Several riders retired during the 2015 season. One of them is Thomas Dekker who ended a turbulent pro career with a failed Hour Record attempt in February. In a lengthy interview with Wielerflits, the Dutchman reflects on the time from 2006 to 2009 when doping destroyed a highly promising career.

After a strong debut year as a professional in 2005, Dekker developed steadily. At the age of 21, the Dutchman won Tirreno-Adriatico against a high-level field and thus got an international breakthrough. However, 2006 did not go exactly as he would have liked. "In the 2005 season I was healthier and in some areas already very good. Then you want to take the next step and then the doping story comes into play for the first time.  You see that riders around you and the team management are open to thar. The leaders and the managers that have nothing against it and actually stimulate everything. Furtheremore, there was my own desire to be the very best. That’s when I stepped into the trap of cycling.”

After he had done the Walloon classics in the service of the team, it was the plan that Dekker would do the Tour de France. A virus set him back after which he resumed his season at the Eneco Tour. "In the Eneco Tour I was really back at the level to compete for the win in the Tour of Poland. But in the third stage of the Tour of Poland I ride into a dog and I broke my metacarpal. End of season."

The 2007 season started in a good way in February in Mallorca as he won the Trofeo Pollenca. "The level in Mallorca is always high. I had trained a lot that winter and was super good. Then crashes forced me to deal with my first major injury. I got an infection in my hip, so I had to abandon the Tour of the Basque Country. The classics were a little bit compromised. But in the winter I was so good and had done so much training that I did not have a very poor level.”

"Based on willpower I got through the Tour de Romandie, despite a hip inflammation," says Dekker about the Swiss race that he won. "And Romandy is just a great race. Just notice that there are only a few Dutch riders who have won stage races like Tirreno-Adriatico and Romandie during the last twenty years. That was just a great win but then my focus was again on the Tour. I would prepare myself in the Tours of Luxembourg and Switzerland, but still had that inflammation in my hip. Thus I could not start in Luxembourg and I traveled to Switzerland with lots of questions.  I won a mountain stage and with a limited preparation I had got to a high level.”

In Switzerland and later during the Tour, Dekker’s hip was treated by a physiotherapist on a daily basis. In France, Dekker still made his Tour debut. "That was amazing, also to share a room with my childhood hero Michael Boogerd during the Tour start in London! For me it was a dream coming true. As a young rider you always want to start the Tour de France. When that day dawns and you immediately do a good prologue in which you are eighth, it’s nice. Michael Rasmussen was the best rider in the Tour, which we had not really expected.  Therefore we had the yellow jersey for nearly two weeks and I was a kind of lieutenant."

The Dane was riding so well that the overall win was almost secured after stage 16. But then, at eleven o'clock that same evening, the rumours came from Cologne. Rabobank manager Theo de Rooij had decided to take the yellow jersey Rasmussen out of the Tour and sack him immediately. It was a blow for the whole Rabobank team, Dekker admits. "That was terrible. I had the very same day done hundreds of kilometers on the front. You know, by that time I was already a bit older and I also knew that Rasmussen had probably done things that were not allowed. But ASO had allowed him to start.”

"In principle, we would not start the next day," he continues. "I think we sat in the bar until four o’clock that night, with all the staff and the riders. It was obviously a huge disappointment. From huge euphoria, actually winning the Tour, to not starting the next day. In the end, we made the decision to start at seven o’clock." That was partly due to the lack of understanding for De Rooij’s decision. "In retrospect, he probably was under so much pressure from the bank that he had to do it, due to the bank and ASO. He could probably have done anything else. But at that time we felt terrible. You will do your utmost to win the Tour de France. It was a unique experience and it disappeared with a big bank.”

Years later, Rasmussen admitted to doping. But that did not only involve Dekker and Rasmussen: the Dane told in his book Yellow Fever (2013) that the whole Rabobank team were doping in the Tour, supported by the team itself. "At some point, Rasmussen was pushed into a corner and for him it was very unfair," Dekker says about those statements. "But basically he just used doping and no one forced him to do so, also not in Rabobank. You can see it more as a policy of tolerance. Theo de Rooij knew that Rasmussen did business that was not allowed, even though he may not have known the exact details. In any case, I never got doping products from Rabobank. The doctors knew the ins and outs, because I always had a dialogue with them." At the time, the doctors were Geert Leinders, Jean-Paul van Mantgem and Dion van Bommel.

