There was more in it. Robert Gesink himself will have thought this many times since the end of this year's Vuelta. He will not be referring to this one Tour of Spain, which was his last race after 18 years as a professional. The Dutchman has not ridden on his own account for a long time. Rather, he will see it in relation to his entire career. Because it began extremely promisingly, but lost momentum before it even reached its peak.
The now 38-year-old blames two events for this, as he told the Dutch cycling portal Wielerflits says. In autumn 2010, his father died after a serious crash in a mountain bike race. "Driven by a hatred of everything and everyone, I trained like a madman afterwards," he says, describing his emotional state. It paid off in the beginning. "I came out of the winter very strong, won the Tour of Oman, came second at Tirreno-Adriatico and third at the Tour of the Basque Country." But then the air went out of him.
Gesink on his way to the top of the world
Looking back, Gesink hints at burnout symptoms. "I was exhausted and hit a real low. I hadn't given myself the time to process everything. The pain never went away completely," he says, adding: "The bike gave me a lot, but unfortunately also took a lot from me at times."
Before the accident involving his father, Gesink was one of the most highly touted talents on the circuit, a fact he has regularly demonstrated since signing his first professional contract. 2007 was his first year with Rabobank's elite team, before which he had already spent a year with the affiliated continental team, where he finished second in the Tour de l'Avenir. His debut season with the pros also saw his first stage win at the Tour of Belgium. He finished fourth overall in the Tour of Germany, which was still very difficult at the time, and shortly afterwards came second in the Tour of Poland.
The following year, Gesink started the season with a stage win at the Tour of California and fourth place at Paris-Nice. He finished the Fleche Wallonne in fourth place. At the Olympic Games in Beijing, he finished in the top 10 in both the time trial and the road race. Shortly afterwards, he tackled his first Grand Tour and finished the Vuelta in seventh place.
Bad luck at the Grand Tours
Gesink was promoted to captain of the Rabobank team alongside Denis Menchov in 2009, which was mainly due to his fourth place in the Criterium du Dauphine shortly before the Tour de France. For the Tour of France, this meant nothing less than a role with plenty of attention and, for the first time, a certain amount of pressure for the 22-year-old. But before the adventure really began, it was already over. Gesink crashed on stage 5 and dragged himself to the finish with a broken wrist, but did not compete the next day.
Things went better at the Vuelta, although a crash cancelled out an even better result there too. After the 13th stage, Gesink had worked his way up to second place in the overall standings, less than half a minute behind the leader Alejandro Valverde after a difficult day in the Sierra Nevada with a mountain finish. The Dutchman defended this position until the 19th stage. However, another crash two days earlier had weakened the Dutchman to such an extent that he was no longer able to keep up with the very best on the final mountain stage and in the time trial on the penultimate day and slipped back to sixth place.
Nevertheless, he had proved that he had risen to the ranks of the best cyclists of his generation. A victory at the Giro dell'Emilia in October and sixth place at the Giro also confirmed this for the hilly classics.
Gesink is positioning himself for bigger things
And so Gesink entered his fateful year 2010, with everything geared towards the Tour. He already proved that he was in good form at the Tour de Suisse. With a solo stage win at the mountain arrival in La Punt, he also took the lead in the overall standings and looked like a sure winner before the final time trial. However, an extremely weak day in the battle against the clock saw the 24-year-old slip back to fifth place.
However, this did not change his exposed role for the upcoming Tour. And after initial difficulties, the Dutchman was also able to confirm his form in France. He gradually fought his way forward and finished the tour in sixth place, but was relegated to fourth place due to the subsequent disqualification of his team-mate Menchov and the supposed winner Alberto Contador.
"As Robert raced around there, I really thought that this boy would be unbeatable in two years' time," recalls his coach at the time, Louis Delahaije, most recently head coach of the German Triathlon Union, at Wielerflits back. And he was not the only one who saw Gesink as a potential, almost designated Tour winner.
The next fall is the most disastrous
But then everything changed. After the "furious spring" of 2011, the Tour simply passes Gesink by in the summer. He turns 30, and in between he rides in the white jersey of the best young pro. But he also crashes in this race and suffers a back injury. On the first stage in the Pyrenees, he is more than 17 minutes behind, the race is over.
Nevertheless, it seems as if he could slowly work his way out of his hole. At the Grand Prix de Quebec, only Philippe Gilbert is better and so Gesink is aiming for the world championships in order to perhaps be able to make sure of a tough race via a group on the actual sprinter's course, which Mark Cavendish will ultimately leave as the winner. But it doesn't come to that.
In preparation for the World Championships, Gesink also trains on cobblestones. When he braked to give way to a car, he crashed. Although his speed was low, the injury was serious: a compound fracture in his thigh. Although the subsequent operation is successful, his biomechanics cannot be completely restored to their original state; small deviations in his musculoskeletal system remain. And these are fatal.
Gesink: "Divide my career into the time before the crash and the time after"
The Dutchman has to learn to run and cycle again. The full power never returns to the damaged leg. "Then I always rode with two different legs in the gym. There was a lot of discomfort and pain, which in turn led to the necessary changes in position on the bike. This difference was the beginning of a lot of misery," he says. And analyses: "When I look back, I divide my career into two parts. Before and after the fracture. This fracture severely limited my performance after 2011. My development as a cyclist stopped there. For a top athlete who strives for results at the highest level, a leg fracture like that is very limiting. After that, everything was much more difficult."
