‘I have success, money, women. I’ve been lionised by the public and the media. The world is at my feet. I’ve spread my wings and here I am, soaring above everything and everyone. But in reality, the descent has already begun.’
Thomas Dekker was set to become one of pro cycling’s next big stars. But, before long, he found himself sucked in by the lure of hedonistic highs and troubled by the intense pressure to perform.
In The Descent, Dekker tells his story of hotel room blood bags, shady rendezvous with drug dealers and partying with prostitutes at the Tour de France. This is Dekker’s journey from youthful idealism to a sordid path of excess and doping that lays bare cycling’s darkest secrets like never before.
Thomas Dekker is a Dutch former professional cyclist. As one of the biggest talents in the sport, he catapulted to the top, participating in the Olympics and the Tour de France. His career highlights include winning Tirreno–Adriatico in 2006 and Tour de Romandie in 2007. Yet it all came crashing down when he was caught doping while with the Rabobank team. Dekker was suspended for two years and returned to racing in the summer of 2011 but never got back to his old level.
Thijs Zonneveld was a professional cyclist before he became a journalist and writer. He covers cycling for the biggest newspaper in Holland and works as an analyst for Dutch public television. He received the award for the best Dutch sports journalist in 2016 for The Descent.
IT’S A THOUSAND shades of dark. The curtains are drawn, the door is locked. The only light is the dim glow of the bedside lamp. Shadows creep across the carpet and up the wall. The picture hanging there is the kind you find in countless hotel rooms – an anonymous print of some flower or other.
I’m lying on the bed in my jogging pants and T-shirt. I haven’t even gone to the trouble of taking off my shoes. A thick needle is sticking out of my arm, attached to a drip. My blood runs dark red through the plastic tube. Slowly it fills the bag that’s lying on a set of digital scales on the floor.
In the corner of the room, far from the light, a man is sitting in a chair. His foot bobs up and down as he jots something in his diary. Every few minutes he glances at the scales. I met him for the first time half an hour ago in the hotel lobby. He introduced himself as Dr Fuentes. Beige trousers, checked shirt and a face that is instantly forgotten. He smells of cigarette smoke. We have barely spoken a word to each other. His English is basic and my Spanish nonexistent. I don’t think he even knows who I am. Not that it matters. I haven’t come here to talk.
I stare at the blood in the bag. It’s as if it isn’t mine. As if it isn’t even real. I thought it would be different, the first time, that I would be excited, nervous – like a kid stealing sweets from the corner shop. But there is no thrill, no jangling nerves. This is a simple transaction. Doping is business, only one you need to hide from as many people as possible.
Fifteen minutes go by and Dr Fuentes gets out of his chair. He removes the needle from my arm and wipes away the blood with a wad of cotton wool. He holds out a magic marker and says in a thick Spanish accent, ‘I give you number. Twenty-four. Two four. You must write here.’ He points to the bag of blood. I sit up, take the marker and write the number on the bag. He nods and says, ‘We are done.’
I pull my tracksuit top over my T-shirt and shake his hand. He opens the door and mumbles something indecipherable. I step into the hallway – the light is so bright it hurts my eyes.
The door clicks shut behind me.
There’s no way back from here.
I GREW UP in an ordinary family in an ordinary house on an ordinary street in a small town by the name of Dirkshorn. It’s slap-bang in the middle of the pan-flat landscape of northern Holland, little more than a dot on the map: 12 streets, a church, a supermarket, a football club and a chip shop. A funfair comes to Dirkshorn once a year. That aside, nothing ever happens.
My parents are ordinary too. Bart and Marja. Salt of the earth, you might say. Mum works as a swimming pool attendant in the next town. Dad is a baggage handler at Schiphol Airport. Five mornings a week for 30 years he’s been getting up at 4.30 to head for Amsterdam, lunchbox crammed with sandwiches, to lug other people’s suitcases from one place to another. Dinner is on the table at 5.30 every evening; Dad does the cooking. Standard Dutch fare for the most part: cauliflower, meat and potatoes. On Sundays we’d always get a takeaway from Joep’s chippy. My folks earn enough to make ends meet and they take good care of what they own. I spent my whole childhood whizzing around on second-hand roller skates. They were good enough.
