“If they really wanted to clean up the sport, they should have stayed”: Rabobank’s return to pro cycling – decade after leaving due to doping scandals – a “no brainer”, says Michael Rasmussen

If you’re ever searching for an example of what sets professional cycling enthusiasts apart from fans of other sports, look no further than the excitement generated last week by the announcement that a multinational financial institution was returning to the sport after an almost decade-long absence.

In July, Rabobank – whose iconic orange, blue, and white kits graced the peloton for 20 years from the mid-1990s – will return to professional cycling as jersey sponsor of the Visma-Lease a Bike men’s, women’s, and development teams in a three-and-a-half-year deal, described by the Dutch squad’s former Tour de France leader Michael Rasmussen as a “no brainer”.

The sponsorship, which will see Rabobank’s name added to Visma’s kits as well as the creation of a ‘Ready2Race’ initiative aimed at making cycling more accessible for children, marks the financial institution’s long-awaited homecoming at a squad it stepped away from almost a decade ago following a string of doping scandals.

“With the addition of Team Visma-Lease a Bike to our sports partnerships, we are returning to our old love: cycling,” Stefaan Decraene, the chair of Rabobank’s managing board, said in a statement last week announcing the bank’s renewal of its partnership with the double Tour de France winning team.

“As the jersey sponsor of both the men’s and women’s teams, as well as the Development Team, we look forward to supporting the next generation of cycling talent together.”

Rabobank (credit: road.cc)

Rabobank first entered the pro cycling world in 1996 when it became title sponsor of Jan Raas’ Novell team (which started life as Kwantum, a successor of the famed TI-Raleigh set-up, in 1984).

During an era in which the sport was beset by doping controversy after doping controversy, the Dutch squad won many of cycling’s biggest races, including the Giro d’Italia, Tour of Flanders, Milan-Samremo (three times), Paris-Nice, Amstel Gold, and a host of Tour de France stages, and featured star names such as Óscar Freire, Rolf Sørensen, Robbie McEwen, Denis Menchov, and Tour King of the Mountains Rasmussen.

However, things first began to unravel in 2007 when, on the cusp of winning the Tour de France, yellow jersey Rasmussen was sensationally sent home by the team, just days from Paris.

In the hours after his dominant solo win on the Col d’Aubisque, seeing off the threat of Alberto Contador and all but securing the overall victory, the Danish climber was unceremoniously booted off the race, Rabobank having come under increasing pressure for much of the previous week following reports that Rasmussen had lied about his whereabouts to avoid doping tests during the build-up to the Tour.

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With Rasmussen gone, Rabobank’s reputation, like that of professional cycling at the time, was in tatters.

While the team carried on for the next five years, picking up a Tour green jersey and a Giro d’Italia title on the way, the USADA report that led to Lance Armstrong’s lifetime ban – and the revelations that emerged in 2012 concerning the team’s organised doping programme, supervised by Dr Geert Leinders (who briefly ended up at Team Sky) – proved the final nail in the coffin.

That year, amid reports of bus blood transfusions, team meetings about how to evade tests, and smuggled products, Rabobank withdrew its sponsorship, with the bank’s board member Bert Bruggink saying at the time: “We are no longer convinced that the international professional world of cycling can make this a clean and fair sport. We are not confident that this will change for the better in the foreseeable future.”

Rabobank-Liv, 2014 team (credit: Rabobank-Liv)

The timing couldn’t have been much worse. The same year it pulled the plug on the men’s team, Rabobank had started its first women’s squad, one which soon became a dominant force within the sport, containing world-class, era-defining talent such as Marianne Vos, Annemiek van Vleuten, Anna van der Breggen, Lucinda Brand, Kasia Niewiadoma, and Pauline Ferrand-Prevot, before the bank eventually stepped aside in 2016.

Meanwhile, on the men’s side, under the management of new team owner and director Richard Plugge, Rabobank’s former press officer, and propped up initially by the bank’s money (if not its title sponsorship), the squad endured a torrid few years, with one of the smallest budgets in the World Tour and limited success.

In 2012, Plugge was keen to start afresh after years of doping scandals, an approach epitomised by the team’s ‘Blanco’ moniker while in between sponsorship deals.

That fresh start approach has certainly paid dividends, culminating in the remarkable Visma-fronted turnaround of the past decade, and the Dutch squad’s Wout van Aert and Jonas Vingegaard-led ascension to the very top of the sport.

And, ultimately, Rabobank’s belated return in 2025.

“They should never have left the sport”

“Their decision to rejoin us as a partner is a great compliment,” Plugge said last week of Rabobank’s return. “It shows how much cycling has evolved in recent years and how our team has become synonymous with professionalism, integrity, and success.

“Through this partnership, we continue building the future of the sport and inspire the next generation of cycling talents. We are proud of this collaboration and excited about what we can achieve together.”

