COACHING A CHAMPION
Marianne Vos’s coach tells Procycling what sets the Dutchwoman apart and how you train such a unique rider
There’ll be a time, probably not too far in the future, when Marianne Vos will have retired and cycling will have to reckon with having witnessed a once-in-a-lifetime rider. No other rider in history has a spread of victories as vast and as varied as the Dutchwoman. Her wins include world titles across three disciplines in road, cyclo-cross and track, and she has had a long, long career.
What is most remarkable about Vos is that she is still prolifically winning and looked as strong as ever as the 2021 season began at Strade Bianche. 2019 was one of her best ever in terms of results, and produced 19 victories, her highest tally since 2014 and the most in the peloton that season. Last year, despite a disrupted season that produced limited racing, Vos won three times, placing her in joint fourth on the list of wins for the year. It was fitting that her three 2020 wins all came at the Giro Rosa - two from flat bunch sprints, one atop a steep, short hill - as looking back through her record at the Italian race showcases Vos’s calibre. As well as having won three Giro GC titles, Vos has now won 28 stages there. Her first stage win came in 2007 and in the years since, she’s won at least one stage here for nine editions of the race. Every time she has lined up in Italy, she’s come away with a victory.
There’s no question Vos is immensely talented. But her success isn’t simply down to that. She’s come up against other hugely talented, world-class riders throughout her career - classics riders like Nicole Cooke, climbers like Emma Pooley, sprinters in Giorgia Bronzini and Ina-Yoko Teutenberg in the early years. Then more recently others of the calibre of Annemiek van Vleuten, Anna van der Breggen and Lizzie Deignan. Still, Vos’s record is unique.
“Obviously she is physiologically very special,” says Louis Delahaije, Vos’s coach since 2018. “She has a lot of talent to ride the bike and a phenomenal aerobic level. But on the other hand she is a real racer. She loves to race. She loves to play and I think that makes her so phenomenal. I compare her on that level with Óscar
Freire, I worked with Óscar as well a long time ago and he was the same - he just loves to play. He wasn’t scared to lose, was willing to take a risk in a race. Then you look forward to the race and I think that is one of her strengths, beside the fact that she can do it. I mean, if you cannot follow the peloton, maybe you like to play but there is nothing to play for. She has the level, but she also loves the fun of cycling.”
Delahaije and Vos began working together little over two years ago after a recommendation from Van Vleuten, who the Dutchman also coaches. They met over dinner and instantly “clicked”. At the time, even in 2018, Vos was still building form after her year away from cycling in 2015, and Delahaije says the aim was to get her back to her previous level by focusing on her natural talent and her biggest strength, which is her explosiveness. To do so, they needed to build up her endurance and fitness.
“For Marianne to put it in one sentence: cycling is fun. So let’s not over-complicate things. What do you need to be a good cyclist? Marianne Vos is a naturally explosive type of athlete, you need endurance, and you can do that very easily,” Delahaije says.
“She didn’t want to have a really complicated programme with all kinds of different targets and exercises, no, we just made it as simple as possible… We increased volume and the second is we did a lot of sprinting but that’s quite simple, five and 10-second sprints. We did a lot of that.”
For years Vos was self-coached, and so her partnership with Delahaije, at this point in her career, is revealing. As Delahaije says, a rider of the calibre of Vos doesn’t need support in the same way others may do. He says training is secondary to his role as a coach, a confidant and figure to share ideas or ask for advice. Providing off-the-bike support is often more important for him.
“You are not teaching Marianne how to ride a bicycle race, tactics etc. There she probably has the most experience of anybody in the peloton. But she can still learn to improve physically and in how to deal with setbacks,” Delahaije says.
“The most important thing, and I always mention it to my riders, is that a happy rider is a good rider. One part of my job, I always say, is quite simple. It’s to keep them happy and you can do that with training or with a good talk or a nice dinner, whatever is needed at that moment. It’s never about keeping them motivated - they are motivated, otherwise she wouldn’t have done this for 16 years at this level. Motivation is not the problem.”
With Vos having relied on herself for so long, Delahaije points to the
“You are not teaching Marianne how to ride a bicycle race, tactics. There she probably has the most experience of anyone in the peloton” – Louis Delahaije, Vos’s coach
importance of taking the decision-making pressure off Vos. Rather than questioning what she has done in training, whether it is enough or too much, Delahaije has the distance to make those calls on her behalf. It was something Delahaije says Vos was missing in the years before.
“At specific moments you need a coach to tell you not to do things. When you coach yourself, you say, ‘I have to do that because I cannot skip a day’, and now she was calling me and saying, ‘I feel a little bit tired’ and I’d say, ‘Stay at home, take a rest day; you’ve worked very well.’ These simple things make the difference,” Delahaije says.
“I have a lot of riders who tell me, ‘I did the four by four minutes, at 400 with this, this and this watts,’ but I don’t care. I can see that in the file. I want to know how did it feel, how were the legs, how was it mentally, how did you recover? Marianne is very good at giving that kind of information every day, so then it is very easy to work with somebody and make decisions for somebody.”
Added to that is simply the fact that Vos is always eager to learn, to do more, to keep pushing. Delahaije calls her a rider with a “growth mindset”, someone who is constantly looking to improve, to grow. That, he believes, helps sets Vos apart from others. “The best of the best, they are really interested in the process, and the result of that is that they are really successful.”