I have a loving mother. The kind who has orange squash and biscuits waiting for you when you come home from school. In her whole life she has only been really angry with me once, when I was very little. I can’t even remember what I’d done to upset her.
My father is a typical northerner. The strong, silent type – verging on gruff even – but he has a big heart and wears it firmly on his sleeve. He’s not afraid to speak his mind but he seldom has to; what he’s thinking is written on his face. More often than not he’s in good spirits but when his lip starts to tremble, you know there’s a storm brewing. His face is sometimes etched with lines, a sign that he’s worried and no stranger to worrying. It wouldn’t surprise me if most of his worries have been about me. I think at times he wishes he could still hold on to me the way he used to when we’d cycle over to see Grandma when I was a kid: one hand resting on the back of my neck to stop me falling and keep me on the straight and narrow.
My sister is called Floortje. She’s two years younger than me. We have always got along well. We were playmates all through childhood and happily spent entire days in each other’s company. At the weekends, when Mum and Dad were having a lie-in, we’d creep downstairs in the cold, dark house and snuggle up under a blanket on the couch to watch cartoons.
AS A BOY I was always outdoors. When I wasn’t knocking a ball about on the empty lot around the corner or over by the noise barrier along the main road, you could find me playing soldiers or swimming in a lake or the outdoor pool along the way. I was a member of the tennis club, the football club, the skating club. Lack of talent didn’t stop me being fanatical about all three. I played for FC Dirkshorn and made my way through the junior ranks from the Fs to the Ds. Grandad used to come and watch me play every week and he’d give me a guilder if I scored. Sometimes I was so eager to impress him I would charge right through the defender. If we lost, I was in a foul mood. It was the same with every sport. I could fly into a rage if things didn’t go my way. All the same, I knew better than to throw a tantrum. If I had hurled my racket to the ground when I lost at tennis, Dad would have marched onto the court and dragged me off by the hair.
I went to school in Dirkshorn. There were only eight children in my class all the way through primary school. Our favourite playground game was marbles. I was determined to have more than anyone else. Sometimes I sold my marbles to the other kids – and then proceeded to win them back again. I must have earned hundreds of guilders that way. I saved it all up for later, to fulfil my dream of buying a flashy car. I have no idea where it comes from, my love of material things. Not from my parents, that’s for sure. My sister has no appetite for bling either.
Our summer holidays were much like everyone else’s. Mum and Dad in the front seat of the car, Floortje and me in the back with currant buns, Fruittella and comic books to keep us quiet. Most years we went camping in France, to campsites with a swimming pool, a ping-pong table and those loos you had to squat over. It was either that or Center Parcs or Gran Dorado: a couple of weeks in a holiday bungalow that was exactly the same as the one next to it and the one next to that and the hundreds of others that filled the park.
One thing’s for sure: I was never one of those troubled kids who are destined to go off the rails from an early age. Our parents showered us with love. Our house wasn’t a place of fighting or endless rows. If anything, we were the opposite of a problem family.
My boyhood can be summed up in a single word: ordinary.
Make that two: dead ordinary.
IT WAS MY birthday present when I turned 11: my first racing bike. So beautiful I could have wept. Black with white accents – the colours of the PDM team back in the day – and ‘Concorde’ emblazoned on the down tube. The frame was bought to grow into, saddle as low as it could go. To negotiate my way through the 12 gears I had to fiddle with controls mounted on the frame. The pedals had straps that you pulled tight around your feet. A pair of cycling shoes was thrown in for good measure, black with plastic soles.
