Don’t call him the defending champion; Tom Dumoulin prefers to go into the 101st Giro d’Italia with a clean slate. And whatever happens in Rome, a shot at the Tour de France is at least on the cards as things stand. Cycling reporter with Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, Raymond Kerckhoffs, has closely followed his countryman’s rise to the top.
It’s pouring with rain, the thermometer reads 5C. The date? Wednesday March 28, 2018: the day of Dwars door Vlaanderen.
Just 60km to the south of the Belgian Classic’s finish in Waregem, across the border in northern France, Tom Dumoulin is training alone.
While a number of his colleagues and Sunweb teammates use Dwars door Vlaanderen as a warm-up for the Tour of Flanders four days later, Dumoulin has his sights set on July’s Tour de France.
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"A beautiful experience. I enjoyed it," he tells me that evening via WhatsApp when I ask him if it’s true that he's been doing a recon of the 154 kilometres that make up stage 9 of the 2018 Tour, between Arras and Roubaix, complete with 22km worth of cobbles.
It may sound like a cliché, but it’s a stage on which you won’t be able to win the Tour, but one on which you could certainly lose it. And that’s the reason behind the Dutchman’s dreary late-March outing.
Chris Froome was here a week earlier, while Movistar’s Alejandro Valverde and Nairo Quintana later also tested the pavé sections. Dumoulin, therefore, is perhaps laying bare his intentions. A tilt at the Tour de France this summer is uppermost in his mind.
Neither Dumoulin nor his Sunweb team are prepared to share such information with the outside world, of course. Dumoulin confirms as much with Daniel Verbrackel, the director of the iconic Roubaix velodrome, which hosts the finish of Paris-Roubaix a week after Flanders.
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