Kenny Van Hummel, who was definitely not a bad sprinter, made his Grand Tour debut in 2009 with the Pro Continental team Skil-Shimano. During that Tour de France, it wasn’t his power that left a mark but rather his tenacity in the mountains, where he was often seen battling for survival against the dreaded time cut.
Tour de France was a surprise.
“I had actually not planned to participate in that Tour, but in the spring of 2009, I secured five victories and stepped onto the podium a few times. The team started thinking: it’s going to be three weeks, if all the pieces fall into place, we might succeed with that eccentric Van Hummel,” he revealed fourteen years later in an online cycling program called Cycloo Cycling Café.
“I realized during the altitude camp before the Tour that I didn’t have the physical preparation and form, not even to race. You need that condition to be fresh in the sprint, but I didn’t have any of that,” he says now.
With his then sports director Merijn Zeeman (current head of Jumbo-Visma), they did everything they could, as Van Hummel now recounts with an anecdote on Cycloo. “At one point, Merijn pretended that the car had stalled. We were climbing a mountain where there were many people. Then you pass by these people, where the commissioner was behind Merijn’s car with his motorcycle. And he stopped the car.”
Colleagues’ help avoided the time cut.
As the commissioner couldn’t see what was happening, Van Hummel pleaded for any help possible. “I shouted to everyone, in every language I could muster at the end of the Tour, that they had to push me,” the former cyclist said.
“So they pushed me for two to three kilometers because, of course, he was behind Merijn with his car stopped. He supposedly couldn’t get it running again. Anyone who’s not strong has to be smart,” concludes Van Hummel, who eventually had to leave that year’s Tour on the seventeenth day after a crash.