Laurens ten Dam and his fellow former professional Thomas Dekker had arrived in America for last weekend’s Unbound Gravel.
24 hours after landing, they headed out for a three-hour training ride near Marietta, Oklahoma, finishing up outside a Mexican restaurant where they planned to have lunch. Presumably not wanting to disturb their fellow diners, all sweaty and dirty after hours out riding, they decided to have a quick makeshift shower with a bottle of water in the parking lot outside.
“After Thomas had rinsed me off, I quickly changed my pants between the car doors,” Ten Dam said on his Live Slow Ride Fast podcast. “But as I do that, I hear someone shouting very angrily across the street.”
Their European comfort with nudity was clearly too much for one local, who promptly called the police.
“Suddenly there were five police cars. The man who had shouted at us was also there and said: ‘You should go to jail for this’,” Ten Dam continued.
“Within five minutes there were five police cars. At that moment, the man who had been yelling at Thomas comes over and yells for Thomas to be put in jail.”
“Walking around naked on the street apparently caused so much offence …” Dekker explained. “It’s really not allowed there.”
“We were told that we had been charged with indecent behavior. The charges stated that we sprayed each other with water bottles like two ‘gay cyclists’,” Ten Dam explained what the pair were told by police, before Dekker added the officers had “the IQ of a shrimp.”
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