INTERVIEW: ANNA VAN DER BREGGEN
The Dutchwoman topped the WorldTour in 2017, but just what makes her so dominant?
The Boels-Dolmans team are easy to miss on their training camp in Xàbia, Spain. The small complex of selfcatered apartments the squad has been staying in on Alicante’s Costa Blanca is hidden behind a large white gate just off a main road. It is so inconspicuous we initially drive past it twice. Once inside, the only sign of life is a black cat wandering around the foot of an orange tree on the gravel driveway. There’s no team cars or a bus parked up.The only clue that 2017’s top ranked women’s team and its best performing rider are staying here is the Specialized bike leant up against the wall.
In the absence of a door to knock on, or a reception to walk into, it takes a few minutes before anyone realises we’re there, and it’s the diminutive Anna van der Breggen who comes walking down some steps to greet us. She apologises if we’ve been waiting long, and leads us back up the steps, past the covered-over swimming pool around which all the rooms are centred, to a communal living room adorned with a random collection of books and DVDs left by previous guests. And just like the apartments, Van der Breggen is understated. She’s petite, just 5ft 4in, and dressed in leggings and a team issue hoodie. She offers us a cup of coffee and makes it in the adjoining kitchen before sitting down to talk. Her results from the past 12 months command attention – a trio of hilly Classics wins, a Tour of California GC title, a second overall Giro victory – but there’s no air of an ego here.
Those results propelled her to the top of the Women’s WorldTour rankings in 2017. The 27-year-old is modest, however, when she looks back on what she achieved last year. “I enjoyed it,” she tells Procycling, clutching her warm mug close to her, before pausing. “I enjoyed being with the team and at the races. I had a couple of goals and especially at the beginning of the season it was nearly perfect. It was nice, and I think it was a great season. I loved it.”
By now, Van der Breggen is used to performing in the spotlight. She was the reigning Olympic and European road race champion going into 2017, and also had a Giro title and wins in races like Omloop Het Nieuwsblad to her name. But it was during that hilly Classics week in late April that Van der Breggen showed why she is the dominant force in women’s racing. She won Amstel Gold Race (on the calendar for the first time since 2003), Flèche Wallonne (her third victory there) and a debut edition of Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Remarkably, each race was won using the same tactic – her team-mate Lizzie Deignan went up the road in a late breakaway and when the group was caught, Van der Breggen would attack and ride to the finish. Three times she did the same thing, and three times she was too strong for anyone to do anything about it.
“A big goal for us was to win that race [Amstel] with the team and I was very happy with that. For the rest of the week it didn’t really matter any more: we were still happy and focused on the next race. We started so well, then to win the second then the third – it was never really expected,” she says.
“You see it with the guys, the same guys are always in front in those races. I mean Valverde is doing it. But we never thought about it – to win all three of those races.”
VAN DER BREGGEN is an aggressive rider. She is very rarely content just to sit in the pack and follow others. She prefers to be the one at the head of the race, taking it on. She’s a predator who pounces when her rivals least expect it or, if they do, they are at their weakest.
“In every race I would like to take the maximum out of it. I never do a race just by competing,” she says of her riding style. “If you have the feeling you could do more, for me, a race is not a success. Even if I am not that good I will try to hide more in the peloton and then in the end
“If you have the feeling you could do more, a race is not a success. Even if I am not that good in a race I will try to hide more and then still try and win it at the end. I’m an active rider”
still try and win it. I’m an an active rider,” she says.
She classes her all-round ability as her biggest strength, and it’s hard to argue against that. But again – rather modestly – Van der Breggen underplays how good she is at just about everything: one-day races, stage races, time trials, climbing, sprinting, cobbles and crosswinds – she can handle it all.
“I never do one thing really good,” she says, after pausing. “But I like to do a time trial when I am good in it. I like to do a long race. I like to do stage races. Sometimes I like to be a leader and sometimes I like to help other girls from my team. Cycling is not easy; every race can be different and you can have different goals. That’s what I like about it.”
Yet while Van der Breggen’s attacking prowess might be what defines her racing style, it didn’t come naturally. Growing up in the city of Hasselt in the northeast Netherlands as one of five children – with three older brothers and one sister – Van der Breggen admits she was “pretty competitive” even when she started riding bikes aged seven for fun with her friends. She joked she would look at the trophies in her cycling clubhouse and realise that she wanted one of her own.
But her tactical nous took time to perfect. “In the beginning, I always did it wrong. I always attacked at the beginning of a race,” she says. “When you are young you are excited and it’s sometimes really difficult to wait and find the right moment. I think you have to do it wrong for a couple of times to do it right.”
