Plain-speaking often seems something of a national trait in the Netherlands. Laurens ten Dam certainly didn't sugar-coat his account of his Sunweb teammate Tom Dumoulin's travails on stage 16 of the Giro d'Italia. "I think you all saw what happened on television, right? He had to shit," Ten Dam said with a wry smile after reporters swamped him on crossing the finish line in Bormio.
Ten Dam's humour was undoubtedly helped by the fact that Dumoulin, despite his obvious distress, had managed to limit the damage sufficiently to retain the maglia rosa, albeit with a much-reduced advantage of 31 seconds over Nairo Quintana (Movistar) and 1:12 over Vincenzo Nibali (Bahrain-Merida).
Dumoulin's metronomic dominance at Montefalco and Oropa saw him characterised as "monstrous" in sections of the Italian press, but he was laid low by a very human problem with 32 kilometres remaining, just as the pink jersey group approached the Stelvio for the second time, this time via the Umbrailpass.
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"He had a little bit of stomach problems, diarrhoea. He had to find the right moment to stop to get rid of the stuff," Ten Dam said of Dumoulin, who removed his helmet and his maglia rosa as he dashed to the roadside. All of a sudden, Dumoulin's long conversation with the team car ten minutes previously, not to mention his unusual placement near the rear of the group, began to make sense.
Ten Dam was the only teammate Dumoulin had for company in the sizeable group of favourites, and the help he could provide was limited after he had been delegated to infiltrate the breakaway that formed on the Mortirolo early in the stage and augmented its advantage over the first ascent of the Stelvio. With Dumoulin isolated behind, Ten Dam was ordered to drop back on the Stelvio, and he immediately understood that his leader was struggling.
"I hadn't seen him since the Mortirolo and then when I came back into the group it wasn't the normal Tom I saw," Ten Dam said. "I said, 'Hey what's going on?' And he said, 'Yeah, I need a shit. I got some problems in the stomach.' So first we tried to stop it, but that didn't work, so then we stopped on the side of the road."
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