ANNEMIEK VAN VLEUTEN
Procycling visits the world champion at home, for a ride and a revealing interview
Annemiek van Vleuten wakes up some days with heavy legs. You might think this would be cause for a little worry. Not now. It’s the off-season. The next race is some time ahead and that’s why, a couple of seconds later she thinks to herself: ‘Who cares? It doesn’t matter that my legs are shot.’ The pressure is off and that gives her a great feeling. Nothing has to be done; anything is possible. It’s mid-October, the temperature has dropped and the leaves on the trees and ground have taken on the colours of autumn. Even on these days, Van Vleuten can still be found on her bike. But not in the rain, or when she doesn’t feel like it. And definitely not alone. Riding now is for purely sociable purposes. “I have many friends who cycle, and I enjoy going on short rides with them to chat and catch up. That makes me happy,” Van Vleuten tells Procycling as we leave her home city of Wageningen and set course to the Veluwe. “October is a month where I still like to keep training a little. Also, it’s pretty cool to be able to ride around in the rainbow jersey. A lot of people watched the Worlds. Cars honk at me and cyclists will ride beside me to take selfies. It’s fun. I’m enjoying the aftermath of the race.”
How different did her life look 12 months ago? Van Vleuten had a very successful 2018, with wins at the Giro Femminile and La Course, along with her second world TT title. But four days after winning one rainbow jersey in Innsbruck, she suffered a knee injury chasing another.
“The worst thing was that I had such a good season, but because of this injury I never got the opportunity to actually enjoy it. Yes, three days in Innsbruck, until it all went wrong. I thought that was a shame. As a pro cyclist you always press on; there is always another new goal. Right when the season finishes is the time to look back at what you have achieved. That’s exactly what I am doing now. But last year I was so disappointed and I was mostly hoping that everything would be alright.
“I didn’t have any other choice but to dive head first into rehabilitation. The only other option would be to quit. Sitting at home and doing nothing would not help get me back on the bike, so I went to physiotherapy in Papendal six days a week. I had to search high and low for motivation. It was boring, repeatedly having my knee bent. And the sessions weren’t fun either. I was in agony on that table,” she continues.
“But I did find inspiration in Papendal by speaking to other athletes and most of all by structuring my days. That’s what I needed. When I was at home with my leg up in the cast, it would feel like the walls were starting to close in on me. It drove
me insane. When friends wanted to come around and cook, I would suggest to go out for dinner just to get out of the house - 15 minutes on the crutches to the centre of Wageningen was just about manageable. Eight weeks of physiotherapy later and I could bend my leg at an angle of 110 degrees and I was allowed to cycle. That moment was: now I can move forward.”
Those legs now turn smoothly on the roads made wet by overnight rain around Arnhem. A year ago she fled the Dutch winter and went to Calpe in Spain to ride her first real kilometres towards 2019.
“I suffered a lot. I pedalled squares in Calpe. It didn’t feel good. At that moment, getting back to being good seemed very far away. On Boxing Day, me and a friend flew to Gran Canaria and that’s where I noticed: I’m really riding again. I started training with a bit more focus.
“For a while I was thinking I might go to the Tour Down Under, but Mitchelton-Scott weren’t keen on that idea. They didn’t want me to rush my comeback. Then I got a call from my team leader, Gene Bates. He was making the transition to the men’s group and told me that in January he was taking 10 riders – I didn’t know who – to a training camp. Nine days of cycling: from Faro in Portugal to Almería in Spain. Long distances, pure endurance, and not too hard. Did I want to come with? I like a challenge, so said yes. But later, when I received the schedule, I discovered that we would be riding 200km every day, and climbing 30,000m in total. All that in the company of Adam and Simon Yates, Mikel Nieve, a large part of the climbing squad and a handful of new boys. I thought my trainer Louis Delahaije would think it was too much, but to my surprise he thought it was a good plan.
“I’d only been training for 10 weeks by the end of January, and I was nowhere near fit. The distances were doable, but the speed was so high that it wasn’t even worth trying to keep up. After three days, I sent a crying voice-message to some of my girlfriends – I was too tired to type – that it had been the worst idea to have come along. I thought: this is not good for me. I was afraid I was overdoing it.
