SKATIN! TO MO"E SUCCESS
One key to Dutch cycling's success lies in the crossover between cycling and one of the country’s other sporting passions, ice skating. Marianne Vos, Ellen van Dijk, Janneke Ensing and former professionals like Iris Slappendel or Loes Gunnewijk as well as youngster Floortje Mackaij and more came to cycling from speedskating. "As a speedskater it's normal to train on the bike in summer," Van Dijk explains. "A three-kilometre race in speedskating is explosive, but you also need endurance. The leg power is pretty similar and a lot of speedskaters start with power training very early. You have a lot of competition early on," she says. Van Dijk decided to focus on cycling at the age of 21; Vos did so earlier and Ensing still dreams about the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.
Thijs Rondhuis, the organizer of both the Boels Ladies Tour and the Healthy Ageing Tour, a smaller stage race in April, always adds junior or youth races to his elite events - a motivational booster for the youngsters to get in contact with their role models there. The junior Healthy Ageing Tour plays an important role on the small international race calender for junior women. “In Denmark we had a lot of races with the boys, which helps to make a huge step, because they are so much stronger. But for the international races we had to go to Holland. Most races are there,” says Pernille Mathiesen. The 19-year-old Dane is the newly crowned double European U23 champion and won the Junior Healthy Ageing Tour in 2015, when it was called the Energiewacht Tour.
Of course, those Dutch junior races attract international federations, but there are many Dutch club teams racing as well. So more Dutch riders have the chance to compete with the best of their age group, which breeds strength in depth and quality. The UCI’s Women’s Junior Nations Cup was dominated by the Dutch this year, just like the elite level. At Gent-Wevelgem the British rider Pfeiffer Georgi was the only non-Dutch rider to win a race of the series, which ended with Holland having more than double the points of secondplaced Great Britain in the overall ranking. It looks like the current run of Dutch supremacy is only laying the foundations for further dominance in the future.
In the last 20 years, the Netherlands have been on the top or at least close to the top of the rankings, going all the way back to the era of Leontien van Moorsel. In the last 10 years, only two seasons ended with riders from other countries on top of the rankings (Sweden’s Emma Johansson in 2013 and the USA’s Megan Guarnier in 2016. “We always helped each other to a higher level,” explains Lucinda Brand, Holland’s seventh-ranked rider who sits in 25th position in the World Rankings.