Elinor Barker interviews Anna van der Breggen
AS DUTCH POWERHOUSE AND DOUBLE WORLD CHAMPION ANNA VAN DER BREGGEN ENTERS HER FINAL SEASON AS A PRO RIDER SHE TELLS FELLOW RAINBOW STRIPES WEARER ELINOR BARKER ABOUT HOW HER CAREER TO DATE PREPARED HER FOR THIS FINAL CHALLENGE, HER HOPES AND FEARS FOR LIFE AS A SPORTS DIRECTOR AND WHY YOU SHOULD MAYBE STEER CLEAR OF HER IN AIRPORTS
would you rather your child was extremely smart or extremely kind?
This is one of the questions I was most looking forward to asking Anna van der Breggen. “Would you rather” is something my team-mates and I play when we’re bored on long rides or travel days. It kills time and sometimes gives an unexpected insight to somebody you thought you knew very well. Katie Archibald had asked me this specific question while training that morning. We’d taken our time to weigh up the pros and cons of raising a lovable fool, versus a terrible person with the potential to one day cure cancer.
Anna chooses kindness, as had I. So there is little need for debate between us. I feel a little defeated that my big existential question hasn’t produced the long character assessment I was hoping for. But I needn’t be disappointed. Her own method of killing time in airports is 10 times better than I could have dreamed of.
Anna’s game has three simple steps:
1. Identify a stranger that you think can’t speak your language.
2. Walk up to them with a big smile on your face and give them the worst possible insult you can think of.
3. Hope you got number one right.
She laughs as she tells me that Dutch riders Jip Van der Bos and
Eva Burman are exceptionally good at this game. I can’t tell if I’m relieved or disappointed to find they haven’t come across a native speaker yet.
True Grit
When I think of Anna van der Breggen, my mind plays out a montage of victory salutes, long-gutsy attacks with gritted teeth and that Imola helicopter shot. In these images, she’s the embodiment of the clichéd athletic attributes we’re told we won’t succeed without; grit, determination and a desire to win above everything else.
While she clearly has the first two qualities in excess, I’m surprised to find how little the latter seems to be true. Of course, the desire is there. She’s double world champion. Olympic champion. Queen of the Ardennes. You don’t get these titles without a hefty amount of ambition. But does it rank above everything else? Certainly not.
I ask her what is her favourite memory of her decade-long career. I’m expecting her to weigh up Olympic gold in Rio against double World Championship wins in Imola. Anna is not so predictable. Without much hesitation, she replies, “When I think back to my first top-10 place in Flanders, it’s that feeling of victory.”
She’s nostalgic of her breakthrough seasons. “If you are a young rider, you get better and better. You keep surprising yourself,” Anna explains. “I think that period is one of the best periods in cycling, you have no pressure and nobody expects anything from you. I think every victory has its own story and its own thoughts about it. And I think that’s what’s making it so beautiful. Sometimes even if you don’t win, it’s better than when you do. It’s not just about the feeling, it’s more about the story behind it.”
I sense a desire to return to this feeling of being on the cusp of greatness has contributed to her decision to retire from cycling and become a sports director later this year. After a decade-long career, there are very few gaps on van der Breggen’s palmarès. She currently holds every major title available to her in road racing, from Olympic down to National. There is little room left to surprise anybody with her racing capabilities, never mind herself. So instead of striving just to repeat history, why not start a new challenge?
New beginnings
Becoming a sports director was never on the radar. But on announcing her retirement to her team, SD Worx offered her the role. “I was a bit surprised. I actually first said, ‘No, I don’t think so,’” she recalls. “But I thought about it, and the nice thing about being a sports director is that it’s
“It’s not just the feeling of the win, it’s the story behind it”
a job with many different activities. Sometimes, if you have a lot of contact, you really can help riders to be better than if you weren’t there. So, I thought about it longer and I thought, yeah, maybe this is something I would like to do.
“I have a lot of experience as a rider, but if I just quit cycling, it’s gone. The role of sports director is a place where I can keep on doing this, not give up cycling but just do it in a different way.”
In her new role, Anna says one of the most important qualities she will look to develop in riders will be trust. She won’t expect riders to fit into a predetermined mould of how a good cyclist should be. Instead, she plans to get to know riders individually and personalise her working style to get the best out of everybody as a team.
Anna will ride her last race in 2021 and says, “I’m looking forward to a different kind of life. I know every race I do, and it’s just a life I’ve really liked. But I’m also looking forward to change and having some new experiences in life.”
It seems she’s accustomed to lifestyle change having trained as a nurse before committing to pursuing a career in cycling. Anna recalls a pivotal moment in her early career, while on a nursing placement in Ghana. She had struggled on her transition from junior to senior. Shocked with the step up in speed and distance she became disillusioned with what she has described as a lack of results (although a quick Wikipedia check begs to differ, unless you count fifth at the World Championships as a lack of results. That, really, is all the more impressive given that her training consisted of nothing more than Tuesday and Thursday evening sessions with the local club at this time). She seriously considered quitting the sport.
To study or cycle?
“At that point, I didn’t really know if I wanted to do this or not. I basically put my efforts into my study and I didn’t ride my bike for half a year. And then I really had to make a decision – do I quit cycling now? Or am I going to train really well for one year and see how good I can be?”
“I’m looking forward
to having some new experiences
in life”
She cites her early coach as one of her biggest influences in keeping her on the bike during that time. He told her not to quit, to keep attending local races and just have fun with it. Advice which she took very seriously because “I was always listening to him at that age!” Within a few years she was becoming a familiar face on UCI podiums.
Now, she’s preparing for her final season, and has the honour of wearing the rainbow bands in both the road races and the TTS. It’s a situation she’d dreamt of, but never expected to be in. “Every time I go out for training, I think how crazy it is to be an Olympic champion… world champion,” she says.
Anna isn’t concerned about living up to any of the expectations that come with being one of the biggest names in the peloton. “I don’t feel much pressure because I know if it doesn’t work out, if I don’t win, I know my career is already better than I ever expected. So, I’m pretty happy.”
She’s adamant that there’s no room for complacency though. When it comes to racing she knows she needs to be at her best if she wants to achieve her season target of back-to-back Olympic wins. On Tokyo, she says: “It doesn’t matter which jersey you won or whatever you did in the past, you still need to prove yourself to be at the same level.”
One of my favourite things about being a professional cyclist, is how each discipline almost feels like its own sport. It’s allowed me the unique perspective of being able to idolise riders from afar, to really view them as superhuman, while also being able to relate to what they’re doing quite strongly. While I’ve dabbled in road racing, my greatest love has always been the track, and so I feel there’s enough distance between us to confidently label myself a big, fat, van der Breggen fangirl.
Best of both worlds
That said, we do have a lot in common. We’ve each been world champion a handful of times. We agree that celebrating a good race is as important as celebrating a good result. We belong to a small group of people who can say they’ve been Olympic champions for five years, titles we’re both looking to defend in Japan this summer. On the off chance we bump into each other at Tokyo airport arrivals, I’ll be spending the next six months practising my best Dutch insults.