RETRO: PDM TEAM

The Dutch PDM team were trendsetters in the 1980s, and came close to winning the Tour on several occasions, but always just came up short. Procycling looks at their short but influential time in the sport

The Dutch team never quite won the Tour, but they revolutionised cycling nonetheless

Team Association should be a game all cycling fans play. Name a team. Then say whatever first comes into mind. La Vie Claire: kit. Festina: doping. US Postal Service: Armstrong. ONCE: Alex Zulle’s spectacles. Molteni: Merckx. Sky: the line (and where you draw it). And...PDM: bus. Nowadays, every team has a bus, even outside the WorldTour. The vehicle is integral to professional cycling, so much so that when Team Sky were in the pre-launch phase, the design of the bus was a real topic of conversation. The ‘Death Star’, as David Millar once dubbed it, was an integral part of the iconography and ethos of the team and how they wanted to project themselves.

But team buses haven’t been around for that long. The team bus as we know it began with PDM in the late 1980s. Cyrille Guimard’s team did have one, earlier in the decade, but it sticks in no one’s minds. The big black behemoth with the tinted windows was where the Dutch team truly made their mark. In 1989, other teams still had camper vans; in 1991 you could still interview a bike rider sitting on the bonnet of a team car with nowhere to hide before a race began. PDM were different.

Take a May 1989 interview from Winning magazine where writer Rupert Guinness travelled with Sean Kelly and PDM to Milan-San Remo. “PDM chauffeur Rob van der Merwe proudly captained his glossy black Mercedes passenger bus through Northern Italy, from the Adriatic coast to the industrial capital of Milan,” wrote Guinness. “For Kelly, bus travel like this was a new experience in his 13-year career, one he confesses he was a touch reluctant about before finally signing up with PDM.”

“I wasn’t too keen about travelling by bus before. But this is different… there’s more space,” Kelly told Guinness as he “lounged back, legs outstretched”.

Kelly added: “There is a shower on board, beds, and cooking equipment. There’s even a video machine and TV which is perfect if you are waiting to do a time trial. You can watch what gear the riders before you are using, see how they are being affected by the wind.”

Thirty years later, Kelly still remembers the bus, which was a huge advance on anything he’d experienced at Kas, his previous team. “It was impressive, big and black, leather seats inside,” he says. “For me, it was a huge difference because at Kas we didn’t even have a camper, just cars. The mechanics truck was really impressive too: huge, with a massive number of bikes and spares.”