The same cannot be said of Pieter van den Hoogenband and Tom Dumoulin, two former UM students who have since become well-known public figures in the Netherlands. The two have a lot in common: both were born in Maastricht, went on to become world-class athletes, studied at UM – and both dropped out before completing their degrees.
Olympic champion
Swimmer Van den Hoogenband, who would later become a three-time Olympic champion, sixteen-time European champion and one-time world champion, certainly came here intending to finish his degree. In March 1999, as a first-year Medicine student, he told Observant that he had been over the moon when, almost a year earlier, he heard that he had secured a place on his preferred programme in his favourite city. He found the approach stimulating: working in groups, doing a lot of independent study and the programme’s block structure. At the time, Maastricht was only just beginning to develop support services for elite athletes, and Problem-Based Learning (with compulsory attendance and intensive small-group sessions) was not exactly known for being athlete-friendly. Even so, the faculty did all it could to make things easier for him. By then, Van den Hoogenband had already won a European 200 metre title, and his star was rising fast. He was assigned a mentor whom he described as his “rock”, and the education office proved highly considerate: “We accommodate his wishes.”
In his first year, Van den Hoogenband hoped to pass three of the seven exams – all that his training schedule would realistically allow. On average, he spent twenty hours a week in the pool, plus another six hours of strength training.
Struggling
After two years of struggling and passing just three exams, he decided it was time to give up. The combination had proved impossible. His professors, he later recalled, advised him to focus on his sport: “I can do something special, something perhaps only two or three people in the world can do. Everyone has their own talents. I discovered that mine happened to be moving through water very fast.”
Giro d'Italia
Cyclist Tom Dumoulin, having failed to secure a place on the Medicine programme, began studying Health Sciences in September 2009. He hoped to combine his studies with his cycling career and was determined to make it work, he told Observant in 2014. By then, the university offered elite athlete support, but it left something to be desired. “My plan was to complete my first year in two years, but it kept getting harder. Talking to my study advisor and block coordinators helped a bit, but not enough. Deadlines for resit assignments were often pushed back, but ultimately, you still had to do the same amount of work – or even more – in too little time. You can hardly call that elite athlete support.”
During his second year, Dumoulin gradually drifted away from his studies and eventually stopped attending altogether. It was something he regretted, as he was close to completing his first year. In 2014, he admitted, “I’m a little jealous of someone like [elite gymnast] Epke Zonderland – he studies medicine and has become a great ambassador for the University of Groningen.”
In 2017, Dumoulin won the Giro d’Italia; a year later, he finished second in both the Giro and the Tour de France. Had he and Van den Hoogenband not dropped out, they might well have become UM’s most famous alumni and great ambassadors for the university.