No Tour de France for Nils Eekhoff: Picnic–PostNL rider reflects on "eventful year"

The first race Eekhoff rode this year ended after only three of the five stages. In the AlUla Tour, he crashed hard in the final kilometer. Although he initially managed to avoid the crashing Gorka Sorarrain of Caja Rural - Seguros RGA, he could not avoid hitting the curb. What followed was a heavy blow against a lamppost. He said, "I didn't immediately know how bad it was. My jaw was hurting, I had blood in my mouth, and I heard these cracking sounds, so I stayed there to play it safe. I didn't dare move my neck.” He was rushed to the hospital, where the final diagnosis was multiple broken teeth and a broken jaw.

Four days after his crash, the man who had competed in the Tour de France four times was back on his bike. A month and a half later, Eekhoff was racing again. And how! On his return to Nokere Koerse, he first crossed the finish line in a bunch sprint. A promising sign for the rest of his beloved classics, but he still had more misfortune to come. The 1.92m tall rider was struck down by a new injury: a torn Achilles tendon. No Paris-Roubaix or Tour of Flanders for the man who won Paris-Roubaix in the U23 category in 2017.

The Picnic PostNL rider looks back on the past few months with IDLProCycling.com and is ready to rest. "It's been an eventful year with a low point, a high point, and another low point. I'm in good shape, but my next goals are in the fall. For now, the Tour is out of the question. On Sunday, I'll compete in the Dutch National Road Championships, and then I'll take a short mental break so that I can peak again in other races in the fall."

What that mental break will look like is not entirely clear to Eekhoff, who has already ridden the Tour four times. "I don't have any plans yet; I'll see. It won't be a very long period. I think it will take four or five days to relax, and then I'll be full of energy again in the fall. Maybe I'll just spend a few days at home and do fun things."

Picnic PostNL has another important rider who has been struggling with injuries for a long time: Fabio Jakobsen. He will also not be riding the Tour because he is still recovering from surgery on a narrowed femoral artery. After a long search for the cause of the acidification in his legs, the diagnosis was made that has possibly been affecting him for two to three years. Jakobsen said earlier: “It kind of makes your world collapse, because I obviously had a yellow dream in Lille. You see that disappear right away.”

Where Eekhoff often leads the sprint for Jakobsen, the Picnic PostNL riders went to training camp together in Spain. The lead-out rider says: "I went to training camp in Spain with Fabio. For me, it was a bit more training than for him. He is still building up but working hard for his comeback." Since both riders have had to deal with injuries, they also discuss that together. “We can talk about that together. We both have the same attitude: to stay calm and, above all, keep working hard, then everything will be fine.”

In the battle against relegation from the WorldTour, the results for Picnic PostNL have been somewhat disappointing. The Dutch team is currently in eighteenth place in the UCI ranking for 2023-2025, which means it is just safe for now. But with a few months to go, work still needs to be done. With a stage victory for Casper van Uden in the Giro and third place in the overall classification of the Tour of Switzerland for Oscar Onley – who also won a stage – things seem to be moving in the right direction again.

“It's great that we're getting going as a team. That's good for morale and, hopefully, our WorldTour license for the coming years. It's positive, and it would be nice if we could continue on this path,” says Eekhoff, who doesn't want to worry too much about relegation. “Of course, it's a factor, but it shouldn't be too much of a focus. You can get too fixated on it. Ultimately, the best way to deal with it is to win as much as possible.”