ERIK BREUKINK - The Golden Boy

It has been 26 years since Holland’s champion-elect wore yellow at the Tour de France. As he and his Roompot team wrestle with Rabobank’s legacy, Procycling asks whether the anointed one is looking forwards or backwards

WRITER: Herbie Sykes
Procycling magazine, August 2015

Three unemployed former Dutch cyclists issued a press release in June 2014. Jean-Paul van Poppel, Michael Boogerd and Erik Breukink announced that they’d had a very bright idea. ‘Project Orange’, they told us, was in negotiation with potential sponsors and would soon become a ProContinental team. Van Poppel, a former Tour de France green jersey and multiple stage winner, had lost his job when Vacansoleil had failed to secure new sponsorship. Boogerd, 10 years his junior, had been the poster boy of Dutch cycling during the EPO years. He’d retired in 2007, before being dragged into the long, messy and extremely public fall from grace of Rabobank, to all intents and purposes Holland’s national team. And then there was Breukink.

Rabobank had bankrolled the team for 16 rollercoaster years. However, the fall-out from the Michael Rasmussen doping scandal had left them no alternative but to walk away. Rasmussen had ruthlessly exposed the ‘hear no evil, speak no evil’ policy of the management and the team’s endemic doping. The bank would therefore redouble its commitment to women’s cycling and provide sufficient funding to pay off those under contract. What it wouldn’t do was lend its name to a sport with an intractable drug culture. It was over.

Rabobank morphed into Blanco Cycling but what to do about Breukink? While most agreed that he wasn’t implicitly corrupt, as manager he’d at least been complicit, deliberately or otherwise, in the cover-up. He claimed not to have known about the doping practices but how, given the extent of the problem, could he fail to see? Regardless, the new management needed to send a clear statement to both the Dutch public and putative sponsors.

As Blanco went cap in hand in search of new backers, it became apparent that the golden boy would have to go. Once considered a potential Tour winner, he’d been a high profile rider and, for eight years, a high profile team functionary. He was shown the door summarily and very publicly, and somehow the new brooms persuaded Belkin to sign up. A younger generation headed by Wilco Kelderman and Bauke Mollema were guaranteed a place at the top table, while Breukink and company seemed destined for the dustbin of cycling history.

Only not quite. Independently wealthy and hopelessly addicted to the sport, Breukink put his own money up to get a new team off the ground. The Roompot holiday company stumped up some more and the old boys’ network set about assembling a young, low cost, all-Dutch roster. Johan van der Velde, the most loveable – and most loved – rogue in Dutch cycling history, would be enlisted to drive the team bus, while Boogerd’s status as both nearly man and doping victim would play to the gallery. With a team in each of cycling’s top two divisions, the future of the sport in Holland didn’t look quite so bleak after all. It wasn’t perhaps a luminous Rabobank orange but at least it had a pulse. 

Erik Breukink’s father Wim was a distinguished, urbane man, the consummate diplomat. He’d once captained the Dutch Davis Cup team but his true sporting passion was to be found elsewhere. Unusually, given his bourgeois origins, he was mad about cycling and he soon took up a position at the Gazelle bike-manufacturing company. By 1960 he was head of the board, just as Jan Janssen’s extraordinary talent (and subsequent rainbow jersey) saw interest in the sport burgeon. By 1968 Wim Breukink had seen to it that Gazelle had its own pro team and Janssen’s dramatic capture of the Tour ensured maximal exposure. Breukink became a hugely influential figure at the Dutch Federation, cycling’s emissary to the ruling classes.

In 1983 he rescued the floundering Tour of Holland, and the following year his son, 20-year-old Erik, earned selection for the team time trial at the Olympics. The naysayers whinnied that his father had pulled strings on his behalf but his results gave lie to the notion. In the event the Dutch quartet narrowly missed out on a medal but team-mate Maarten Ducrot recalls a gifted, enigmatic character. 

“He was very talented but not at all flamboyant on a human level. As a time triallist he was sensational. There was no tactical nuance involved in time trialling, no human interplay and no compromise. We were surprised that somebody from his background could be so hard but watching him beat the best Soviet Bloc riders convinced me. He was very polite but quite detached. You never really knew what was going on with him,” said Ducrot.

