One day, the Dutch veteran was a pro training for his next race. The next, he was a cardiac patient facing an existential challenge.
The next Kreder in the family business? Wesley with son Milan. Photo © Wesley Kreder
Wesley Kreder, Cor Vos, Kristof Ramon
August 2023 is the month that everything changed for Wesley Kreder. Forever. A professional cyclist since 2013, a veteran of 14 cobbled Monuments and three Grand Tours, the month began with a crash and a broken collarbone on stage four of the Tour of Poland. That in itself wasn’t disastrous – he’d broken the same bone before – and he knew within a few weeks he’d be race-ready again for the end of the season. It was what came next that upended everything for the Cofidis rider.
“I was slowly building back up to return to racing [and] the rest of the time I was training at home and enjoying time with my family,” the Dutchman told Escape Collective via email. But he wouldn’t get to pin another race number on ever again. He almost wouldn’t even see his family again. In fact, he’s immensely lucky to be even telling his story today. On the night of August 29, 2023, Kreder suffered a cardiac arrest at home so severe that, as cardiologists later explained to him: “Without immediate resuscitation, hardly anyone survives.”
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“No one wants to finish like that. It’s a horrendous way to watch your career circle the drain for 18 months.”
Kreder was only 32. His two young children – ages six and two at the time – were asleep in adjacent rooms, at first unaware that their father was clinging to his own young life. “I suffered a ventricular fibrillation, a severe heart rhythm disturbance where the heart stops pumping and there’s no blood circulation,” he said. Thanks to the quick thinking of his wife and her family, Kreder survived to tell the tale, but the scars still linger via acquired brain injury (ABI). From one moment to the next, his life changed dramatically for evermore. “Sometimes it’s hard to find peace in my head, and that affects my daily life with my kids, my family, and my energy,” said Kreder, now 35. “I”m grateful to still be here, but learning to live with ABI remains a constant challenge.”
The family business
Wesley Kreder was only ever going to be a professional cyclist. It’s pretty much worn into his family fabric, part of his DNA. He and his two brothers (his twin Sander and Dennis, three years older) raced together as kids, while three of his cousins (Raymond, Michel and Stefan) all competed on the UCI circuit. All except Stefan, the baby of the family, were born within a few years of each other. You can imagine birthday parties growing up revolving around spontaneous bike races in the playground and fields.
Of the five, Wesley had the longest and most successful career, registering 746 professional race days and 11 seasons at the ProTour or WorldTour level. He started with Rabobank Continental team in 2010 and progressed to the WorldTour with Vacansoleil-DCM in 2013 after winning the Tour de Vendée for the Dutch team as a stagiaire in the autumn of 2012. “That gave me confidence and led to my first professional contract,” he reflected.
Wins were never frequent occurrences in Kreder’s career as he settled into a helper’s role from the get-go, but in 2016, riding the second year of a two-year contract with Roompot-Oranje Peloton, he took a stage of the ZLM Tour. It was another “great moment,” as he put it, one of several in a “beautiful career” that was mostly marked by six years as one of Wanty-Groupe Gobert’s most trusted domestiques.
Kreder was predominantly a Classics specialist – one highlight was “in one of my first years as a pro [2013] entering the Trouée d’Arenberg cobblestone sector first out of the peloton, riding in support of my team leader Björn Leukemans at Paris-Roubaix.” But he could turn his hand to most tasks in the sport, and rode and completed two editions of the Giro d’Italia and one Vuelta a España. The latter, in 2021, stands out as particularly memorable as little Intermarché-Wanty-Gobert Matériaux led the race for seven stages with Christian Odd Eiking, who finished 11th overall.
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