My first metres on my very own racing bike were from the living room to the utility room off the kitchen. Easy does it, skirting the dining table and wobbling past the TV, a narrow escape for the vase of flowers I passed along the way. Dad grinning from ear to ear, Mum looking a little worried.
Dad had bought my pride and joy at Hans Langerijs, the bike shop in the nearby town of Schagen. A racing bike meant I could join the summer training sessions organised by the skating club where I did my circuits of the rink in winter. I was no great shakes at skating, never really got the hang of the technique. I didn’t have the power either. I was small and skinny, legs like lollipop sticks. The bigger lads shot past me on the ice as if I wasn’t even there and left me plugging away in their wake. But giving up wasn’t an option. It never even occurred to me. All the lads in the north of Holland spent the winter skating, so I did too.
Cycling came more naturally than skating. I started to cover longer distances with Dad: 30 or 35 kilometres out towards the dunes, along the coast and the Hondsbossche seawall, battling into the wind all the way there and then being blown back home. On Friday evenings, Dad would join us on a group run with the skating club, 90 minutes at most. Just a bunch of boys and girls from the neighbourhood.
But cycling was a magnet and I was a paper clip. It tugged at me. The sheen of the bikes as they sped past when I went to see a criterium race with Dad, the smell of the massage oil. This was different from skating or football. It was more heroic, guts and glory. I looked on breathless as these grown men pushed themselves to the limit, biting back the pain, snot hanging off their chin. Compared to cycling, other sports were child’s play.
I WAS GRIPPED by the epic man-to-man battles I saw on TV. I remember the 1996 Tour de France, when Miguel Indurain bit the dust. He was my hero. I wanted him to win more than anything and I felt sure he would triumph over Bjarne Riis. It wasn’t to be. Indurain cracked on the flanks of the Port de Larrau, a stage that ended in Pamplona – his birthplace. I sat there glued to the screen, shaking my head in disbelief. I just couldn’t understand. It was as if he had suddenly become a different rider, too big for his bike and with a grimace on his face that I had never seen before. He seemed to have aged from one day to the next. I remember him being asked to comment that evening back at his hotel, people and cameras everywhere. His words betrayed doubt, his eyes despair. ‘I don’t know what the future holds,’ he said. ‘But I will never be better than I was before.’ It sounded like a farewell.
I BEGAN TO ride my own races. Frenetic, one-off races in the very north of Holland, in villages with names like Wervershoof and Hippolytushoef. They usually coincided with the annual fair. I raced lap after lap, competing against local lads my age, red in the face, going hell for leather. It usually ended in a sprint, not my strongest suit. I even lost to girls, many of whom were much stronger than me at that age. It pissed me off no end.
My dad bought clip-in pedals for my racing bike. They were purple, made by Look. I went for a quick spin in the neighbourhood to try them out before my next training run. Dad had warned me to be careful not to keel over when I stopped. I shrugged off his words only to end up flat on my back at the first crossroads, unable to get my shoes out of the pedals. A man came over to ask if I was okay. ‘Yeah, sure,’ I stammered. I was more worried about my kit than anything. The fall left me with a hole in my cycling shorts. ‘Can I get a new pair?’ I asked Mum as soon as I got home. ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘The padding still looks fine to me.’
Cycling was taking up more and more of my time. Two runs a week became three, became four. Dad and I began to cover longer distances, striking out for destinations further afield.
IN THE SUMMER of 1998 we were on holiday at a French campsite. In the mornings we’d go for a cycle and in the afternoons we’d watch the Tour de France on a little TV in the campsite cafeteria. Dad with a beer, me with a glass of squash. Dutch cycling wasn’t worth shit in those days but in 1998 all that changed: it was the Tour when Michael Boogerd went like a rocket. In his red, white and blue jersey he was giving the best riders in the world a run for their money on the climbs. It was the spark that lit the flame in a 14-year-old cycling fanatic. I yelled at the TV, urging him on, hoping with everything I had in me that he would hang in there and not be dropped by the other contenders. At night, I would lie on my blow-up mattress staring up at the roof of the tent, dreaming of myself in the Tour. The victories. The jerseys. Taking the lead as a group of rivals died a thousand deaths trying to hold my wheel.