But at the time, he still doesn't want to recognise that. And the results also returned in the 2012 season. First, the now 26-year-old Dutchman won the Tour of California and then finished the Tour de Suisse in fourth place, just 25 seconds behind winner Rui Costa. The comeback seems to have been a success. However, bad luck caught up with him again at the Tour. He crashed on stage 6 and a few days later withdrew from the race in order to better prepare for the Vuelta. Gesink once again finished sixth as captain.
Can the man from Varsseveld, near the German border, fulfil the high hopes that have been placed in him? In 2013, Rabobank became Belkin and the tour specialist also wants to take a different path. He rode the Giro d'Italia for the first time in his career. In the meantime, he climbed up to third place. He didn't start the 20th stage in twelfth place. Then came the Tour. He was unable to make his mark there, finishing only 26th.
Now the heart too
A year later, the team provided Gesink with a co-captain in Bauke Mollema to take the pressure off him. But that didn't work. He did not finish Tirreno-Adriatico or the Tour of the Basque Country. In mid-April, it emerged that Gesink was suffering from stress-related cardiac arrhythmia. These problems were already at the root of his Giro withdrawal last year. It is quite possible that the collapse at the Tour de Suisse time trial in 2010 was also related to this.
He attempted a comeback at the Dutch Championships in June, which failed. After that, he only got back in the saddle for the Tour of Poland in direct preparation for the Vuelta. After stage 17, he was in seventh place. He then dropped out. But not because of his own problems: "My pregnant wife had two operations last week. Her condition has not improved, she is still in hospital. I will leave the Vuelta immediately to be with my family, who need me now," Gesink said in a statement. His wife Daisy had a boy and the couple already had a daughter.
Gesink then returned to a tour as captain once. He finished the 2015 Tour in sixth place for LottoNL-Jumbo, which had replaced Belkin. However, he finished more than ten minutes behind winner Chris Froome.
Gesink slips back into second place - and wins
The Dutch team underwent further restructuring for the 2016 season, as a result of which Gesink stepped down to the second tier and was to work for Steven Kruijswijk in future. The fact that he would still have nine years of his career ahead of him at this point, and therefore only half-time, is something he would not have realised at the time, as he was already 29 years old.
But this time, too, the plan did not work out. At the Vuelta, the new leader Kruijswijk crashed out of the race early on, leaving the team without a contender for the overall classification. For Gesink, this was the chance to go stage hunting. Or rather the duty. He made his first attempt on stage 9 up to the Lagos di Covadonga. Only Nairo Quintana was faster. Five days later, he tried again. As a breakaway rider, he won the queen stage as a soloist up to the Col d'Aubisque, nine seconds ahead of Kenny Elissonde.
"That was an important moment in my life, because I already doubted that my time in the grand tours was over," Gesink described a few years later at Cyclingnews. "I had reached a point where the Grand Tours became such concentrated events for me year after year that I no longer had the opportunity to savour the moment or relax." His victory was to be an exception. It was the first since Quebec 2013 - but also the last of his career.
Happy as a helper and rewarded by the team
In the following years, Gesink made further attempts as a stage hunter. Only Lilian Calmejane prevented his first triumph in France on stage 8 of the 2017 Tour and Mikel Nieve on the penultimate day of the 2018 Giro. In Primoz Roglic, however, a professional had matured at Jumbo-Visma who could not only win stages, but also tours. The excursions became rarer, everything was subordinated to one goal. In 2019, Roglic struck for the first time and won the Vuelta.
"I've waited a long time for a moment like this in my career, where I could use my experience to help others and be part of a team that could bring home a Grand Tour win," Gesink says looking back. "We had some young guys on the team, so it was a really proud moment in my career to be the old man with some wisdom."
Gesink was absorbed in this role, finding the peace he had never really felt as captain. His colleagues rewarded him in 2022. A team time trial was on the programme at the start of the Vuelta in Utrecht. Visma won the competition. But it wasn't Roglic who crossed the finish line first. He let Gesink take the lead, who thus slipped into the leader's jersey of a Grand Tour for the first time in his career. And he did so in front of his home crowd. The gesture did not fail to have an effect.
Robert Gesink was due to return to the Vuelta for two more years. He rode the Tour de France for the last time in 2021. In the winter of 2023, Gesink announced the end of his career for 2024. In his final year, he also rode the Giro again, but his bad luck returned. He was out after the first day with a fracture in his wrist. His race, the Vuelta, which he ultimately rode eleven times - once more than the Tour - and saw his greatest successes, thus became the end of his long career.
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Robert Gesink's greatest successes
- Fourth overall in the 2010 Tour de France, sixth again in 2025
- 3x top 10 in the overall standings of the Vuelta a Espana (seventh in 2008, sixth in 2009 and 2012)
- 2x top 10 at the Tour of Lombardy (sixth in 2009, seventh in 2016)
- A total of 13 victories as a professional, including a stage of the Vuelta (2016) and the Canadian double (2010: Montreal, 2013 Quebec)
