Antonia Niedermaier is still struggling with the names and faces. “There are so many girls,” she says with a smile, it will probably take a while. The other cyclists always laugh at her when she can’t identify a competitor. But the Bad Aiblinger can be sure that the others now have her on the screen.
Last week, Niedermaier became the U23 cycling world champion in the time trial – and that as a 20-year-old. It’s “extraordinarily good,” says Canyon team boss Ronny Lauke, and you can’t rate it highly enough. In the women’s classification – the U23 race was held as part of the women’s competition in Scotland – she finished eleventh. It feels “very surreal to get in like that,” she says the week after the big triumph, which she spent at home with her boyfriend and dog, often in the mountains to calm down and clear her head.
Surreal because Niedermaier has only been racing for two and a half years. She is a career changer and comes from ski mountaineering, where she has already won bronze at the Junior World Championships. In her entire cycling career, she only has 45 days of racing – negligible compared to the competition. Nevertheless, in her first year as a World Tour rider, she not only won the U23 World Championship title, but also won the king’s stage at the Giro d’Italia.
Niedermaier has learned a lot in a very short time – and yet she still realizes that she has a lot of catching up to do. Especially when it comes to driving in the field, the feeling for the dynamics in the group, she has an “extreme deficit compared to the others,” she says. Lauke also points out that she still doesn’t have as much experience “as one would actually wish from a 20-year-old”.
“How Antonia deals with it, these setbacks, that’s crazy,” says team boss Lauke
There were also physical problems. In February she had to undergo knee surgery, which affected her preparation for the season – and then came the falls. First two in early summer, then a difficult one in mid-July at the Giro d’Italia. She was taken away by ambulance and teeth had to be put back in. The splint in her mouth that flashes when she smiles is a reminder of that. She didn’t touch her bike for a week after the fall, which meant she only had two weeks to prepare for the World Championships.
The physical scars were joined by psychological ones: How does a young driver with so little experience cope with such a fall? “The psyche was cracked,” she says, mentally she “stumbled quite a bit”. Self-doubt usually arises after such drastic events, Lauke explains, and these can even have a “career-influencing” effect. But not with Niedermaier. How she reacted to the serious fall, “I’ve never seen a driver,” he says. “How Antonia deals with it, these setbacks, that’s crazy” – it requires a strong mentality.
Open detailed view
Antonia Niedermaier at the award ceremony in Scotland.
(Photo: Stefano Sirotti/Imago)
Since she is also strong on the mountain, Lauke sees her as having the potential to “become one of the leading tour cyclists”. This also applies to Ricarda Bauernfeind from Eichstätt, who, like Niedermaier, is having a remarkable first World Tour season this year after a year in Canyon’s junior team. The two Bavarians are the freshest faces of the up-and-coming German women’s road bike movement. “A stroke of luck is very rare, but that you have two in one season is a great story,” Lauke rejoices. Niedermaier is aware that, despite her young age, she is already one of the representatives of German women’s cycling and that “a new era is also dawning because of Ricarda and me”. She likes her role as a role model. It’s nice to know that many young girls are coming “and thinking: oh cool, I can be like her too.”
In 2026 she would like to take part in ski mountaineering at the Winter Games in Milan
Her strong time trial at the World Championships in Glasgow has also put her in the spotlight for the 2024 Olympics in Paris. Lauke wouldn’t be surprised if that became a reality for Niedermaier. In that case, she would realize her Olympic dream two years earlier than expected, because in 2026 she would like to take part in ski mountaineering at the Winter Games in Milan. Their “double-track” drive, as Lauke calls it, was agreed from the start. “I get a lot of freedom from the team and I’m not tied down like the others,” she says. For Lauke, it’s a “triangular relationship” between her, the cycling team coaches, and her home trainer, Dan Lorang, who coordinates the training. Lorang is a big name as a trainer in endurance sports, he looks after the triathlon stars Jan Frodeno and Anne Haug and is head of performance at the German team Bora-Hansgrohe. Niedermaier has been working with him for more than four years.
Niedermaier will continue next week with the Tour de l’Avenir in France, and her first professional cycling season will end at the end of September. Then there is a two or three week break, during which she can focus more on her childhood education studies before continuing with the ski mountaineering training. Lauke says he’s curious and excited to see “how many more times she’ll surprise us.”
