Career ends in 2023: Annemiek van Vleuten - from animal husbandry graduate to serial winner
Sebastian Lindner
· 19.11.2023
When Annemiek van Vleuten begins to celebrate success in cycling, hardly anyone is interested. It did exist, the supposedly professional women's cycling sport, but very few people took any notice of it. TV broadcasts, perhaps even live? Only the hardcore nations like the Netherlands offer it in very exceptional cases.
The situation has now changed completely. She is aware that Annemiek van Vleuten has also played a big part in this, but she would never say so publicly. She is only a small part of the successful development that women's cycling as a whole has undergone in recent years and continues to do so.
van Vleuten celebrated 104 victories as a professional in her career. She can confidently be described as a late starter, perhaps even a career changer, but that was not uncommon in the women's peloton at the end of the 00s. In the 13 years in which she devoted herself full-time to cycling, she won everything there was to win. Tour de France, Giro, Vuelta, classics, world champion titles in road races and time trials. Only Olympic gold in the road race eluded her - and sometimes tragically so.
Olympic drama in Rio does not throw van Vleuten off track
At the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, van Vleuten is in the lead with 13 kilometres to go after breaking away from a leading group of four. She is on the way to her greatest success, with only the downhill ahead of her. But she slammed on the brakes in a bend, lost control of her bike and crashed headfirst onto a road barrier. Unconscious and with severe concussion and three broken lumbar vertebrae, she is hospitalised. Just ten days later she was back on her bike, and a month later she won the Tour of Belgium.
Five years later in Tokyo, she is celebrating. But as she only learnt after crossing the finish line, it was silver. Anna Kiesenhofer from Austria had already crossed the line well ahead of her. Three days later, van Vleuten returned the favour with gold in the time trial. But revenge is not the right word. She does not draw her motivation from victories, she often explains in interviews. She is primarily concerned with performance.
This has been the case since the beginning of her career. Van Vleuten has been cycling full-time since 2010, when she was already 27 years old. Three years earlier, she competed for a Dutch amateur team for the first time. One of her first races was the one that is now called the Simac Ladies Tour. This is where she contests the last race of her professional career this year. As she crosses the finish line at the end of the last stage, she is cheered on by thousands of people in Arnhem.
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Late starter van Vleuten sets first exclamation mark
It was different 16 years ago. On the one hand, there were hardly any spectators; on the other, Annemiek van Vleuten was an amateur who primarily pursued an office job, studied animal science and graduated with a master's degree in epidemiology. Before that, she played football until doctors advised her against it after a knee injury.
Success was moderate in the first few years until van Vleuten decided to focus entirely on cycling. In Team Nederland bloeit, which later developed into the professional Rabobank team, she rode alongside Marianne Vos, who was more than four years younger but already had more than 70 victories to her name at the time. Her first victory came in April 2010. She won the Ronde van Drenthe as a soloist ahead of Ina-Yoko Teutenberg. She added four more this year, including La Route de France, her first tour. She relegates Judith Arndt to second place.
2011 is the first year in which van Vleuten shows her potential. Her focus is on the one-day races. She won three World Cup races that year: firstly the Tour of Flanders, the most important, as well as the GP de Plouay and the Open du Suede Vargada in Sweden. A year later, she celebrates eight victories, but at international level there are no important races that she can win. However, she became Dutch champion for the first time, beating team-mate Vos, who was virtually invincible that year and won more than one in three of her 43 race days.
2013 does not go optimally either. Van Vleuten only won three stages, including one at the Tour of Thuringia. There were also a few top 10 results, but nothing to suggest that the now 30-year-old would cause a furore in the supposed late summer of her career.
Van Vleuten's long wait on the way to the absolute top
But in reality, it's only just spring, as Annemiek van Vleuten proved in 2014. After winning the national time trial title, she won two stages at the Giro in the second half of the season and finished eighth overall. She also won two stages at the Tour of Belgium, as well as the overall victory. But even that is not the absolute initial spark for one of the greatest careers in women's cycling. In 2015, van Vleuten seems to be moulting into a prologue specialist - her three victories this season have all come in the opening time trials of three tours, including the Giro again. Perhaps the new team doesn't suit her either, but Bigla remains a one-year adventure after leaving Rabobank-Liv.
Then comes the year of Rio, in which van Vleuten is slowed down in the most dramatic way just before her first major triumph since the Tour of Flanders five years earlier. But this seems to be a key moment. Because the following year, van Vleuten would go on to become the winning rider with Orica and Mitchelton-Scott that she would be until the end of her career.