In 1985 Gazelle signed a deal to supply bikes to the Skala team and Breukink Jnr signed on as a stagiaire that September. He’d excelled on the track and against the watch, and the accession to road pro was equally impressive. He joined Peter Post’s legendary Panasonic team in 1986 and defeated thoroughbred climbers such as Pedro Delgado to win a beautiful mountain stage at the Tour de Suisse. The following spring he galloped to the prologue at the Giro and carried the fight to the Italians with team-mate Robert Millar. In his first ever Grand Tour, Breukink rode to a wonderfully measured podium finish, before a Tour stage win in the Pyrenees confirmed his innate class.

He carried on where he’d left off the following season. He won the Critérium International and the Vuelta al País Vasco, before revealing his true worth at the Giro. The events of 5 June 1988 are indelible for cycling fans, part of the warp and weft of the sport’s history. A blizzard on the Gavia saw hardened pro riders delirious with cold, before a descent so callous that it reduced them to tears. Though most remember it as the day Andy Hampsten sealed America’s second Grand Tour victory, it was Van Der Velde who reached the top first, and Breukink who rode an apocalyptic descent to win the stage. Breukink had proved his mettle definitively. He would finish second on GC, as the cycling press informed us that a new breed of “yuppies” was set to dominate cycling. La Stampa famously intoned that Hampsten spoke four languages, had a degree and (best of all) “didn’t confuse the painter Vermeer with a Flemish sprinter.”

The 1988 Giro had confounded the notion that only the hungry sons of illiterate farm hands and factory workers made decent cyclists. Breukink was articulate, mannered, middle class and respectable, the polar opposite of the Dutch cycling archetype. When, however, he added the white jersey at the Tour, even the old curmudgeon Post started to believe. Acclaimed Dutch cycling writer Bert Wegendorp very well remembers the buzz around his performances.

“There was genuine hope that he could win the Tour. Roche and Delgado had won, and we felt he was every bit their equal. He was already a great time triallist, and logic suggested he was going to get better. Of course, we didn’t yet know what would happen next, nor how good Miguel Indurain would become,” said Wegendorp.

Wegendorp’s idea that “you couldn’t know him” informed what happened next. No one doubted Breukink’s talent for a minute but he and Peter Post were worlds apart culturally, emotionally and ideologically. Post’s cycling paradigm had been formed by his own career, and specifically by his relationship with Rik Van Looy, his Six-Day partner. The ‘Emperor of Herentals’ had been the greatest Classics rider of his generation and a truly despotic team leader. Post had always struggled with what he perceived as Breukink’s cosseted background and their relationship was further undermined by his passivity. Post didn’t appreciate his unwillingness to impose his authority on a race, and nor on those riding in his service. When, at the 1989 Giro, he cracked horribly in the Dolomites while wearing pink, Post’s tolerance – such as it was – began to fray. Breukink’s subsequent capsize at the Tour (having led the race he lost 26 minutes on the road to Superbagnères) was the final straw.

Post became convinced that Breukink lacked killer instinct. There was always a bad day around the corner, he claimed, and when they came they were cataclysmic. He began courting the firebrand climber Gert-Jan Theunisse, and Breukink took the hint. He joked that he struggled even to give his pet Labrador instructions and promptly left for PDM. It said everything about Breukink. He was far too rounded for the tyrannical Post, had no particular need of him, and saw no value in falling out with him. 

He finished an excellent third at the 1990 Tour, albeit with a cataclysmic off day in the Pyrenees, but then, as EPO proliferated, his career stalled. He still rode an excellent TT but was unable to stay with it during big stage races. In 1993 he negotiated a huge contract with ONCE but struggled with a knee injury. He signed for two years with Rabobank in 1996 but by then he was pretty much anonymous. Aged 32, he called time on his career, and worked briefly as a PR consultant for the team. 

Breukink was slick, articulate and smart, and he’d briefly threatened to win the Tour. When, therefore, state broadcaster NOS had need of an expert pundit for the race, it was to him that they turned. He did the job with distinction until, in 2004, he was persuaded back into the Rabobank fold.

When the Rasmussen scandal broke he pleaded ignorance and while others went under, he was skilled enough to ride the storm. But what he couldn’t do was win in the court of public opinion.

“People like Boogerd are much more popular for a number of reasons. First, because they were riders as distinct to managers, and second because they confessed. Breukink never admitted to having doped as a rider nor having known about what was happening within the team. So while it was very difficult to prove before a judge that he knew, ultimately the image was of someone who is lying,” said Thijs Zonneveld, a former pro turned cycling journalist.

