Dumoulin, on an alpine stage of the last Tour.STEPHANE MAHE / Reuters
When he was still a cyclist, not so long ago, Martín Bouzas saw himself reflected in Tom Dumoulin, he wanted to be like the Dutch phenomenon.
Conditions were not lacking.
Tall like Dumoulin, almost 1.90 meters, and lanky like the cyclist who beat Nairo Quintana at the Giro, the same one who calmly, as if nothing was being played, and was already wearing the pink jersey, he left the field lowering the Stelvio and responded to a strong call from nature, and got back on the bike, and they could not beat him, Bouzas also stood out in the time trials, and from youth he won the Spanish championships of the specialty, and also knew how to shoot long and tough from the platoon when he played.
“I would see his photos pedaling and compare them with mine and even see similarities in the gestures we made,” says Bouzas, to whom the spirit said enough a few months ago and hung up the bike just when he had become a professional, and had only 22 years old.
"And", he adds with a very Galician irony, tainted with melancholy, "look, now it's Dumoulin who's imitating me."
At his home in Rois (A Coruña), where he is preparing for post-office examinations, Bouzas read Dumoulin a few days ago saying that at the time when he had told his director that he was taking a few months of reflection, that he was leaving cycling because He didn't know if he really wanted to continue being cyclists, and that just by saying so he had taken a 100-kilo backpack off his back, and that night he slept happily for the first time in a long time.
“And that is precisely what I felt when I told Juanjo Oroz and Iosune Murillo [his director and coach, respectively, at Kern Farma] that I couldn't take it anymore, that I had been meditating on it for a long time and that I was leaving cycling, to compete now it was not a pleasure but a hell.
There comes a time when you say enough ”.
Bouzas lived in a kingdom where the motto is “welcome pressure”, explains Ramón Cid, athletics coach, who recalls that all athletes who reach the elite have done everything possible from a young age to have pressure: “What a child? Don't you dream playing in your neighborhood of shooting the decisive penalty that will make Real Madrid the European champion? "
Oroz and Murillo instantly understood the reasons and the evil of Bouzas and congratulated him for having been able to make such a young decision, at 22, because they knew cyclists who only at the end of their career recognized the suffering that had been for them But perhaps the Navarrese technicians are an exception in a world, that of highly competitive sports, in which athletes are quickly classified with labels such as "mentally fragile" or "cannot stand pressure" or so on.
And they try to help them by sending them to sports psychologists whose sole objective is to achieve maximum performance from them and, as physiologists say, they never get to know the perception that an athlete has of their body, and the truth hidden in the sentence of Per Olof Astrand, Scandinavian father of physiology, that the first cause of fatigue is boredom.
And some boredom, or psychological fatigue, influenced Alberto Contador, for example, an example of ambition and self-improvement, to retire before he was 33 years old, when he was no longer capable of playing generals and had become a specialist in feats.
It is the kingdom, also, in which the best are distinguished by always changing and aspiring to more, appealing to their need to get out of their comfort zone.
“It's a world,” recalls sports psychologist Pablo del Río, “in which athletes are admired because they win, not because of their personality or their way of being.
And many think that if they don't win they will stop loving them and get overwhelmed, but in all the years that I have been in the Higher Sports Council I have not met any athlete for whom the burden was so great that they had to leave it.
Most have support teams that know how to take them and handle situations ”.
Very few remember successful athletes who were not cyclists who suddenly quit their sport claiming that it was unbearable.
In the memory of many, only the name of Iñaki Alaba appears, defender of the Royal Society of Toshack, the undisputed owner, who at 23 told Toshack that he was sorry but that he was leaving football, and the Welsh coach did not want to believe it that he heard and asked him if he was crazy, when Alaba, a fourth-year law student (and currently working as a lawyer), assured him that he was leaving football "because he was not happy with that kind of life."
“It is a decision that I have made after much thought.
It is not the result of a one-day tantrum, "Alaba said in a farewell press conference in August 1990 in which the president of the Real, Iñaki Alkiza, wanted to remind that Elías Querejeta, a renowned film producer, had also he left football very young (he was a Real goalkeeper) in search of a life satisfaction.
