A little over eleven years ago, in a half-empty ballroom of the Playitas hotel in Fuerteventura, Jumbo-Visma’s current era of plenty would have been hard to imagine. That evening, Steven Kruijswijk was among the riders introduced by newly installed manager Richard Plugge at a decidedly low-key team presentation. Then again, the muted atmosphere was understandable.
Following Rabobank’s withdrawal at the end of the 2012 season in response to years of doping transgressions, the team had rebranded as Blanco while they sought a replacement backer. Just as T-Mobile had done when they left the sport five years earlier, Rabobank provided parachute payments that would allow Blanco to compete in 2013, but in that gloomy winter, bookended by the USADA Reasoned Decision and Lance Armstrong’s belated doping confession, their long-term prospects looked bleak.
The smattering of journalists in the room was limited to a solid cohort from the Dutch-speaking press, a pair of local reporters and Cyclingnews. Quite reasonably, they were focused more on the demise of Rabobank than the flickering prospect that Blanco might survive or even thrive among the ruins.
The evening was Plugge’s first on the job following his promotion from press officer to team manager, formally announced that very morning, and it was also sports director Merijn Zeeman’s first public appearance since moving from Argos-Shimano that winter to help steer the team’s reboot.
Both men would prove key figures in the squad’s rise over the following decade – and so too would Kruijswijk, though he admitted that he could never have imagined the success that would follow, culminating in 2023’s unprecedented sweep of the Grand Tours.
“To be honest, no, at least not at this level,” Kruijswijk told Cyclingnews recently. “Still, I always had confidence in the team, because it would have been easy for me to leave the team at one point, especially when I did a good Giro and Vuelta. But I was confident that we were still in the process of growing to be one of the better teams and it turned out to be like that. I’m happy I always committed to this team, but what we are doing now is above and beyond expectations, I think.”
Kruijswijk has been with the team throughout its transition from Blanco to Jumbo-Visma, by way of Belkin and LottoNL, a distinction shared with Robert Gesink, who retires at the end of next season, and Jos van Emden, who hung up his wheels at the end of the 2023 campaign. A…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…