Ducrot suggests that while cycling is still a big sport in Holland, the damage has been incalculable. 

“It’s a bit like post-Ullrich Germany. Rabobank was our team, just as T-Mobile was Germany’s. Cycling is more popular here but it’s taken a massive hit. We don’t have the bike-racing culture they have in Belgium, for example, because the Dutch are also very passionate about speed skating. Everyone rides a bike here but racing them isn’t part of our DNA the way it is over there,” he said.

Rasmussen went public with the minutiae of the Rabobank blood doping programme in March 2013. By then the Dutch public no longer needed convincing and the old cadre of facilitators (Breukink, Theo de Rooij, doctors Geert Leinders and Jean-Paul Van Mantgem) was long gone anyway. Breukink’s duplicity was fully exposed, however, then the following month his father passed away.

Within 12 months he’d been fired by Rabobank, seen his public image shredded by Rasmussen and lost his father. At first glance, therefore, his announcement that he was rejoining the cycling pantomime seemed extraordinary. The sport had all but brought him to his knees and moreover, people like him, the doping vanquished, are often persona non grata anyway.

Roompot’s stated objective is to develop young Dutch talent. If it’s an attempt to curry favour at home, it isn’t obvious. There has been no public declaration of contrition and Wegendorp suggests its raison d’être is rather more prosaic.

“You basically have a group of guys who don’t know anything but cycling, and he can’t do anything but cycling. It’s who they are and without it they don’t really know how to live.”

That’s all well and good but given their wealth of experience the results have been singularly unnewsworthy. They infiltrated the breaks here and there in the Ardennes but one has the distinct impression that, for now at least, Roompot is but a repository for those unable to cut it at the top level. They picked up Johnny Hoogerland on the cheap and found a place for the Kreder brothers when the World Tour teams saw fit to dispense with their services. There’s nothing unusual in that (nor in startups being limited by budget restraints) but there’s a slightly fin de siècle air to the whole thing. The team’s image – their personnel, disinclination to train at altitude, orange jerseys, endless references to old Dutch champions such as Joop Zoetemelk and Gerrie Knetemann – hardly alludes to a brave new era. Zonneveld finds their approach perplexing.

“Among the Dutch public there are two schools of thought. Some still see Breukink the rider, the guy who made us dream of winning the Tour. They love him in much the same way the French love Richard Virenque, or the Spanish Miguel Indurain. Then you have a group who view him as an old school guy who shouldn’t be in cycling any more. The Roompot management don’t seem to acknowledge the errors of the past, don’t have a transparent anti-doping policy and on the surface just seem to carry on doing things the old way,” he said. Furthermore, ASO and RCS have an obligation to look after their own cycling federations, ergo invite French and Italian wild cards to their races. Of course, there are plenty of others but the visibility gap between the WorldTour and the rest is not only huge but growing. Much will depend on whether they can tap into such residual goodwill as remains from the Rabobank era and attract the millions needed to get back to the top.

That’s a big task and, of course, therein lies the essential paradox of being Erik Breukink. He remains a high profile figure and he’s synonymous with their country’s unique cycling culture. In the flatlands of the Netherlands, perhaps more than anywhere else, the mountains of the Tour are imbued with mystical qualities, which partly explains why so many Dutch fans make the pilgrimage each year. Breukink came as close as anyone since Zoetemelk to conquering them and, 26 years on, he remains the last Dutchman to wear yellow. For better or worse, however, he’s also synonymous with Rabobank, and by extension with doping. He’s both sides of the same coin.

It’s early days for his Roompot project, and it could be argued that he’s somewhere between a rock and a hard place. In some respects it was ever thus but history tells us that the Breukinks usually find a way. Like father like son: Erik Breukink remains a very atypical cycling person.

Passport Details

Name: Erik Breukink
Born: 1 April, 1964 ,
Rheden, Netherlands
Age: 51
Pro career: 1985

Career Highlights
1987: Wins opening stage (and maglia rosa) at the Giro; wins a Tour stage
1988: Wins biblical, snow-hit stage over the Gavia. Finishes second on GC
1989: Wins Tour de France prologue
1990: Finishes third at the Tour de France
2006: Receives médaille de la fidélité for services to the Tour de France