“It will be difficult for them to understand my position, but the truth is that I couldn't take it anymore.
I felt like in a circus.
I have suffered a lot and I have realized that I could not continue.
This allows me to seek another path in life ”.
Neither Bouzas was the first rider nor Dumoulin the second.
Fear of the obligation to win already generated figures that popular folklore celebrated at the time, such as Julián Gorospe, who when he lost the yellow jersey in the 1983 Vuelta at the hands of Bernard Hinault de Serranillos could only say: “What a relief.
What weight have I taken off my shoulders ”.
The same words were repeated practically the same by his countryman Igor Anton, who almost joyfully celebrated a fall at the foot of the climb to Peña Cabarga in the 2010 Vuelta that he faced as leader.
He lost the red jersey that day and the Vuelta was won by Vincenzo Nibali, but he confessed that that night he slept like never before.
Before Bouzas or Dumoulin, it was Adrien Costa, the American youth phenomenon for whom all WorldTour teams were beaten.
And he had such ambition that in winter he traveled the concentrations of the teams on the Levantine coast offering himself to everyone.
He accepted the Quick Step at the age of 19, but continued in 2017 in Axel Merckx's mother team, the Axeon-Agens Berman.
In April, he suddenly stopped running, and in July he announced that he was quitting cycling.
A year later, in August 2018, he fell while climbing and had to have his leg amputated.
And among the great greats, Marcel Kittel opened the door in August 2019. The German sprinter, winner of 14 stages on the Tour, announced that he was taking a few months to think about his future, and shortly after he left cycling for good.
“I was exhausted, physically and mentally consumed.
I was not happy.
I didn't know who he was, ”recalls the German, who ended up devoured not so much by pressure as a victim of an emotional crisis that has more to do with sensitivity or intelligence than with fragility, a fall from the horse that made them see that perhaps cycling, so demanding, was robbing them of their lives, and they ended up up to their noses even shaving their legs, not having the freedom to let their hair grow.
"Why are there more cases in cycling?
It is the hardest sport.
More than 80 days of racing a year that totally absorb you.
They don't give you time to think.
And if you are successful, which at first it even excites you, you go into a centrifuge.
Life is a repetition of moments, and the pressure is such that stress devours you.
Dumoulin's reasons are not very different, who two and a half years ago, after verifying that winning the Giro was the door to a race of maximum demand, and left the Sunweb mid-season, and even stopped racing for a few months. .
He went to the Jumbo, where he was paid double, where the demand was multiplied as the salary.
“I've been feeling like I don't know who Tom Dumoulin is for at least a year.
It's the pressure, it's the expectations of so many people.
It seems that my only destiny is to make everyone happy with what I do, the team, the fans, the sponsors, my wife, my family… And I have forgotten about myself, ”says the Dutchman who gave up being the last Tour alternative to his partner Roglic and preferred to work as a gregarious, a cyclist who has shown all his life great mental toughness, who would surely sign the words that Roglic himself uses to explain how he overcame the drama of losing the Tour in the last time trial: It is very harmful to have victory as the only objective.
If you finish second, you are finished, you do not find energy to start over, and that prevents you from finding pleasure in preparation, on the way "
"What do I want?
How do I want my life to be? ”Asks Dumoulin.
“I have not had time to answer that question, because the cycling race is like a train in which you are always going from one place to another, from a concentration to a race, to the next goal.
And the question is still there, waiting for an answer ”.
Bouzas says that at some point he sought the help of psychologists because he thought his character, very perfectionist, was not compatible with being a cyclist, and that perfectionism, which did not allow him to disconnect for a second from cycling, could end up becoming an obsession.
“I think about everything a lot, I don't know how to disconnect,” says the Galician, “but the psychologists only offered me patches.
And then there was the fear of not winning, the pressure that I put myself, the external pressure, that of the people around you ... Until I got to the Spanish championship, which should have been a sign of my fullness, a happiness , and it was hell. "
And the day he decided to quit, and he did so 10 years before his idol, Bouzas began to sleep peacefully, like Dumoulin.