'Student loans were my income': Meet the Tour de France jersey wearer who was a club cyclist 18 months ago

Eighteen months ago, at the end of 2022, Frank van den Broek – no, not that one – was a club cyclist, riding for a team who didn’t pay him for competing in their colours. Nothing too extraordinary in that – he was turning 22. Today, though, he is entering his second week of the Tour de France, the greatest and biggest bike race on the planet, and he’s already been instrumental in a stage win, and lead both the points and youth classifications. 

“It’s a bit crazy, yep,” the Dutchman tells Cycling Weekly of his rapid rise from dedicated amateur to the sport’s summer breakthrough star in less than two years.

To understand why Van den Broek, a blonde-haired rouleur with a near-permanent cheeky smile, arrived ‘late’ on the scene – ‘late’ is relative; Van den Broek is the 12th youngest of the race’s 45 debutants and Gianni Vermeersch is making his Tour bow at 31 – there is a simple explanation. “I hit puberty a bit later,” he says, the first shoots of a facial hair only just appearing, “and because I was born on December 28 I was always one of the youngest racing.”

Still, cycling has always been a constant in Van den Broek’s life, even if korfball – a team sport similar to basketball and netball – was his first sporting endeavour. His parents met on a cycling holiday in Portugal and he was bought his first road bike aged 12 after suffering a torn anterior cruciate ligament. Progression through the youth and junior ranks, though, was slow.

“In my last junior year I started performing in the spring, but I crashed badly in the April and then two months later I broke my collarbone,” he recalls. “It was shit because the second year junior is an important year. I kept cycling, but then came Covid and I was racing less.”

Van den Broek, a hobby DJ who still spins tracks on his decks at home, enrolled at university to study software engineering for three years, but cycling remained his obsession, a dream of becoming professional still distant but never out of reach. 

“It was in the summer of 2022 when I won the Tour de Namur in Belgium racing against some professional cyclocross teams and Belgian Continental [third-tier] teams that I started to believe I could go for the win, and I had some interest from a few pro teams.”

Twenty-one at the time and living at home with his parents, Van den Broek was riding for JEGG-DJR Academy, a club team reliant on local sponsors and unable to pay its athletes. “Student loans were my income,” he says. “I was also getting a bit of money from prize money at races, but it wasn’t a lot.” How much? “Hmm, about €2,000. So other than new tyres and a chainset it couldn’t buy me a lot. I had to optimise based on the amount of money I had."

Frequent high-placings in domestic Belgian and Dutch races continued to alert teams to Van den Broek, who by now had quit university after two years “as I lost interest in it and shifted more towards cycling.” 

In 2023 he made the move to a UCI team, third-tier ABLOC CT, the upward step he had been seeking. “That was the first winter where I trained properly, more than 20 hours a week and really developed,” he says.

A win at the Ronde de l’Oise accelerated his burgeoning profile, with dsm-firmenich PostNL recruiting him for their development squad. Two pro wins later and he was promoted to the team’s WorldTour squad for 2024 – just a year after having to pay for his own equipment. 

He went into April’s Tour of Turkey “expecting to get my arse kicked in by the other big teams and riders,” he told Road Code, but instead won the GC, a result that earned him selection for the Tour. “I think last year I was able to make small steps,” he says modestly. “I’ve not noticed any big improvements, [it’s been] very gradual and natural.”

Van den Broek admits that the Tour, only his third WorldTour stage race, “scared me”, but on day one he got in the breakaway and then helped tow Romain Bardet to the line, completing a memorable and unfancied team one-two as his French teammate, 10 years his senior, took a career-first yellow jersey. The image of both Van den Broek and Bardet pointing to each other as they crossed the line will be a defining image of this year’s race. “It was a crazy day,” Van den Broek says. “It’s all calming down now but it was very chaotic over the weekend with a lot of messages. It was a nice, enjoyable start to the Tour.”

Cycling has a new name to familiarise itself with, one who a year-and-a-half ago still hadn’t received a monthly wage from the sport, and who was funding his development through student stipends. 

“It’s crazy to think how far I’ve come,” he says. “I still keep in touch with my former teammates and most still race at the same level. A few friends from my junior club will be coming to the Tour to see me.” Will they see another Van den Broek surprise? “The mountain stages are too hard for me, but the intermediate stages I’ll be trying. Hopefully, huh.”