Home for Van der Breggen these days is Zwolle, a city not far from where she grew up. Even though life as a professional cyclist was far from her mind when she was younger, the flat, windy plains of her home country provided a good training ground, and it is where she still prefers to hone her form.
“It’s flat, of course and we have a lot of dykes and wind and it’s pretty bad weather at this time of the year [winter]. But that’s how you grow up. For us it was normal to ride in the wind or when it was cold outside, to have good clothes,” she says.
The Netherlands’s lack of hills meant climbing was absent from Van der Breggen’s formative years on the bike, which is perhaps a surprise considering how at home she now is on the very steepest and longest slopes.
It wasn’t until she was a teenager and spent time with the Dutch national squad that she found her taste for climbing, and discovered she had a natural aptitude for it.
“We went to the Ardennes to see how everybody was climbing and it was my first experience in the mountains. That went pretty well, so I liked it. But I remember we did a time trial and I thought I was doing so badly, then I found I came out on top. I had the fastest time, I was so surprised. I thought I was going so slow, because I was not used to going uphill,” she laughs.
Cycling was also absent from the family television screen growing up, which made the thought of pursuing the sport as a career seem even more distant. Instead, on finishing school, Van der Breggen started a nursing course at university. She juggled study and a hospital internship with racing with Team Flexpoint. And yet a question grew in the back of her mind: what if she dedicated herself to cycling and found out how good she could really be?
Yet it was another three years before she fully committed to cycling by joining the Sengers Ladies Team in 2012. “I wanted to know how good I was. I never trained totally for cycling, I always did studying next to it and I had no idea how to do it,” she says. “I tried that year in 2012 to be serious and see what training does for you if you do it well. That year was incredibly good. I made so much progress that I was surprised that training really worked out. That was the beginning.”
It was indeed an incredibly good season. Van der Breggen took two stage wins plus the overall at the Tour de Bretagne, won the U23 European TT Championships and finished second at the Tropheé d’Or. She capped 2012 off with fifth place on her debut in the elite Worlds road race in Valkenburg.
FROM SENGERS she joined native team Rabo-Liv for three seasons before bolstering the already strong BoelsDolmans squad at the start of 2016. The team has three world champions in Lizzie Deignan, Amalie Dideriksen and Chantal Blaak. Former Giro Rosa winner and UCI world number one Megan Guarnier is also part of the team. Yet Van der Breggen insists that while her team-mates may have reputations and personalities as big as their palmarès, there’s no rivalry.
“You always have competition but that’s not between each other on Boels- Dolmans, that’s with yourself. I know if I am in the right shape I can win the race”
“The girls are so professional here – they know what to do, they know what they want. And that’s a good thing,” she says. “You always have the competition but it’s not between each other, it’s with yourself. I know that if I’m in the right shape I can win the race. I can say to the others I would like to win, say, Flèche. But if I am not good enough I will never say something like that.”
She admits being in such a strong team does have some drawbacks. For example, if she puts herself forward as the leader, then the pressure is on to produce the result to validate the team’s support. “These girls around me know what my goal is and what we are doing. If that’s not working out then sometimes that’s pretty hard,” she says. “For me that’s the biggest pressure: if I’m not good enough I lose the race, not only for myself but for my team-mates.” Like any other 20-something, when Van der Breggen does have some downtime she likes to do the usual things away from cycling: cooking and spending time with her family. She enjoys playing the piano and painting too, though they have largely been put on the back burner for now. “If you start painting you really need the whole day for it, and normally I don’t have the whole day. That’s something to keep in mind, when I quit cycling maybe I will do it,” she says.
This season is likely to follow a relatively similar trajectory to 2017, with the Ardennes Classics again a target, though when she speaks with
Procycling her programme has yet to be finalised. However, if there’s one race that will firmly stay a target for Van der Breggen it’s the Worlds. She was the runner-up in 2015 to her now team-mate Lizzie Deignan and was was eighth last year in Bergen as her compatriot Chantal Blaak won.
“It stays a goal because I’ve been close a couple of times already but I’ve never won it. If that never works out, it doesn’t mean my career is not good – it’s already really good. It’s a good goal for me, it will stay a goal,” she explains.
In fact, though Van der Breggen’s palmarès may grow each year there’s plenty to keep her motivated. “I like to pick races which I haven’t won yet,” she insists with a smile. Her determination is understated, but it’s definitely there.