Jeroen Johannes Hendrikus Blijlevens is a retired road bicycle racer from the Netherlands, who was a professional rider from 1994 to 2004. He now works as a directeur sportif for UCI Women's Team, and has also worked as a cycling co-commentator at Eurosport Netherlands. Nicknamed Jerommeke, he was one of Holland's leading sprinters in the 1990s, claiming a total of 11 stage victories across the three Grand Tours. He won a total number of 74 races in his professional career.
Biography
Blijlevens was born in Gilze en Rijen, North Brabant in 1971, as a son of a shoe sales man. In 1990, he won his first race as an amateur. He scored nineteen victories as an amateur, and at the end of 1993 was signed by Cees Priem for. Blijlevens showed good results in his first years, and in 1995 was selected to ride the Tour de France, where he won the fifth stage. Blijlevens, not a good climber, left the race before the Alps. In 1996, Blijlevens again won a stage in the Tour de France. In 1997, he finished second to Erik Zabel in the sixth stage of the Tour de France, but when the jury disqualified Zabel for irregular sprinting, the victory was given to Blijlevens. In 1998 Blijlevens won the fourth stage of the Tour. That Tour was full of doping allegations, also towards the TVM team, and as soon as the race had passed the French-Swiss border, Blijlevens left the race, as a protest against the treatments by the French police. In 1999, Blijlevens wore the pink jersey as leader of the general classification in the Giro d'Italia, after winning the third stage. After the events of 1998, the TVM team was excluded from the 1999 Tour de France. The cyclists of TVM started a legal procedure to force the Tour organisers to invite them, but failed. At the end of that year, Blijlevens left TVM for. In 2000, Blijlevens invested in his climbing-abilities, but this did not work out as planned, and Blijlevens was not as successful as before. He failed to win a stage in the Tour de France, and was even disqualified after finishing the last stage for seeking out and assaulting Bobby Julich. When Polti stopped as a sponsor at the end of the year, Blijlevens signed for for 2001. In 2001, Blijlevens rode the Giro d'Italia, where the Italian police raided his team's hotel, but no forbidden products were found. As a protest against this treatment, the cyclists refused to start the eighteenth stage. At the end of 2001, Blijlevens could not find a new team, and made plans to ride as an amateur again, but finally he signed a contract for one year at. Blijlevens rode for a low base salary, with bonuses for victories. After a year full of injuries, Blijlevens was not given a contract for 2003, and switched to the team. After his retirement at the end of 2004, Blijlevens made plans to break the speed record on a bicycle, but failed to do so. In June 2013 he became sports director of the new team, and as part of a Dutch nationwide doping inquiry signed a statement saying he had never used doping. In July he was named in a French Senate report as one of many cyclists who had tested positive for EPO during retesting of samples from the 1998 Tour de France, Blijlevens then confessed that he had used EPO since 1997, and that he had lied in the investigation because he wanted to keep his job.
