Thomas Nybo Riis has only been riding seriously for 18 months with the small Blue Water Cycling team but has secured a place in the national squad that aims to help emerging riders by giving them a ride in the biggest race on the Danish calendar.
The five-day Tour of Denmark will be held on August 3-7 this year.
”I did not expect this at all, and I am very surprised. At the moment I’m only riding, because it’s fun, and we how to see, how far I can go,” Thomas Nybo told Sporten.tv2.dk.
"I've played football and handball, and I like music but deep down I have always thought that I’d be into cycling one day."
"I believe that if I train like everyone else, I can be better than them all. I definitely have a talent for it. Right now the bike I really just for fun, and we’ll see how far it will go in the future.”
Bjarne Riis said he was pleased and proud to see his son following in his footsteps. He won the Tour of Denmark in 1995 and became a national hero in Denmark after winning the Tour de France.
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He fell from grace in 2007 when he confessed to doping to win the Tour de France and symbolically offered to give back his yellow jersey. He is the owner of the Saxo Bank-SunGard team.
“I am very proud. It’s fantastic, that he’s doing well. He have only been riding for a bit more than a year, so it is kind of crazy, that he is already on this level,” Riis said.
“Of course he asks me for advice but I have let him do this on his own, and that is cool. He got talent, and he is very serious about his sports, and he knows what it takes. How far he can go, time will tell.”
Stephen is the most experienced member of the Cyclingnews team, having reported on professional cycling since 1994. He has been Head of News at Cyclingnews since 2022, before which he held the position of European editor since 2012 and previously worked for Reuters, Shift Active Media, and CyclingWeekly, among other publications.