Victorious Jumbo-Visma cross the line on the Champs-Élysées at the 2022 Tour de France (credit: Zac Williams)

Speaking to road.cc, Rasmussen – one of the riders intrinsically linked with Rabobank’s tainted association with cycling and now a journalist at Danish newspaper Ekstra Bladet – described the Dutch bank’s decision to renew its partnership with the Netherlands’ national team, and one of the world’s best, as a “no brainer”.

“It’s a no brainer. They should never have left the sport. Cycling is such a great marketing tool, and in the Netherlands, cycling and Rabobank are so closely connected, so it makes so much sense,” the former pro tells road.cc.

“They’re running a really good programme at Visma, and they’re a big bank, they have a lot of money to spend. Rabobank have been sponsoring national and Olympic teams, and cycling is such a big deal in the Netherlands, so it makes a lot of sense for them to re-enter now. And being a Dutch bank, they’ve got the opportunity to sponsor what is essentially a national team, like Visma is.”

Michael Rasmussen, 2007 Tour de France (credit: road.cc)

Not that Rasmussen, who criticised Rabobank online last week for their hands-on approach to his controversial Tour exit in 2007, believes the bank should have abandoned the sport in the first place.

“If they really wanted to clean up the sport, they should have stayed and done something about it,” he says.

“2012 wasn’t a surprise. They certainly knew what was going on, there are intelligent people sitting in that bank.

“And they were there when all the big scandals happened – Festina, Operación Puerto, you name them, they were there all along. And nevertheless, they still had one of the best teams in the world competing with all these people involved in these scandals. Of course they knew what was going on.

“They were extremely hypocritical at that point, but in 2012, they probably felt like they were forced to abandon the sport, not because they wanted to.”

But, while Plugge branded the Rabobank 2.0 deal as an indicator of his squad’s – and the sport’s – renewed integrity following decades of systemic doping, how much has the team, and cycling, really changed since 2012?

Because, while the ‘Blanco’ era of the early 2010s appeared to represent a fresh start for the beleaguered Dutch squad, 13 years on, traces of the old Rabobank era still remain.

One of the team’s sports directors, Grischa Niermann, rode for Rabobank between 1999 and 2012, and like Rasmussen in 2013 confessed to using EPO during his career. Meanwhile, Addy Engels, a DS for the WorldTour and development squads, also raced for the Dutch team in the early 2000s, and other staff members were in place before the Plugge revolution.

Michael Rasmussen celebrates winning stage 16 of the 2006 Tour de France (credit: AFP Photo)

Nevertheless, while personnel remain, Rasmussen is convinced that cycling has undergone a wider cultural shift, aided by corporate outsiders entering the sport, over the past decade.

“It seems that the sport has changed a lot for sure, the riders now don’t have to face the same choices we had to make 15, 20 years ago. As far as we know, the big doping scandals are now few and far between,” the 50-year-old tells road.cc.

“At any period in cycling, riders just adapt to whatever conditions are going on around them. Back in the day, it’s not like we were doing things that other teams weren’t doing. And it’s the same thing nowadays. You know, people really compete under the same terms at any given time in in cycling.

“We just did the same as every other single team out there. Everybody adapts to whatever reality they are faced with, and I think Visma are doing that now.”

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Reflecting on what has changed within professional cycling since Rabobank departed, Rasmussen continued: “A lot of the teams are now run on a corporate and technical level by external people, compared to, say, 10 years ago, let alone 20, when all the teams were run by people with a long history in cycling. But the people who have entered the sport in recent years couldn’t live with what was going on, they’ve come in with different values.

“Before, the team managers in the 1990s had raced in the eighties, and the managers in the 2000s had raced in the nineties and so on. But things started to change when Bob Stapleton came in and bought T-Mobile in 2006 and 2007 – and that was one of the biggest moves.

“He came in with different values and started to change things around, and it’s developed from there. Whereas beforehand, the people at the wheel of the team cars, who were managing the teams, most of them probably didn’t read too many books before they suddenly had to make a company with 50 employees. So, a lot has changed.”

Rabobank, 2012 Vuelta 2012 TTT (credit: Unipublic:Graham Watson)

And how does Rasmussen think Rabobank will adapt to life back in the peloton, albeit in a new, less front and centre manner?

“It will be different now, because in the old system, Rabobank owned the team,” he points out. “They weren’t a sponsor in the traditional sense, where a manager owns the team and secures a sponsor, they were the owners. So, they could fire a team manager with a click of the fingers, in five seconds.

“Had the structure of the team been different, I’m sure the team would have acted differently back in the 1990s and 2000s. But now, they’re just a co-sponsor, so if they want to pull out this time, they can do it without closing the team. If they really wanted to own a cycling team, they could just do it.”