Niki Terpstra wound down his road racing career on Sunday in a less than ideal way after the former Paris-Roubaix and Tour of Flanders winner was unlucky enough to crash in his final event.
The Dutchman crashed during Sunday’s edition of Paris-Tours but battled on to finish 128th and last, more than 20 minutes down on winner Arnaud Démare (Groupama-FDJ).
The TotalEnergies veteran was greeted by his family as he rode across the Paris-Tours finish line on the Avenue de Grammont and reached the end of a career spanning three decades.
A pro since 2007 when he began a four-year block with now defunct German team Milram prior to racing with Quick Step (2013-2018) and TotalEnergies (2019-2022), Terpstra is rumoured to be considering moving over to gravel racing. His last road race, in any case, proved to be a tough finale.
"It went well until halfway through, but then I crashed and it hurt quite a bit," Terpstra told NOS about his very last race .
“For the first ten seconds I thought: this is it. I said yesterday [Saturday] it was going to be dangerous, and that's the dark side of cycling. That is unfortunately part of it.”
A former triple National Champion and very successful Classics racer in the middle part of his career, the last few years of Terpstra’s career were blighted by multiple accidents, with his last road victory the Tour of Flanders in 2018.
Terpstra crashed badly in the same race in 2019 and again in the Tour de France that summer. He also had a heavy fall while training behind a motorbike in 2020 after swerving to avoid some geese, needing airlifting to hospital where he was diagnosed with concussion, a collapsed lung, fractured ribs and a collarbone.
He nonetheless recovered and raced on with TotalEnergies for two more years, prior to hanging up his road wheels on Sunday, aged 38.
Terpstra is set to continue involvement in cycling beyond his retirement from road racing, with a possible move to gravel on the cars. "But listen, I am not done yet with cycling. Of course I will continue to race... stay tuned!" he wrote in his retirement announcement.
