There aren't many riders whose last couple of years have been as disrupted as Taco van der Hoorn's. After hitting his head in a heavy crash at the 2023 Tour of Flanders, Van der Hoorn's life as a professional cyclist came grinding to a halt. A severe concussion forced him off the bike for a few days that became a few weeks and then, became a few months.
The 2023 season disappeared in a haze of dark rooms and inactivity – "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 ... the days are very long,” he said at the time. A similar script followed for much of 2024: the sad milestone of the following year's Tour of Flanders came and went, as one of the sport's natural animators was restricted to rides of an hour and half at most before the "brain fog" descended again. "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,” he said.
After 502 days on the sidelines, Van der Hoorn finally returned to racing in August of last year, steadily regaining form and confidence and even notching up a win in October. The Dutchman was back, and had the support of Intermarché–Wanty for a contract renewal after his lengthy absence. 2025 will, hopefully, mark his first full season of racing since 2022.
Van der Hoorn is a rider with his fair share of fans – tall, lean, tanned and with a quirky, innovative approach to bike positioning. But more interesting than all of that is the ethos with which he approaches his profession. When most of his peers were notching up wintery kilometres in Majorca or under Europe's grey skies, Van der Hoorn set his sights on the other side of the world, seeing an opportunity to mix exploration with his efforts.
Before the start of Cadel's Road Race, just after signing on for the day, Van der Hoorn was good enough to chat about a big bikepacking adventure that was also a solo training camp, of sorts: a 15-day, 73-hour, 2,014 km journey around the South Island of New Zealand, with all his gear strapped onto his team bike.
This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and flow.
Iain Treloar: Taco, hi! A different one for you: I don't want to hear about the race today or your time in Australia. I want to hear about your holiday in New Zealand.
TvdH: Oh, it was great, man. I had such a good time. I did two and a half weeks.
IT: Have you been to New Zealand before?
TvdH: No, never. I’ve been to Australia – this is my sixth time, I think – so I wanted to do something else, but I still like to combine a bit of holiday with just training really hard. I saw all these pictures and I thought “I have to go there” – it inspired me. So then I went up there and took my bike and it was amazing; the nature’s unbelievable. I really enjoyed it.
IT: Were you bikepacking the whole way?
TvdH: The first days I stayed around a little bit, but then I was bikepacking. I did two weeks, 70 hours in total, and also did my efforts with all the bags and stuff so it was quite fun. [laughs]
IT: What’s it like doing efforts with a full bikepacking setup?
TvdH: [laughs] I think for people watching it’s a little bit strange, doing 40/20s [ed. repeated intervals of 40 seconds on, 20 seconds off] with all this stuff on, but actually it was quite fun.
IT: Were you camping in a tent, or huts, or ...?
TvdH: Both, and sometimes I also stayed in hotels where I could do laundry and that kind of shit. But most of the time, I stayed in the tent.
IT: You've obviously had a pretty disrupted couple of years with the concussion –
TvdH: Yeah.
IT: Was this a kind of way of reconnecting with the bike?
TvdH: In general, I think it's my ninth year as a pro. I think you need to keep on doing new things to keep motivated to train. I think, for me, if I combine training with some kind of adventure or going with friends or something, it keeps me motivated to do all the hard work for the season.
Now, for example, I’ve come back from New Zealand, and I trained a lot but I have the feeling that I just came from holiday. The season is still long – until the end of October – so if you can make your training a little bit more nice, and you enjoy what you're doing – instead of riding, for example, in Belgium in the rain – then I think it's also good for your shape as a rider, but it’s especially good for you as a person. I can be motivated for the coming four, five, six years to be a professional rider if I can sometimes do things like this.
IT: Does Intermarché adapt a training program for you?
TvdH: No, I did the complete training program, only a little bit more hours than it was supposed to be. And furthermore I did all the efforts and things I needed to do, took my rest days, things like that. The only difference is that you don't go from A to A, you go from A to B.
IT: How about in terms of nutrition and stuff like that? Were you eating just normal food, or do you need to carry all your typical race nutrition to prepare your stomach for the season? Or was it a bunch of fish and chips?
TvdH: Mostly normal food – whatever I could grab somewhere, because sometimes I was quite hungry and just needed to grab something. I tried to get it as healthy as I could, but that wasn’t always possible.
IT: Now that you’ve come back into a season that will hopefully be uninterrupted by concussions and things like that – has your perspective on racing or riding, or the risk of racing and riding, changed?
TvdH: Mmm … No. I knew already that it’s a dangerous sport; I think every rider know it’s a dangerous sport, and the spectators also probably know. So in that way, there will always be risk – it doesn't really change. I feel comfortable in the bunch, or at least, as comfortable as I was before.
IT: And all of the after-effects have gone away?
TvdH: Yeah, I have no problem at all. The first maybe two races in the summer I had some headaches, but that’s also normal – every time you do new things, the doctors were saying that you might get some slight headaches. But after that, everything was gone, and now I’m already more than half a year without symptoms.
IT: Do you have any teammates or friends who’d like to join you for your next bikepacking adventure?
TvdH: Uh, at the moment no. After this I go to Colombia to a camp, directly.
IT: Colombia? Is that an unusual choice?
TvdH: No, actually – I've been there three times already. I go now with some teammates, and there are some teammates who are already there. But then it's just in one place, where we can train well and prepare for the Classics. The next bikepacking, I don’t know. We will see. It’s still a long way away …
IT: Any ideas where you’d like to go? North Island this time, maybe?
TvdH: Oooh, if I do Tour Down Under again, maybe, yeah! But maybe also still the South Island – maybe based around Wanaka a little bit more, I really liked it there.
IT: Did you head up the west coast?
TvdH: Yeah, I did – but I couldn’t really do too much hiking while I was there. If I go on holiday, I’d love to go on some long hikes there also, but this time I needed to train so I couldn’t do much hiking. So maybe I’ll go one time a little bit more in the offseason so I can do some hiking.
IT: Anything else you’d like to tell us about your bikepacking adventures?
TvdH: No, that's about it actually: I really like it. I learned this from Annemiek van Vleuten, she’s a good friend of [mine] and she always inspired me by telling me that you have to enjoy riding your bike – that’s one of the main things. You train a lot, so you have to make it fun for yourself. She went always with friends to altitude camp; every rider has to find a way how he likes cycling, actually how he likes to train.
For me, it’s sometimes doing this kind of thing, and now I can be focused for the rest of the season doing something different. It just gets you motivated.
IT: Sounds good! Thanks very much for your time, and good luck for the season.
TvdH: No problem.
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