When we got back home, I came across a poster of Michael Boogerd in a magazine. In no time, it was hanging on my bedroom wall.
That was when I knew for certain. I was going to be a cyclist too.
IN THE SHOWERS, I looked around at the lads I had just competed against. It was one of my first official races. They were yelling, joking around, telling tall stories from the race. Some of them were useless, some I looked up to. Often they were the bigger lads, the ones with their adolescent growth spurt behind them. A few of them even had pubes. I looked down at my own tackle. Not a hair to be seen. Not even a light dusting.
My performance in those early races was nothing to write home about. Weighing in at a mere 45 kilos, I was blown away in the frantic charge for the finish line. Back then, almost every race was won by Wim Stroetinga – he sprinted like he’d been shot from a revolver. On the track, Niki Terpstra was already making a name for himself. He was a bit on the chubby side, but he rode at a killer pace.
Every weekend there was another race to enter. We travelled the length and breadth of the country: Dad, Mum, Floortje and me. It was like moving house every time we set off: the back seat piled high with cycling gear, sandwiches and currant buns, and in the boot a cool box packed with cans of Fristi and Coke nestled alongside my new racing bike – a blue Simon, made in Zaandam. To make sure everything would fit, Dad splashed out on a Volkswagen camper van. A wise move, especially when Floortje was bitten by the cycling bug too. She didn’t stick at it long but there was no doubting her talent. She even finished second in a national junior time trial championship, ahead of future world and Olympic champion Marianne Vos. It must have been tough for her that family life revolved around me so much of the time, but she never once complained. At least, not that I heard.
Slowly but surely I began to improve. In the Tour de Achterveld, a kind of week-long stage race for young boys and girls, I finished second. My parents weren’t able to come and watch every day, so I slept with a host family. It was the first time I had ever been away from home alone. I was so nervous that I hardly slept a wink all night. Not because I was lonely but because this was starting to feel like the real thing, complete with time trials, dollybirds, juries and barriers to keep the spectators at bay.
I sailed through the youth categories and with each passing year my ambition grew and my dreams became bigger and brighter. My parents encouraged me but never pushed. Dad was fanatical but he never stood on the sidelines bawling his head off and he was never disappointed if I wasn’t up there with the leaders. As long as I did my best, that was what mattered to him. To me that was only logical: I always did my best. Those were the days! To Mum it was all the same whether I came first, second or 356th: she would have been just as happy to see me playing tennis or hanging around the school playground with my friends.
In all that time I only ever saw Dad angry once. It was after the Omloop van de Maasvallei, a race for novices in the province of Limburg, 300km south of Dirkshorn. Dad drove me down there the day before and we stayed at a little bed and breakfast in the riverside town of Elsloo. I was convinced it was a course made for me, if only because it was among the hills of Limburg and I cherished the secret hope that I was a good climber. Fat chance – I was left for dead before the climbing even began. The weather was on the wet side and not long after the start a slick stretch of cobbles led down from Maasberg. I was scared shitless and made the descent with my brakes squeezed as tight as my arse cheeks. The peloton sped off ahead of me before we were eight kilometres in. I didn’t see them again for the rest of the day. I turned and cycled back to the start alone, where Dad was still standing around chatting to other parents. He saw me, and the words ‘F’ckn’ ’ell’ came out through clenched teeth.
The drive back to Dirkshorn lasted a lifetime. We sat there in almost total silence, my dad and I. Was I more pissed off or ashamed? It was a toss-up. Dad couldn’t understand it. It wasn’t because I had been dropped by the pack – shit happens. What he couldn’t stomach was the fact that I had caved in before the race had even properly begun. When we were halfway home, somewhere near Utrecht, he said to me, ‘Well, son, if you slam on the brakes on a downhill run … ’ Then he ruffled my hair and mumbled that next time was sure to be better.