“The team was great, they brought along an extra car, so there was always a car behind me. Towards the end, I began to improve and was able to ride with the group longer. On one of the last days, when we arrived at the hotel, it turned out that the guys had literally arrived one minute before me. This gave me hope and motivation. Ultimately it was the key to my comeback.”
Van Vleuten dragged herself to Tenerife next, to get herself ready for her comeback at the beginning of March, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. There she was a domestique, but still ended up in fourth place. A week later, ahead of Strade Bianche, she made it known to the team management that she was once more capable of more than a supporting role. And she wasn’t lying: Van Vleuten won alone in the Piazza del Campo in Siena.
“That win felt to me like I was truly back. I thought I would need the whole of 2019 to get back to the same level. Instead I won my second race of the season, and took second places in the Tour of Flanders, Amstel Gold and Flèche Wallonne, and won Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
“My level was again better than in 2018, but mentally and tactically I’ve also taken a step forward. I started believing in myself more. For years a little voice in my head had crept in.
“In the Tour of Flanders on the approach to the Oude Kwaremont, I was riding too hesitantly. Instead I should have seen it as an opportunity to attack. In Flèche I waited until the steepest part of the Mur de Huy. But that is exactly where Anna van der Breggen is at her best, and I wasn’t able to follow. The team were encouraging me to have more faith in myself and to try to let the important points of the parcours make the difference. So that’s what I did in Liège. I attacked on La Redoute.”
This gave her confidence for the Giro Femminile. After holding back in the first few days, she finally attacked on the Torri di Fraele on stage 5 close to Lago di Cancano – just a stone’s throw away from the hotel where for years she has stayed while training. The next day, in the race leader’s pink jersey, Van Vleuten rode the best time trial near Teglio and now with a lead of four minutes on Van der Breggen and Kasia Niewiadoma, it was a clear road ahead to victory.
“The Giro was a party where I could play the leading lady. We had really lived for this moment as a team. At the team meeting at the end of the season, I was so pleased to hear that this race was the highlight of the year for many of the girls. Even though they had all ridden in service of me, with zero gain for themselves.
I was bursting with pride.”
Grey clouds gather over our heads, while the green tops of the Veluwezoom National Park appear in the distance as we ride through the river landscape of the IJssel. Van Vleuten tells us about her only off day of 2019 and perhaps strangely it’s the World Championships time trial.
“When I work towards a goal, trained and rested well, and believe that I’m in shape, then usually that is the case. This time it wasn’t,” she says. “As usual, I started on intuition, but after five minutes my legs were burning. A time trial always hurts, but I usually really start to struggle in the second half. It was a struggle early on and on the climbs I was unable to step it up. The national coach Loes Gunnewijk told me that Chloé Dygert and Anna [van der Breggen] were a bit faster than me. Had she said the difference was a minute, then I wouldn’t have come third. I tried not to let my head drop but in the end my bronze medal came from character.
“We never found out why I had an off day. We decided to put it aside until our annual evaluation at the end of the season. I had the ominous feeling that I was going to be terrible during the road race. The next day I recced a big part of the road race parcours with Anna, Lucinda Brand and Amy Pieters. In the end, it was a beautiful race. My legs performed well and I was having fun. After the TT I thought: ‘When I get home from the Worlds I’ll have to empty my drawer of all my rainbow jersey clothes.’ But during that race I was feeling like: ‘Maybe I won’t have to.’”
It starts to drizzle during our climb of the Zijpenberg, the access road from Rheden to the Veluwezoom. The chains start cracking with the mud that has attached itself to our bikes in the past hour and a half. Otherwise it’s quiet, just like in September at Lofthouse in Yorkshire when Van Vleuten, after 40km of the Worlds road race, attacked on the toughest part of the course.
“During the team meeting, I said I wanted to do something there. For us as a team it was important to tire fast girls, such as Lizzie Deignan and Marta Bastianelli. It would have been a missed opportunity if we hadn’t made the race difficult. At first Deignan was blocking the way. ‘Are they afraid?’ I thought. I sped up and all of a sudden it got quiet around me. I could still hear the crowds, but not the noises of gears changing, or the other riders breathing. That’s when I realised I was alone. I was riding Lofthouse just as I had La Redoute in Liège. ‘Commit and don’t look back’. You need the guts to give a hundred per cent and not to look back.
