After spending all but a few months of his decade-long pro career with the Rabobank, Belkin and LottoNL-Jumbo teams, 29-year-old Dutchman Dennis van Winden is hoping his move next season to the first-year Pro Continental squad Cycling Academy will provide new opportunities to add more lines to his palmares.
"I'm one of the most experienced riders," Van Winden said of the 2017 Cycling Academy roster, which includes 12 neo-pros with an average age of 24. "I've done Classics, I've done Grand Tours, so I have to be a little bit of a role model. We are the youngest professional cycling team and I hope that, like I did not receive the results that I hoped for when I was under-23 as professional, and I hope to grow with this team and in the end fight for big results in Grand Tour stages and the Classics."
As a promising young rider, Van Winden came up through the Rabobank Development Team on the Continental level starting in 2007 when he was just 19. Over three years with the team, he won the Dutch national time trial title, a stage at the Vuelta Ciclista Leon, a stage of the the Olympias Tour and a stage at the Tour de Bretagne, and was third and fourth at the U23 Liege-Bastogne-Liege.
ADVERTISEMENT
Van Winden also won a stage and scored two third-place finishes at the Tour de l'Avenir, won two stages and the overall at the Tour du Haute Anjou and scored top 10 finishes at Volta ao Algarve, Settimana Lombarda, Ronde Van Drenthe, Thüringen Rundfahrt and Vlaamse Pijl-Harelbeke, among others.
He graduated to the Rabobank WorldTour team in 2010 and stayed with the Dutch team as it morphed into Belkin. He moved briefly to Synergy Baku in 2015 but was back with LottoNL-Jumbo by May of that year. He finished the 2015 season with the team and raced through the 2016 season there before moving to Cycling Academy for 2017.
By his second year on the WorldTour in 2011 when he was 23 years old, Van Winden was notching top 10 results in .1 and .HC races like Tour de Romandie, USA Pro Challenge and Tour of Beijing. He scored two top 20 finishes in the Giro d'Italia and was 26th in the Tour of Flanders. His results slowed a bit in 2012, but he earned a top 10 stage finish at the Vuelta a España and went fifth at the Binche-Tournai-Binche/3rd Mémorial Frank Vandenbroucke.
A nightmare surgery that nearly ended his career
Finding new opportunity with a 'start-up' team
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
via Cyclingnews Latest News http://ift.tt/2icyjTi
No comments:
Post a Comment