In 2017, the Dutchwoman, now 34 years old, wins her first world title in the individual time trial. Earlier in the year, she again won two stages of the Giro and finished third on the podium of one of the major tours for the first time. She finishes in the top 6 in almost all the major classics and comes third in the Amstel Gold Race, which is organised for women for the first time.
Van Vleuten gets better every year
The spell is broken. Three stage wins at the Giro in 2018 are enough for overall victory for the first time - with three more to follow. She wins the Simac Ladies Tour for the second time in a row and also defends time trial gold at the World Championships. At the start of the season, she made a detour to the track at her home World Championships in Apeldoorn and took silver in the individual pursuit. From now on, every year gets better.
In 2019, van Vleuten repeated her overall victory at the Giro, winning Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Strade Bianche. She also celebrated her first victory at the World Championships in the road race. In the difficult coronavirus year of 2020, she repeated her victory at Strade Bianche and won the Omloop Het Nieuwsblad for the first time. She also becomes European Road Champion. The following year saw her first triumph at the Vuelta, her first victory at the Clasica San Sebastian and her second at the Tour of Flanders. On top of that, Olympic gold in the time trial.
2022: Tour, Giro, Vuelta - Annemiek van Vleuten takes all the honours
And then it's 2022. Although the competition is getting stronger and stronger, van Vleuten, who switched to Team Movistar the year before, is unstoppable - at the age of 39. In February, she won the Volta Comunitat Valenciana and the Omloop. This was followed by 2nd place at Strade Bianche in March and at the Ronde in April, 4th place at the Amstel Race and 2nd place again at the Fleche Wallonne. She wins Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
Then it's July. Within a month, the Giro and the first-ever Tour de France Femmes are on the agenda. With two stage wins, she wins her third Giro and travels to Paris, where the women's Tour begins before the men take to the Champs-Élysées, as the top favourite. She takes it easy on the first sections, letting the competition go first. Until it ultimately becomes decisive. On the penultimate stage to Le Markstein in the Vosges, van Vleuten sets the pace. to the big solo trip on. She gains three and a half minutes on her closest rival Demi Vollering during the stage, while the rest of the field gains at least five.
It's tighter up to the Super Planche des Belles Filles, where the Tour ends. But only because van Vleuten no longer has to. Nevertheless, she wins again by 30 seconds ahead of Vollering and celebrates, as she says later, the biggest victory of her career. But she is still not satisfied. In the same year, van Vleuten also wins the Vuelta and the world title on the road - the latter with a broken elbow.
Another two out of three, but Vollering's changing of the guard is here
After the peak of her career, she announces the end of her career for the following season. But even at 40, her last year is not supposed to be just a farewell tour - although Vollering is breathing down her neck more and more and is just waiting to finally replace her compatriot as the top dog. And Vollering, who is 13 years younger, succeeds. She wins the Ardennes Triple and the Tour. But van Vleuten was able to defend her Vuelta victory. She is nine seconds faster than her crown princess. And she also wins the Giro again, and thus for a fourth time, with three stage victories in dominant fashion. However, her great rival is not there.
Whether Annemiek van Vleuten herself still believed that she would be able to counter Vollering's sheer superiority at the Tour remains her secret. In any case, she showed no signs of frustration in the interviews afterwards and seemed at peace with the situation. She was not only beaten by Vollering, but also by Lotte Kopecky and Kasia Niewiadoma.
Van Vleuten recently told cyclingnews.com that she has no concrete plans for the future, just a few ideas. Retirement from cycling is not a problem for her, not constantly chasing after goals takes her back to her past. But thanks to Annemiek van Vleuten and her 104 victories, women's cycling will never be the same as it was a few years ago.
Annemiek van Vleuten's greatest successes
- 2x world champion in road racing (2019, 2022)
- 2x world champion in the individual time trial (2017, 2018)
- Olympic champion in the Tokyo 2021 time trial
- Winner of the first Tour de France Femmes 2022
- 4x overall winner of the Giro d'Italia Donne (2018, 2019, 2022, 2023)
- 16x stage winner at the Giro
- 3x overall winner of the Vuelta Espana in a row (2021, 2022, 2023)
- 2x winner of the Tour of Flanders (2011, 2021)
- 2x winner at Liège-Bastogne-Liège (2019, 2022)
- A total of 104 victories as a professional
- 2x winner Strade Bianche (2019, 2020)
- 2x winner Simac Ladies Tour (2017, 2018)