“A little later Loes came up next to me in the team car. She told me what the situation was with the rest of the peloton. I had programmed the race route into my computer and I saw the distance to the finish was still over a hundred kilometres. ‘Oh... What did I get myself into?’ I thought to myself. I had good legs, but thought I was going to burn them out.
“I had no idea my attack would give me the world title. The difference between me and the group behind me was 50 seconds for a long time. But I had a plan. I would ride at the same speed as the others, but on the climbs I would try to make the difference.
“Only when I got to the circuit did the thought occur to me that this crazy plan might actually work. My lead jumped up. But I immediately suppressed those thoughts. I had to focus on my task: to keep riding as aerodynamically as possible and to eat and drink well. It’s incredible how many thoughts went
“What did I get myself into? I had good legs, but thought I was going to burn them out”
through my head in those 105km. It was not only a physical, but also a mental battle. Then
I heard that Dygert was coming after me. I thought: ‘She will be with me in no time. She’ll win! Damn! This is my shot, and she’ll win!’
“It was only three kilometres out that I really thought I was going to win and I tried to take in as many of the things happening around me as I could. After I crossed the finish line and stopped, the realisation hit me that I’d done it.”
After stopping and taking photos on the Posbank, we continue riding along the beautiful loop of cycling paths through the Veluwe forest, which are dotted with leaves, acorns and nuts. Van Vleuten loves to ride in this area. But what would make her even happier would be some loops of the Mortirolo and Gavia in the north of Italy. Van Vleuten goes there four times every season. To train, but also for the surroundings and the peace.
“I like to ride uphill, as it makes training more fun for me. In the Netherlands I ride from hour to hour, but in Italy I go from mountain to mountain.
“For a few years now I’ve been going to this Sicilian-run hotel in the Italian Alps. I put some effort into getting to know them, which means I feel very at home there now. I could go to Sierra Nevada, but that wouldn’t make me happy. I pay for my own altitude training. That’s not something special - many pro cyclists do this. I’m as free as a bird to schedule my altitude training as I like. Some riders detest altitude camps, but I make it fun by inviting my friends to come visit.
“A period like that gives me peace. It’s like one big yoga session, a mental retreat. You can leave the stress of racing behind for a while and go back to a very simple life. I use that time to recharge myself. The willingness to suffer decreases over the year. That’s also the reason why I don’t do so many time trials and races during the year. I notice that at a certain point I start to crumble a bit. A period up in the mountains gets me ready to hurt myself again.”
The autumnal sun tries to break through. “Duck your head here!” Van
“A period like that gives me peace. It’s like one big yoga session, a mental retreat. You can leave the stress of racing behind for a while and go back to a very simple life. I use that time to recharge”
Vleuten says, as she shoots into a long, dark tunnel after we pass the Papendal sporting complex, and through a stretch of forest. It turns out to be a great short cut, which takes us under the railway and sets us on our course for the last 10km of our three-hour ride.
The Olympics take place in 2020 but it doesn’t immediately spark joy in Van Vleuten. It’s not that she doesn’t think it’s a great event, she just has difficulty with the fact that for the crowds the attention is mainly on the Games as a whole.
“Also: the knowledge that I will have to relive my fall in Rio,” she says, referring to her crash during the women’s road race in 2016. “The worst thing is people are already talking about revenge for Rio. I’m not concerned with that at all. Tokyo has nothing to do with Rio. And especially nothing to do with revenge. An Olympic year is not the most fun year, but I will try to make it fun for myself,” she says.
Van Vleuten has already signed up for another training camp this January with the Mitchelton men’s team to prepare. “I’m also giving myself other goals. That will be to start with Strade Bianche, Flanders and the Ardennes week. The classics are beautiful. I would do a disservice to the rest of the season if I were to focus too much on Tokyo. I won’t start planning for the Games until after the spring. If I get selected, of course.”
It’s already been confirmed that Van Vleuten will be part of the peloton in 2021. Age doesn’t mean much to her. She’s 37, but only 12 years into her professional career, and has just had her best year.
“It was a dream season. And according to Louis, we haven’t hit the ceiling yet; every year I still get a bit better,” she says. “During the climb at the Worlds where I attacked, I recorded my highest ever five-minute power. It’s quite nice when you pull that off at 36.”