“There are a lot of beautiful goals to work towards this year, starting with the Olympics”
She has been a professional cyclist for 15 years but Marianne Vos is still at the top of her game. For 2021, however, the greatest rider of the modern era, who counts 285 wins, has changed teams, for the first time. She tells Procycling why she has made the move to Jumbo-Visma
Maybe after 15 seasons as a professional bike rider, you’d think a sense of routine would have long set in when a new year comes around, that familiarity would have overtaken the novelty and anticipation that riders at the start of their careers feel when a new season begins. There’s a comfort that comes with routine. You know what to expect and the effect of that is grounding, even when the routine of a pro athlete means travelling around the world and never staying in one place for long. The neverending cycle of racing, to off-season, back to the start of a new season, is entrenched in an athlete’s psyche. The calendar is familiar, the race programme, by now, would be fairly consistent. Even the hotels riders stay in tend to stay the same year-in, year-out, while the knowledge of how to get the best out of yourself would be fairly set. You’d imagine it could feel even more routine if you’ve won almost everything there is to win in your sport, sometimes multiple times.
Marianne Vos, however, is looking ahead to the 2021 season with a renewed feeling of excitement. Fifteen years after lining up for her first race as a professional road rider, Vos seems full of the same bright-eyed enthusiasm you’d expect from a neo pro.
Vos has good reason to be looking forward to the new racing year. For the first time since she turned pro back in 2006, she has joined a new team, having transferred to JumboVisma’s women’s squad, after spending her entire career within the same team structure - albeit one that changed title sponsors on five occasions during that time. It’s a challenge she’s hugely embracing.
“It wasn’t easy to leave my former team. I’ve been around for so many years, I knew the people and I felt in my place, I felt comfortable,” Vos tells Procycling. “A new challenge could trigger me, could help me, could challenge me in a positive way. There is a lot of experience in the team and a lot of work and details that can help me in where I can improve. But also the reservation that it’s a new environment, and you have to invest.
“There are two sides of a new environment that trigger you. It’s new and it’s a little bit scary. I’ve found the challenge more significant than the risk so I took a chance.”
She continues: “I feel this very high motivation, excitement in the new team, that will help me to get the best out of myself as well.”
It’s mid-February as we speak and Vos is coming to the end of an altitude training camp in Tenerife, a last finetuner before her season begins at Strade Bianche. Physically, she’s feeling good, even if the past winter brought little time for an off-season. Having finished road racing in October, Vos jumped straight into the cyclo-cross season, as she has every year of her career, even after the intensity of the covid-altered 2020 calendar. She competed in the black and yellow of her new Dutch team for the first time on January 3, and from the mud of the cross season she went straight to Alicante, Spain, to meet her new teammates at a training camp, before this latest camp in Tenerife followed. Just hearing Vos’s schedule for the past few months alone is a signal of how non-stop the life of a pro athlete can be.
“This might be my 15th, maybe even my 16th year... I don’t know. It’s quite a lot,” Vos says with a laugh. “It sounds maybe a little weird after being pro for so long. You think, ‘She knows everything, she has nothing to learn, she’s done with the sport.’ But, no. I’m pretty much learning every day. I’m improving every day. Of course, I still make mistakes and try to make as few mistakes as I can. This is also part of the learning experience.
“It’s really nice being in this new environment. There are some new lessons and things I’m able to improve. There are a lot of beautiful goals to work towards, starting this year with the Olympics. It’s a big year.”
Victories came quickly to Vos once she’d turned pro. She became an instant superstar in cycling after winning the World Road Race Championships in 2006, aged just 19, in Salzburg, months after winning the rainbow stripes in the Cyclo-Cross Worlds for the first time. Her record of victories in the sport since is quite unprecedented. On the road she starts 2021 with a tally of 285 wins. By way of comparison, none of her peers today have even passed 100. Among those are three road world titles, an Olympic road race gold medal, three Giro Rosa victories, 28 Giro stage wins, and wins at almost every major one-day race. Branch out to cyclo-cross and the track and you add even more (including seven world titles in cross and one on the track). Vos’s status as the greatest rider of her generation, if not the greatest rider ever, has long been certain.
It’s also little coincidence that Vos’s success has coincided with the growth in women’s cycling over the past decade. Marianne Vos is women’s cycling as we know it today. Her longevity and domination is part of the reason the sport has gradually reached a wider market, and isn’t the same as the one she started out in all those years ago. Vos has captivated a new generation of racers and fans in cycling, and has both directly and indirectly been a driver behind more sponsors and teams seeing viability in investing their money.
Still, Vos has always given the impression that her feet have stayed well and truly on the ground. Few riders on the men’s side of the sport who hold a similar profile can be as accessible and amicable to interview. Her family famously follow her around the world in a campervan, her dad regularly acts as her pit-man at cross races, and for years the sight of her beloved cat sitting outside the van was the only indicator you needed that Vos was on the startline. Marianne Vos the racer and Marianne Vos the person have always seemed to exist in relative harmony and balance.
A level of success like Vos’s, however, inevitably brings with it more exposure, and with more exposure come more obligations and more responsibilities. With success also comes pressure for more success. You only need to look at Tom Dumoulin, Vos’s compatriot and team-mate on the men’s Jumbo squad, to see how pressures off the bike can become overwhelming. Aged 30, the former Giro d’Italia winner confirmed earlier this year that he is taking an indefinite break from the sport to reassess whether it’s where his future lies, citing the relentless lifestyle. Or Marcel Kittel, who retired in 2019 also aged 30, blaming the pressure to perform and how it had taken the love of cycling away for him. Vos experienced her own period of physical and mental burnout in 2015. She spent a year away from the