For months, Arvid de Kleijn disappeared from the peloton without explanation. Now, he’s opening up on what happened. And he’s finally ready to race again. The Dutch rider is sharing some personal details about some of the hell he’s endured, and how he overcame it all.
The Tudor Pro Cycling Team sprinter missed a bunch of races and training camps and team. He skipped them because he was dealing with some things behind the scenes that he admits took a huge toll on him mentally, while dealing with a series of personal hardships that, he now says, left him emotionally drained.
The 32-year-old pro said that when his father was ill with cancer, he wanted to stay close to his family during the final months of his dads’ life.
A tough time
“It was an incredibly hard few months,” de Kleijn said. “My dad had cancer, and toward the end, things became very difficult for him and for all of us as a family. I needed to be there. I needed to stay close.”
At the same time, de Kleijn and his wife were preparing for the birth of their first child.
“It was beautiful news, of course. But becoming a father while preparing to lose my own dad… that was emotionally overwhelming,” he said. “I was living between two extremes: joy and heartbreak at the exact same time.”
The Dutch rider turned pro with the Danish squad, Riwal Securitas Cycling Team in 2020, after riding for several Conti teams before. He even had a stint on Human Powered Health, riding alongside a few Canucks like current pros Pier André Côté and Nick Zukowsky.
After his father died in mid-February, de Kleijn said he slowly started rebuilding toward a return to racing. But another incident soon derailed that progress. Something terrifying, which left him both physically and mentally shaken.
Assault when riding
“During training, I was stopped by a group of young guys. They shouted at me and chased me. There was no way to reason with them, so I tried to leave,” de Kleijn said. “One of them punched me in the face several times.”
The assault left him with a broken nose.
“I still don’t understand why it happened,” he said. He figures they were drunk, but the toll it left on him was severe. “More than the injuries, it left me shocked.”
De Kleijn has not raced since late 2025, but said he never fully stopped training during his absence.
Now, he is preparing to return this weekend at the Rund um Köln. The German race, as you can guess, goes around Cologne for a total of…
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