VAN VLEUTEN VS THE REST
Annemiek van Vleuten completed cycling in 2019. Though she didn’t win everything, she evolved a tactic over the course of the year which brought her some of the most spectacular victories in the sport.
Cycling is meant to be complicated. The strongest rider can win, but it’s very straightforward to employ tactics that can get in the way of that. There’s also an old cycling saw that says while it’s difficult to win a race, it’s the easiest thing in the world to stop somebody else winning. To that, we would add: unless it’s Annemiek van Vleuten.
The Dutch rider is the best climber in the world at the moment. She’s also one of the two best time triallists in the world. This makes winning comparatively simple, if not particularly physically easy. Her modus operandi in stage races is to attack in the mountain stages, especially the summit finishes – she won the Giro Femminile in this way by almost four minutes. In one-day races she identifies a hill, attacks on it to drop everyone, then time trials to the end, no matter where the hill. In the Yorkshire Worlds it was over 100km away from the finish, but she still won, even if she was helped by the tactics of the group behind.
In 2020, the spring classics and the Olympics are on her radar and all offer the kind of terrain upon which she has been winning with abandon over the last 12 months. Oh, and by the way, in the Olympics and Worlds she leads the formidable Dutch team, while being ably supported by Mitchelton-Scott the rest of the year. She’ll start every race as the favourite: can she top her spectacular 2019 with a gold medal in 2020?