The Betcity Elfstedenrace is no major event in the calendar. Squeezed into the last days of the racing season, it’s a last chance to impress for the older riders that haven’t yet made a mark or for younger riders to cut their teeth. But for the Dutchman Taco van der Hoorn, it may be remembered as the most beautiful race of all.
Van der Hoorn, a tall blonde Intermarche-Wanty rider, has had a career with its share of highs and lows. Highs: a stage win at the 2021 Giro d’Italia and a narrow second-place to Simon Clarke on the ‘Roubaix’ stage of the 2022 Tour de France. Lows: the 2023 Tour of Flanders, and everything that followed.
That Flanders, Van der Hoorn was left sitting on the side of the road, cradling his face in his hands as blood ran from a cut above his eye, spattering his kit. A doctor tended him, joined by a team staff member. His result that day – a DNF. But the nightmare was just beginning.
Van der Hoorn was diagnosed with a severe concussion – the second of his career, with the other forcing a recovery period from November 2017 to August 2018 – and settled into wait for his body to give the green light to race again. And wait. And wait.
The 2023 season disappeared through his fingers. By that November, he was still yet to return to the peloton, or indeed a semblance of normal life: “No reading a book, no going out with friends, no watching TV, no being around people because it was too busy. Then there is not much left, of course. And then the days are very long,” he told Wielerflits.
When those empty days had passed, the next phase of his recovery began – restoring his physical condition. But there was a link between the body and the brain: “Only when my heart rate and blood pressure go up, that is what causes most of the complaints,” Van der Hoorn explained. “Most of the dysregulation is due to the blood flow in my head. So it is also logical that when your blood flow goes up, you will also suffer more from it.” Crippling headaches followed his efforts to return to the bike: a ride of 30 minutes one day would set him back so far that he could ride only 15 the next, and not at all the day after. His riding rehabilitation was recalibrated to gentle walks – a WorldTour cyclist, used to rubbing shoulders with the best in the world, strolling around Andorra waiting for the clouds to part. “That just really gnaws at you. A concussion is just a shitty injury, especially because you don’t know,” he said. “That is why I am also visiting a psychologist, to get through this shitty period a bit better.”
The training camps of early 2024 showed marginal improvement: he could attend, although was unable to train with his teammates. “For now we have no certainty about the duration of my unavailability, before recovering physical capabilities which are stable enough for a high load of training work. These question marks sometimes cause frustration, but I try to focus on the encouraging aspects and the positive evolution on the long term,” he said in a statement published on the Intermarche-Wanty team website.
Tour of Flanders 2024 marked a brutal milestone: a year since the crash, with Van der Hoorn still off the bike. “It … hurts that I still can’t race, which is what I love to do the most,” he told Sporza. “Every now and then I doubt whether it will be completely okay.” Given the slow pace of his recovery, that’s easy to understand: by that point he could ride at most an hour and a half before the “brain fog” descended: “You can’t call it training yet. It’s more like a bike ride. Of course, racing again is what I want most. But at the moment I’m not a professional cyclist yet.”
Slowly but steadily, though, Van der Hoorn worked his way back to fitness, rigidly following the advice of the medical team supervising his recovery. On August 13, he dipped his toe back in the water: a kermesse in Heusden, Belgium, with Van der Hoorn making the full distance. Two days later was his first UCI-ranked race, the Tour of Leuven (1.1). The result was a DNF, not from his physical condition but from a mechanical issue catching him out of position: “I was doing fine in the race, everything was going well. But because I was pushed back so far, I never got back in the race,” he told Wielerflits.
Finally able to call himself a pro cyclist again, Van der Hoorn was in a reflective mood about the year, four months and two weeks that had preceded this milestone. “It took months – if not a year – before I could rebuild my daily life. Sometimes it went better, sometimes I could no longer see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he explained. “Being healthy is what I missed the most in the past 502 days. That you no longer have to be careful, because you can’t do something. When friends went for a bike ride, I couldn’t join them. Skipping dinners, because it gave too many stimuli. Enjoying cycling through the mountains, enjoying the weather and the view. That makes me incredibly happy, that this is possible again. The feeling of health. I was super happy that I could pin on a race number again. I took very small steps. But in the end I’m back.”
Through August and September, Van der Hoorn rode a series of small one-day races as well as the Deutschland Tour, reacquainting himself with life in the peloton, with contract pressure piled on top of the strain of the past year and a half. The door at Intermarché-Wanty was “open”, he said, but the possibility of more irons in the fire was dependent on form. “I have not been working on anything for 2025. If you don’t cycle for a year and a half, nobody will give you a contract,” he said, still with a quiet confidence that he’d be able to deliver a result in the end of the season and turn the tide.
Which, in a roundabout way, brings us back to Betcity Elfstedenrace – a Dutchman on Dutch roads, at the front of a race with big names in it; names like Jakobsen, Laporte, Groenewegen, Walscheid. Steadily, the front group was whittled down to 15 riders – and from there, a group of six slipped away. Van der Hoorn knew that if it came down to a sprint he’d miss out so he gambled everything on an attack, just like the Van der Hoorn of old. Daylight opened and then he was gone: flying down the straight, blustery roads to the finish line. Two punches of the air, and it was done: Taco van der Hoorn had won a bike race again.
“I was on the sidelines for ten months. Thinking very strongly that I could never be a cyclist again. Whether I could lead an everyday life again was already the question … It’s been very tough,” he said in the aftermath, a little stunned, slouched over his handlebars surrounded by delighted teammates. “I had confidence that I could finish [it]. You always need a bit of luck, but it worked out.”
A bit of luck in a minor Dutch race, but months of pain and patience in the leadup: a breakaway of a few kilometres to crown 78 weeks in purgatory.
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