Dylan Groenewegen (center) was ahead of compatriot Fabio Jakobsen (right) on Sunday. This had won the second stage of the tour on Saturday.
Photo: imago/Belgian
Fate seems to have planned a special bond for Dutchmen Fabio Jakobsen and Dylan Groenewegen. With one stage win each in Denmark, the two sprinters are now arriving in the motherland of the Tour de France, where the next duel between the two currently most explosive sprinters is likely to take place on the 4th stage this Tuesday between Dunkirk and Calais. What’s explosive is that one, Groenewegen, caused the other’s horror crash two years ago during the Tour of Poland. Since then, both careers and both lives have been deeply affected by the incident. The Tour de France does not bring reconciliation. But she takes the rivalry back to purely sporting realms.
August 5, 2020 may have very different memories for the two of them. Jakobsen noticed how Groenewegen pushed him into the barriers in the sprint just before the finish line in Katowice. Then his eyes went black. When he woke up from the coma two days after the horror crash, he was in the hospital with smashed teeth, a craniocerebral dream and many other serious injuries. Groenewegen got off lightly. The collision also brought him down shortly after the finish line. He broke his collarbone on impact.
Participation in Jakobsen’s fate weighed much more heavily on him. He later apologized in tears and tried to talk to his opponent after he had been discharged from the hospital with parts of his pelvic bone implanted in his skull. What was intended as a reconciliation went wrong. Jakobsen resented Groenewegen for reporting publicly about the meeting, contrary to the agreement.
Since then, the careers of the two have run in strange parallels. Groenewegen was banned for nine months by the world association UCI. He isolated himself from the public, even got police protection because of death threats against him and the child his girlfriend was pregnant with. He changed teams after Jumbo-Visma suspended him.
After an initial marathon of operations in Poland and the Netherlands, Jakobsen soon began advanced training. He contested his first race eight months after the accident. Almost exactly a year after the fall, he achieved his first victory, at the Tour de Wallonie. And at the Tour of Spain in autumn 2021 he won three stages and the points jersey. Since then he has been seeded as the first sprinter for Team Quick Step, even displacing the great Mark Cavendish. “We know what we have in Fabio. He’s the fastest man in the peloton,” said team boss Patrick Lefevere “nd”.
Due to the suspension, Groenewegen only returned to racing a month after Jakobsen. However, the power pack could not build on its earlier successes, including four stage wins in the Tour de France. He was mentally blocked for a long time. “It was a difficult time for me and my family. The death threats, the hate messages – all of that weighed heavily on me,” Groenewegen later looked back. He then celebrated his first win after the suspension in front of Jakobsen of all places. A day before he was supposed to win stage 2 in Wallonia, Groenewegen won stage one. Since then, they have met another 24 times. Jakobsen was ahead twelve times, Groenewegen twelve times. The 1:1 on the tour now fits perfectly into the statistics.
But it will never be like it used to be between the two of them. “I once admired Dylan. It’s gone since the fall. I don’t give a damn that he has now won a stage,” said Jakobsen on Sunday. He is only happy that he was successful on his first tour. »I always dreamed of the Tour de France. Then the accident intervened. Now we’ve come full circle,” said Jakobsen after his stage win.
He will continue to duel with Groenewegen, but luckily their fight against each other has shifted back to the sporting level – a civilizing achievement by both their teams and those around them. That, too, is a story of the Tour de France.