After his first Tour, Dekker started again. He finishes fifth in the Eneco Tour, won two stages and the overall classification in the Dreiländer Tour, finished eleventh at the World Championships in Salzburg and was eighth in the Tour of Lombardy. "I think that I was so much of a cycling enthusiast that I wanted to be good all year," he says when asked about the kind of rider he was. "Moreover, there was no one in the team with a very strong character who said ’As a team we want you to excel only in the Grand Tours and we will work towards that’. Rabobank was more a team that wanted to be good in the spring classics, do well at Worlds, the Tour of Lombardy... Everything was interesting, actually. Michael Boogerd has always done everything. He was always pretty good everywhere but after 1998, he was never close to the podium in a grand tour. That was not really part of the culture. That came late because the grand tours were important. That played a role for Denis Menchov and Rasmussen who were given free rein.”

During the winter, Dekker again had pain in the hip and he could barely train. Nonetheless, he achieved good results in April despite his limited preparation – which included banned substances: third in the Basque Country Tour behind Alberto Contador and Cadel Evans, fifth in the Amstel Gold Race, fifth in Flèche Wallonne and sixth in Liège-Bastogne-Liège. " I did my best spring and I reached my highest level ever. In Romandie, I cracked. But that was because of the fact that I could not train in the winter. I could reach a very high level purely on talent or momentarily but I could not maintain it for six weeks.  My base was simply too small."

Dekker then had a disagreement with Harold Knebel, the successor of Theo de Rooij as team manager. "That’s when the troubles started. Rabobank was now under fire after the Rasmussen case one year earlier. A bank is a matter of trust. They are supposedly to not take any risks. What do I mean by that? What I say. After that I was never really in agreement with the team management. And that was terribly difficult. At one point, I felt that I had to leave. Actually, the team had already indicated that. Menchov could stay while I was the biggest talent they had. I simply could not understand that a Dutch team did not support me but they supported riders who were also controversial at that point.”

The parties disagreed and 23-year-old Dekker felt abandoned by the team. "They wanted me to skip the Dutch championships. I travelled to the start because you can start the Championships as an individual rider. Somehow I was in the hotel and was actually not involved with the team at all. Shortly after that race, I heard that I would not go to the Tour and we started negotiations to terminate the contract. Halfway through August, the first article in de Volkskrant reported that my blood values ​​were not correct. Rabobank decided that I should do the Sachsen Rundfahrt. Afterwards I found out the reason because a rider must have done at least 35 race days before a team can fire him. That’s why they let me start there. Otherwise I would have been able to sue them for having had too few race days. But I did not know about that.”

The Rabobank chapter was definitively closed. A day before the Worlds, Dekker announced that he had signed a contract with Silence-Lotto, the only ProTour team that had been interested in him. "They offered me a good contract and were not interested in my blood values which were a problem," says Dekker. "That had been revealed in the press. Nowadays, you would have been done in cycling. Back then it was still a bit of a transition period, the blood passport only started that year. I stopped doping during the following winter. I did not want to have stress anymore. It had such an effect on my daily life, my family and things like that. Then I started quietly again to get back to a high level. I rode the Tour of Catalonia (which was held in May, ed.) as training and was then immediately fourth in the Tour of Belgium. In the long final time trial at the Tour of Switzerland I was third behind Fabian Cancellara and Tony Martin. Then I was ready for the Tour. "

But even before the Tour de France would start, he received a call on July 1 in his home in Lucca. That was the beginning of the end: "That morning I had done a ride and at 12.20 I received a phone call on my mobile phone from a Swiss number I did not know. She said. 'Anne Gripper (UCI, ed.). You have tested positive for EPO.’  I said somthing like: 'It’s impossible, because I had not used it all year. But then it turned out to be the first retrospective test which went back to December 24, 2007.”

Dekker paid the price for violating the doping rules. "I had a few hours to warn everyone and call the team. The UCI would announce the news at four o'clock that afternoon. I did my best and informed my parents. Naturally, my world collapsed.Then I informed the team and at two o'clock everything was already in the media.  Everyone knew it. The six o’clock news had it as a top story and it was the same at eight o'clock news. At the end of the day I was in a car, driving to Milan to speak to a lawyer.”

Dekker’s world collapsed.  "It was terrible. However, the whole situation only made me much stronger as a person because of everything I've been through. It has shaped the Thomas Dekker I am today. For me, things cannot get more difficult than they were back then.”