Ilan Van Wilder can laugh again: “I used to think ‘The Wolfpack’ was a lot of bullshit, but now I know better”

Ilan Van Wilder’s concerns are gone. The rider raced with Team DSM for two years, but ended up sidetracked last year after he came into conflict with the team management. He barely got around to racing, wanted to leave, was not allowed to leave until a solution was finally found with Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl. “I’m happy here,” he said at a press conference in Calpe. “You can see that. You can barely get the smile off my face. Here they find the perfect combination between hard work and having fun. As an outsider I thought that ‘Wolfpack stuff’ was bullshit, I thought it was all a bit bloated and didn’t believe much in it, but now after two stages I really know better. This is a close-knit group. The newcomers were also baptized. What and how? No, I’m not going to say that,” he laughed, “but it broke the ice and I felt right at home.”

Van Wilder does not deny that he went through a difficult period when he was barely allowed to race with his old team. “That was very annoying. You want to, but it is not possible and that weighs. Recently, more attention has been paid to mental problems in top athletes and there is more talk about it. I didn’t even visit a psychologist, but I did take a look at myself. I returned to base. Why did I become a top athlete and professional cyclist? What drove me to do it, why do I like doing it? And then one day I just got up, I ‘blasted my way through’ with the mindset of a top athlete. I wanted to race again and I trained as if I would race again two months later. That happened sometime in the summer and that’s how I cycled through that period. When I ended up here in the team, everything turned out all right.”

Van Wilder is a great talent, especially in the mountains, and finished third in the Tour of the Future of 2019. “I want to show again what I can do. I have personal ambitions, but in the first months I mainly want to discover how the team works, how they race and I want to have fun again. I missed that last year. I want to race a lot and then we’ll see how it goes. Remco and I don’t have the same program, but we will race together every now and then. Then I want to be a good teammate.”

Van Wilder will start his season in the Tour de Provence (February 10 to 13), followed by the UAE Tour. Perhaps a first big Tour is also on his program, possibly the Giro, but he didn’t want to anticipate that yet.