Laurens Ten Dam has decided to cross the Atlantic to relocate to the United States of America in 2016. Indeed, the Dutch rider has started an American cycling adventure. At 35 years old and after 13 years in the professional peloton, he wants to spendmore time with his family now.

"For the love of cycling, I wanted to get back to basics", he told Cyclingnews. "Standing next to a car in my naked ass changing my bibs instead of being on a fancy bus doesn’t matter to me, you know, so that’s why I was ready to race for Jelly Belly or Bissell. (...) After the Tour, man, I was done with Europe, because I wanted to balance my family life, and I decided I wanted to go to the US. It was what I wanted ten years ago, and I’ve done everything in cycling that I wanted, and I wanted to just go and ride for a domestic team – and that’s certainly not for the money because a domestic team doesn’t pay much."

He has a discussion with his agent Joao Correia about his choice to leave the European scene. "I phoned my manager and he said ‘Whoah, whoah, whoah – maybe you can combine'. Several teams didn’t take the bait, they probably thought that I had checked out a little bit, like you said about footballers going to Major League Soccer."

After seven years with LottoNL-Jumbo, Ten Dam opted for Giant-Alpecin. "I thought I was changing things anyway so I might as well change completely and I decided to come here. The first point I had in the negotiations was ‘I want to move to America’ because I didn’t want to talk bullshit with them, I wanted to be honest. So then we talked about the programme, and I knew we would have to decide early about when I was going to be in the US and when I was going to be in Europe to race. In the end, it’s all worked out nicely for me and the team. We’ll have to see at the end of the year in September if it’s been good or not. For now it’s ok and I’m looking forward to the year."