AT THE END of my first year with the novices, when I was 15, a letter landed on the doormat. The Rabobank logo on the envelope was enough to get my pulse racing. It was an invitation to take part in the Rabo Ardennen Proef – a mini-training camp organised to give the team a closer look at the talented young riders on the circuit. The aim was to hand-pick the best early on with a view to propelling them to elite level in three stages: through the juniors (Under-18s) to the Under-23s and on to the pro circuit. I could hardly believe it – an invitation from Rabobank addressed to me!
When I left for the hotel in the Belgian resort of Spa a few weeks later, I was on cloud nine. Dad drove me to the pick-up station in De Meern and from there a coach took us to the Ardennes, with a few more stops along the way. The selection included a slew of good riders from my generation: Marc de Maar, Reinier Honig, Jos Harms to name but three. We were welcomed to the camp by Jan Raas himself, world-class road racer turned team director. We were given Rabobank water bottles for our bikes. Support staff were on hand to attend to our every need and we trained under the watchful eye of another Dutch cycling hero, Adrie van der Poel. It was unbelievable. In my eyes, Rabobank was as good as it got. The absolute pinnacle.
ALL THIS TIME I was still at school. Learning nothing. It was like serving out a jail sentence. I acted the clown, eyed up the girls and pretty much ignored everything my teachers had to say. I only opened my books when there was a grade at stake. I got away with it for a while, scraping through the first and second year of high school in the top stream and somehow even making it to third year at the same level. But as my interest in cycling soared, my schoolwork took a nosedive.
I had one dream and that was to become a professional cyclist. Everything that stood in the way was swept aside. Cycling ruled my day from the moment I got up in the morning till my head hit the pillow at night. Through the cycling association I was assigned a coach, René Kos. He drew up training schedules for me but I always did more than he asked. Towards the end of 2000, shortly before my transition from novice to junior, Dad bought a motor scooter so I could train behind him. When he came home from work in the afternoon, we would ride for hours through the polders of northern Holland. Every Thursday evening, rain or shine, I biked over to Alkmaar for a training session at the cycle track and returned late with my bike lights shining through the dark. Twenty kilometres there and 20 back.
At weekends, I worked to earn the money to buy new equipment. My parents supported me to the hilt but I chipped in a fair amount from my own savings. I was determined to buy a Campagnolo Record groupset for my bike, with carbon brake levers. I had spent months with my nose pressed up against the bike shop window; they cost a whopping 1,600 guilders. I peeled flower bulbs and worked part-time serving coffee at the local furniture showroom. I even did farm work. With all this and training too, things were pretty busy. Too busy sometimes. I remember coming home in tears one day after getting up at the crack of dawn to work in a greenhouse. ‘Mum, Dad, I’m so tired. If I have to keep this up I’ll never make it as a pro rider.’
IN THE END, I joined the junior ranks riding a bike with Campagnolo Record groupset. Paid for with my own hard-earned cash. The carbon wheels to go with it came courtesy of my first sponsorship deal – with my Uncle Claus. The new parts made one hell of a difference. But better still, I began to grow … and how! I stretched a good ten centimetres in next to no time. The result was a massive boost to my performance: I was much stronger than I had been in years gone by. I flew through my next races, taking third in the first classic of the season, a result that led national coach Egon van Kessel to select me to ride for my country. I was allowed to take part in races outside Holland, world cup races for juniors. My first international outing was to Poland – the Coupe du Grudziądz. I had no idea where we were, the food was so shitty we sat there gagging at the table – but I loved every minute of it. A few months later I was selected for a world cup race in Austria as a guest rider for the Rabobank junior team. The whole team slept in the same dorm at a boarding school. Johnny Hoogerland was my teammate that week and it was the race when I first laid eyes on the Italian armada: Vincenzo Nibali, Giovanni Visconti and Mauro Santambrogio. They all sported identical tracksuits, identical bum bags, identical phones and strutted around like they were cock of the walk. I was deeply impressed. I’ve always admired Italy’s cycling tradition. There’s none of that po-faced Calvinist ‘let’s not get carried away with ourselves’ attitude you often see in Holland. I’d much rather see cyclists walk with their shoulders back and their head held high. In Holland a top athlete is frowned on for driving a Ferrari: in Italy everyone wonders why the hell you’d want to drive anything else.
