Thomas Dekker

He eventually reached the 35th place in the overall final standings, and sixth in the young rider classification, in the Tour.

Thomas Dekker (born 6 September 1984) is a Dutch former professional road racing cyclist.

He was nicknamed "The Hulk from Dirkshorn" and joined the Rabobank junior team in 2002, winning the Junior National time trial championships, among other races.

In 2003 he joined, the continental team of , winning two stages of Ster Elekrotoer, and the national under-23 titles in the Road Race and Time Trial disciplines.

He also finished third in the Men's under-23 road race of the 2003 UCI Road World Championships.

He won two Dutch National Time Trial Championships and represented his country at the 2004 Summer Olympics held in Athens, Greece.

In 2004 he won the Tour de Normandie, Olympia's Tour, the Dutch National Time Trial Championships and also participated in the 2004 Summer Olympics at the age of 19, finishing 21st in the individual time trial.

Later in the season he also won the Grand Prix Eddy Merckx with Koen de Kort but crashed out of the Tour de l'Avenir while he was leading the race.

In September he joined the UCI ProTeam for the rest of the 2004 season as a stagiaire.

He won a stage of Rheinland-Pfalz Rundfahrt, finished second in both the U23 individual time trial and U23 road race of 2004 UCI Road World Championships and finished first in the UCI U23 Classification of 2004.

Dekker turned professional in 2005 with.

In his first season as a professional he won Grote Prijs Stad Zottegem and stages of Critérium International and Tour de Pologne.

He also repeated his victory in the Dutch National Time Trial Championships and rode the Giro d'Italia.

His career highlights included winning Tirreno–Adriatico in 2006 and Tour de Romandie in 2007.

In 2006 Dekker won the Tirreno–Adriatico stage race, making him the third Dutch cyclist to win the event, after Joop Zoetemelk (1985) and Erik Dekker (2002) and in 2007 the Tour de Romandie stage race, which featured two time trials and several difficult climbing stages in the Alps and Jura.

He eventually admitted to using EPO over at least parts of the 2007 and 2008 seasons, although he declined to give exact dates.

In 2007, Dekker debuted in the Tour de France.

Although he had been dreaming of winning the young rider classification, he did not win it.

Dekker finished his 2007 season with his first top ten finish in a 'Classic,' the 2007 Giro di Lombardia.

In addition, the UCI stripped Dekker of all of his results from 24 December 2007, the date of his positive.

The 2008 season got off to a promising start, with Dekker coming in 3rd place overall in both the Vuelta a Castilla y León and Tour of the Basque Country and achieving three top-ten finishes in the Ardennes classics.

However, after a poor showing in the Tour de Suisse Dekker was not selected by Rabobank for its 2008 Tour de France line-up.

On 14 August 2008 Dekker officially announced on his web page that he had split from Rabobank.

Although an early report in SportWereld said Dekker was on the verge of signing with Garmin-Chipotle, team manager Jonathan Vaughters later denied this rumor.

Dekker later revealed in an interview and in his book Schoon Genoeg that Vaughters had been on the verge of signing him, but the deal fell through when Dekker's blood values indicated he'd been doping.

According to Dekker, this was the wake-up call he needed to quit using performance-enhancing drugs.

On 27 September 2008 it was announced that Dekker had signed a contract with for two years.

A few days before the start of the 2009 Tour de France, it was announced that Dekker had tested positive for EPO in a retroactive test carried out on a urine sample taken in December 2007.

Dekker initially protested his innocence but he later admitted to using EPO, claiming it was a one-time mistake.

Dekker was suspended for two years, from 1 July 2009 to 30 June 2011.

Dekker's career has been marked by other doping allegations.

He was a client of Luigi Cecchini, an Italian doctor who was investigated in relation to doping matters, though Dekker adamantly denies that Cecchini was involved in his doping.

In 2009 he was also questioned in the Humanplasma doping scandal, a suspected doping ring connected to Austrian manager Stefan Matschiner.

In 2009, Dekker finished a respectable 16th in the Tour of Switzerland, with a highlight of 3rd place in the second, 39 km long, individual time trial.

On 1 July 2009, it was announced that a re-test of an out-of-competition sample taken in December 2007, while Dekker was with Rabobank, was found to contain the banned substance EPO.

Silence–Lotto immediately removed him from their team for the 2009 Tour de France.

Once his B-sample confirmed the EPO positive, Silence-Lotto fired Dekker, who admitted doping, apologizing and calling it "a mistake".

The Monaco Cycling Federation, where Dekker held his racing license, announced on 3 March 2010 that Dekker had been suspended for two years, until 1 July 2011.

Dekker retired in March 2015 after narrowly failing to set a new world hour record.

Dekker was born and raised in Dirkshorn, North Holland, Netherlands.