Sunday it will be over. The best cyclist of the last decade, one of the greatest champions of all time, will definitely put away her bib shorts after the last stage of the Tour of the Netherlands arriving in Arnhem. “It’s 25 km from home, my boyfriend lives there… it’s a beautiful place to say goodbye,” she wrote on her blog.
It is also a way of coming full circle since it was on this same Tour of the Netherlands that she launched her career late in life, in 2007, after a first experience in football which had ended short due to ‘a wound. The first turns of the wheel of the neophyte, a graduate in zoology, came to an abrupt end with a fall after only one step.
Since then, she has won her National Tour twice, amidst a dizzying track record, as long as the Amsterdam-Rhine canal which runs alongside Vleuten, her hometown after which she is named.
The Dutchwoman has won everything: the World Championships (twice), the Tokyo Olympics time trial, Liège-Bastogne-Liège (twice), the Tour of Flanders (twice), the Giro (four times). ), the Vuelta (three times) and the Tour de France in 2022, the year she won the three Grand Tours. That’s 104 victories in total, the last at the recent Tour of Scandinavia.
???? Two World RR titles
????⏱️ Two World ITT titles
???????? Olympic gold and silver
???? 1 Tour de France
???? 4 Tours of Italy
❤️ 1 La Vuelta + 2 Challenge by LV
???? 2 Liège
????️ 2 Roads
⛪️ 2 Ronde
1️⃣0️⃣4️⃣ wins???? @AvVleuten ????#ThanksMiek pic.twitter.com/Bg2OFEqaAH
— Movistar Team (@Movistar_Team) September 4, 2023
Most of these triumphs, she snatched them with panache, with an ultra offensive way of running and solitary raids like the 105 km which allowed her to become world champion in 2019 in Yorkshire.
“Again this summer at the Worlds (in August in Glasgow), people thanked me and said that they would miss my way of running. Hearing that is very moving for me. I can leave this sport with pride,” she underlines in an interview posted online on Monday by her Movistar team.
Beyond the titles and the way of conquering them, Van Vleuten will have marked his era by his way of training, more than all his colleagues but also many men. Ambitious and stubborn, she spent her life on the bike, covering up to 33,000 kilometers per year, a huge total.
“My father always encouraged me to do things to the fullest. At school, I always wanted to get the best grade,” she explains.
Increasing the number of courses at altitude, she often rode with boys and forced herself to live a monk’s life. This Stakhanovite rhythm allowed her to gradually transform her body, initially designed for the classics, in order to transform into a climber reigning over the great Tours.
“She’s a girl who lives 100% by bike. She eats and sleeps by bike. We are all professionals now. But if we give 100%, she gives 150%,” reports her French teammate Aude Biannic.
In this, Annemiek van Vleuten embodies the development of women’s cycling like no other. And her ability to endure gigantic workloads is accompanied by unfailing resilience which she showed again in 2022 when she won her second world title, in Wollongong, Australia, with a broken elbow. “Annemiek can go deeper in pain than anyone. She is really capable of suffering,” notes Grace Brown, former teammate at Mitchelton-Scott.
“She taught us so many things, how to overcome adversity, get up when you fall, never give up,” Sebastian Unzue, her boss at Movistar, listed last year.
After being “married to cycling”, she is now looking forward to “regaining a little freedom” and a “social life”. She enrolled in an IOC program to prepare athletes for their sporting retirement, while waiting to set “new goals”.
