that if something goes wrong, you have to put that energy into the team meeting. If we want to improve we have to be critical to each other.”
When asked directly about how fast he is, or what he could achieve at the Tour this summer, Groenewegen slips into generic replies about how “every race is different” and “we’ll see what happens.”
Zeeman is also reluctant to make bold statements about Groenewegen being the fastest sprinter in the world, even if he believes it. “I think it’s important that we stay humble and I think other people should say these kind of things about us and not ourselves because I want to respect the opponents.”
Yet just because Groenewegen doesn’t like to make brazen statements about his form or his goals, doesn’t mean he privately doesn’t exude exactly the same self-confidence as the most cocksure riders. “He is very confident in himself and in the team and in winning the races - there’s only one thing that counts for him in the Tour and that’s winning, there’s no doubt,” Zeeman says. “He is very confident that he can do that and every one around him knows that he is that confident.” While Groenewegen may be the star sprinter at Jumbo-Visma, he is the core of a cohort of young riders who have emerged through their ranks and turned pro with the squad. His lead-out is made up of Amund Grøndahl Jansen, 25, who joined in 2017; Timo Roosen, 26, who joined in 2015; and Mike Teunissen, 26, who turned pro with Jumbo in 2015, and rejoined this season after two years at Sunweb. All are a similar age, none have children or family commitments yet and by all accounts tend to be the ones laughing and making fun of each
other on the bus. It’s this friendship and bond on and off the bike which the team believes has made them so successful.
Jumbo is one of the few teams that tends to enter every stage race with split objectives in the GC and sprints, meaning Groenewegen has never had a full leadout of six or seven riders around him. Rather, he relies on this core group and then uses his instinct to surf wheels in the finale. Rarely in the last kilometre will you see Groenewegen glued to a team-mate’s wheel in the way other sprinters are. It was a tactic which took a while to perfect, and earned them plenty of critics when he misfired in sprints early on.
“We chose the path to be more flexible and not to have too many guys in front of Dylan, and I think actually that works really well,” Zeeman says. “For example, in Dunkirk we changed it a little bit and had five guys in front of Dylan and the second day we almost missed out, because we got boxed in and Dylan lost his train. That was for me a confirmation for me that we are on the right way with our strategy.”
“We learn very fast, and we ride in the moment,” Groenewegen continues. “I trust them, they trust in me and that’s very important.”
The form book doesn’t always count for everything at the Tour de France. Success is in no way guaranteed. If he wins in Brussels on stage 1, and takes the race’s first yellow jersey, history suggests the wins will keep rolling for Groenewegen. But if they do, just don’t expect him to shout all that much about it.