How did your student loan run out? On a purchase of a new laptop or phone? Amidst a shopping spree, of the clothes, not the book kind? Or were you one of the wilder ones, maxing it out before you’d caught the Freshers Week-induced cough? Frank van den Broek trumps all, at least from a cycling standpoint. “The maximum loan I could get each month was €800, and if you hadn’t loaned anything for four months, you could go back and get it in one go,” the Dutchman says, his smile getting ever bigger as his anecdote reaches its climax. “At one point, I thought: fuck, I really need a TT bike! So I took out the maximum loan I could, and it paid for my time trial bike.” Given that he’s now finished second in a stage of the Tour de France, it’s safe to assume he’s paid his student loan back, right? “Oh no, the interest is low!” Recent British university alumni can only dream of such a reality.

Van den Broek – yes, a very cycling name, but zero connection to the late Belgian star – has been on quite a journey in the past few years. A student of software engineering in his native Holland, he competed in the amateur circles alongside his studies and only started riding for a third-tier Continental team in 2023, aged 22. Immediately, he caught the attention of others, and DSM-Firmenich picked him up in mid-summer for their development team, forcing him to pause the last part of his studies. “I was still interested in school but I wasn’t going to class much,” he says. Things not just accelerated but turbocharged even more, and within a year, he had won a stage and the GC at the Tour of Turkey, and crossed the line of the opening stage of the Tour de France along with teammate Romain Bardet. A dizzying, whirlwind rise from a broke student to the biggest stage of all.

This article was published in Rouleur in January 2025. You can read the full article here.