FEATURE: MARIANNE VOS
Marianne Vos ended 2019 as the rider with the most wins in the women’s peloton and top of the WorldTour rankings, making it her most successful season in five years. Procycling looks at how the Dutchwoman got back to her best
We ask, after another winning season by Marianne Vos, how does she keep on doing it?
y stage 10 of the Giro Rosa this July, Marianne Vos was in full, swashbuckling flow. She already had a hat-trick of wins under her belt; it had been five years since she’d matched that total here. She was confident, she had momentum on her side and she was clearly enjoying racing. As the peloton swept through Udine’s Piazza San Giacomo heading towards the finale up to the city’s castle and the finish line, Vos sat comfortably in third wheel behind Kasia Niewiadoma and Kirsten Wild. But when Wild overran the final right-hander and stuttered into the barrier, Vos didn’t hesitate. There were still 400 metres to go, up a dragging cobbled hill - maybe too early to start a sprint. Others certainly wouldn’t want to try leading from this far out. But this kind of finish could have been tailor made for Vos, and in this form, she was unstoppable and full of energy - anything was possible.
She took a quick glance over her left shoulder as she hit the front, realised a gap was opening up and kicked her sprint again. Vos stood up taller on her pedals, put her head down and leaned forward. There was already clear road between her and Niewiadoma and the climb had only just started. Metres on, Vos took a second quick glance behind her, mouth gaping open, and kept accelerating. By the finish, she had time to sit up and celebrate -she was even given a one-second time gap on the line, she’d won that comfortably. “Winning earlier this week made me even more confident, and the team also believed in it,” Vos said at the time.
It was only mid-July, but already Vos had matched her win total from 2018. A couple of months later, by the end of the year, she’d have more than doubled her tally to end the season on 19 wins, making her the most prolific rider in the women’s peloton. It had been Vos’s most successful season in five years.
There was a time not so long ago when all of this would have been a given. Vos’s record and the variety of wins at her peak is not comparable to any rider in the peloton, male or female, and in the years 2010-2013 she swept up victories with such ease she was untouchable - in those golden seasons Vos never dipped below 20 wins and hit a staggering 31 in 2011, a win rate of 53 per cent for every race she started that year.
But then 2015 happened, when Vos endured a debilitating year ravaged with a knee injury and exhaustion caused by overtraining. She was fatigued and started just two races the whole year - her comeback was repeatedly put off and put off as the timeline on her return constantly shifted. When Vos did come back in 2016, missing a whole year of racing took its toll. While 2016 was still a success - she won nine races - her wins were not as high profile and at major championships, such as the Rio Olympics and World Championships in Qatar where Vos would previously been an outright favourite and leader, she played a support role for her Dutch team-mates. The firepower Vos had in her arsenal, and which made her so dangerous previously, was diminished, and behind the results Vos was unable to take on the same workload in training. Recovery took time - take on too much too soon and the previous symptoms that had sidelined her from racing for so long, could return.
Coming into 2019 Vos had three full seasons of road racing behind her.
Gradually she was able to train for longer, take on a more intense workload and recover more quickly. Over the winter Vos also began working with a new coach, Louis Delahaije, previously a performance manager at LottoNL-Jumbo, who also coaches Vos’s compatriot Annemiek van Vleuten. The combination of the two factors is what Vos, and her team, credit her success with this year. As Eric van den Boom, Vos’s long-time team manager at CCC-Liv, explains: “I think it’s a matter of time. In the meantime, she was pretty successful with some WorldTour wins but this year it’s been really special, because of the results over the whole year, and a lot of wins, like we used to get,” he tells Procycling.
“The recovery was still going on over the years and I believe that’s it. When a talented rider like Marianne, or in general a talented rider, is fit and can do a lot of workload and enjoys cycling and that’s one of the main things, then you get really good.”
BACK TO THE TOP
Vos has been far from the cycling wilderness between 2014 and now. But the calibre of her victories this year, as well as the quantity of them, highlights the Dutchwoman’s rise back to the top. In the three seasons before this year Vos won a combined total of nine WorldTour level races, yet by contrast, this year alone she won 10. Her consistency in the top ranked races, against the top ranked riders, meant she ended 2019 atop the Women’s WorldTour ranking for the first time in her career and second in the World Ranking, narrowly behind compatriot Lorena Wiebes. Among Vos’s wins was a record-equalling fourth Trofeo Alfredo Binda. She won a stage at the Women’s Tour and looked on track for more before she crashed out on stage 3. She emphatically won La Course, on the uphill finish in Pau.
She won three stages and the GC at the Tour of Norway.
Aside from the wins, Vos finished in the top 10 a further 13 times this year - six of those results were on the podium and included third at Amstel Gold, fourth at Flèche Wallonne and second at the European Championships road race. Her consistency from the start to the finish of the season was a marked improvement from recent years.
“Marianne is a winner and she wants to win, and for her, in the back of her mind she kept on being very driven to get back on the level that she likes to be, and also be winning in big races, be there in big races,” says Van den Boom. “To be there with the top riders and be able to make the race - that’s something I think that has been inside her all the time.”
It’s no coincidence that Vos’s wins and indeed her best performances all came on parcours with short, steep, uphill finishes, perfectly suited to her explosive sprint. Earlier this summer,
Vos told Procycling how reverting to her natural talent has been a contributing factor to her resurgence this year. Rather than trying to win everything and anything, as she did before - in 2014 Vos won the Giro Rosa for the third time with four stage wins and not a single stage placing below sixth, for example - she narrowed her targets, to focus on what she is best at.
“Her weapon is a sprint after a hard race and she can survive during these little climbs and then she is at her strongest. It might not be the real super long climbs any more but surviving the climbs and sprinting uphill is a speciality she has,” Van den Boom explains. “I think she found out that she can rely on her talent again and in those specialities. When she is motivated and can make use of these specialities then she is world class.”
Indeed, at no time was this better exemplified than at the Giro on stage 3, when Vos snatched the victory quite literally from under the nose of Lucy Kennedy, overtaking the Australian on the line after single handedly closing a gap to her on a 150-metre long steep cobbled climb. With 800 metres to go Kennedy still held an 18-second gap over the incoming chase group, but when she hit the climb she began a slow grind to the top; Vos meanwhile launched off the front and was turning the pedals behind her at twice the speed. Still, Kennedy even celebrated and smiled as the finish line gantry emerged into view, thinking that the win was hers, only to find Vos zooming past her on the line at a rapid pace. It was a textbook Vos victory straight out of her vintage years.
Vos admitted that there were times - even if for a second - when she began to question whether she could still win at the highest level, belief that’s now been eradicated after this year. “Getting these wins on the highest level... gives me the confidence that I can still do it at the highest level in women’s cycling,” Vos told Procycling. “It doesn’t make it easier, but I did need to believe that I can do it.”