Menno Huising (Visma | LaB) forced to take a step back: "Getting knocked over at 60 km/h isn’t fun"

Huising crashed hard on May 15th during the Northern French stage race and was unable to start the following day. “We were fighting for position ahead of a section where echelons could form, and it was super chaotic. We took a right-hand turn on a descent, and most riders noticed it quite late. We braked in time, but the guy behind me didn’t, and he rode straight into me.”

“That was a really hard hit,” he recalls. “Bob Jungels and Connor Swift (of INEOS Grenadiers, ed.) also went down and had to abandon. I had a concussion that lasted about a week and a half, but there were a few other things that took longer to heal. It wasn’t a pleasant crash, getting knocked over at 60 kilometers per hour isn’t exactly fun.”

For Huising, it was a real shame, because after a few months, he was finally finding his rhythm. “The whole season had been getting better and better. In Romandie, I was seriously strong, and I felt the same in Dunkirk. But the days where I could really show myself were later in the week. I never got to them. At first, you think: damn, but you recover and move on. But when it keeps dragging on for weeks, you really get fed up.”

He did still start in the Tour of Switzerland, but during the third stage, the team decided, together with Huising, that it was best for him to stop. “Menno is still dealing with the aftereffects of his crash in Dunkirk. We didn’t want to take any risks,” team director Maarten Wynants explained in the team’s race report.

“Since my crash in Dunkirk, I’ve been struggling a bit with injuries and overall fitness, so things just haven’t been going my way,” Huising told us earlier. Now, the Dutch rider will focus on recovery before building toward the second half of his cycling season.

In his first few months, Menno Huising combined WorldTour races like the Tour Down Under, the Tour of Catalonia, and the Tour of Romandie with mostly smaller one-day races. So, halfway through the year, how does he look back on his first stretch as a full-time WorldTour pro? “The big difference with the U23 ranks is that it’s always fast, constantly fast,” he says. “I was chatting with Emiel Verstrynge during the first stage in Switzerland and he was complaining a bit: ‘Does it really have to be this fast again already?’”

“I just laughed and said, ‘Better get used to it.’ In Romandie, I suffered like crazy even in the so-called 'sprinter stages’,” Huising explains. “There’s never a breakaway where you think, ‘Nice, we can just roll along behind this.’ It’s always full gas. But that’s what I love about it. The overall level is just so much higher. In Romandie, I was riding close to my best-ever power numbers. Back in the U23s, maybe ten or fifteen guys could follow at that pace, but here, it’s a whole different story.”

“There’s still a lot of room to grow,” he adds. “But when you’re averaging 43 km/h over a hilly stage, yeah, that’s pretty fast, haha. After seven days of Catalonia or Romandie, you’re definitely tired, I can tell you that,” says the ever-friendly young rider, who is contracted with Visma | Lease a Bike through 2027. “I’m really positive about how things are going so far, and I’m very happy with the team.”