IN THE AUTUMN of 2001, I signed with Rabobank. Of course I signed with Rabobank. They wanted me on their junior team and I would have crawled on my hands and knees to get in if that’s what it took. Not only that, but I was selected for my first World Championships, in Lisbon.
The juniors were put up in the same hotel as the pros. I met Michael Boogerd and Erik Dekker. They said ‘hello’ and asked me how I was doing. I don’t recall saying much in reply. Not that it mattered. The mere fact that a lad like me was standing there talking to riders I had only ever seen on TV was a thrill in itself. The poster on my bedroom wall had come to life.
Lisbon was also my first encounter with Gerrie Knetemann. He was the national coach for the pros but he rode behind me in the team car when I did the time trial. He took me aside beforehand and we spoke for quite a while. He told me he could see that I had what it took, and not just because we hailed from the same part of the country. ‘Thomas,’ he said, ‘you’re the complete package. You’re a climber, a time triallist and I can see that you’re willing to give it your all. We haven’t heard the last of you, boy.’ I was walking on air. That day I barely had to make an effort on the bike. I had the wind at my back no matter what direction I was cycling in.
Every junior rider at the time was in love with Pleuni Möhlmann, who came away from Lisbon with a silver medal. But I was the one kissing her at the closing party. We fooled around for a while after the championships but never really got it together. Back home the opposite sex was becoming more of a focus too. I started hanging around the little huddles of girls that formed during school break times and noticed that they didn’t seem to mind. I understood what they wanted. I gave them attention and time. Both were in plentiful supply: once my training sessions were over I had nothing else to do. I called girls, mailed them, texted them. I took them out for a bite to eat or to see a film. I never had a steady girlfriend; I tended to get bored after a while. There was always someone sweeter to catch my eye. But if you’d told me at the time that I’d end up sleeping with hundreds of women, I’d have said you were out of your mind.
At school I was on a road to nowhere. I had already been moved down a stream and went on to fail my fourth-year exams. And when I joined the Rabobank juniors the following year, things went from bad to worse. I skipped classes so I could train, turned up without my books, and when it came to tests I wrote down the first thing that popped into my head. When my sister handed in my books at the end of the year – I was too busy training to do it myself – they were still wrapped in cellophane. I hadn’t opened them once. School was useless, a waste of time, a black hole that swallowed up the precious hours of my life. If Italian had been on the curriculum, I might have sat up and paid attention – that would have been some use to me as a cycling pro. Anything else I dismissed out of hand.
RIDING FOR THE Rabobank junior team in 2002, I just kept getting faster. It was such a professional outfit. We were surrounded by coaches, mechanics and support staff. A training camp was laid on for us. The equipment was always up to scratch and I was riding with the best Dutch juniors of the day, among them Marc de Maar and Tom Veelers. But I was the biggest talent of all. There was no stopping me. I won, won again and I kept on winning. It sometimes seemed like losing wasn’t in my repertoire. I didn’t just beat my rivals, I pulverised them. Of the 60 races I rode that year, I won 22 and made the podium 40 times. I was light years ahead of everyone in the world junior rankings. My confidence grew with every victory. I began to realise that I was more than just another promising rider. My ambitions got bigger and so did my mouth. I expected the world to revolve around me. I wanted to be the centre of attention.