Cycling is a simple sport.
Ride your bike quickly, cross the finish line first and you very often win a brightly coloured jersey, bunch of flowers and a bit of pocket money. Okay, not quite, but there are currently two Dutch cyclists who take glee in making the sport look easy. For the men, there’s Mathieu van der Poel, the 6-foot, 26 year-old titan who is igniting the peloton. While for the women there’s Anna van der Breggen, the effortless, unceasingly brilliant rider who has greedily collected nearly every victory possible.
The 2021 season is barely a month old, and both are showing excellent form.
For his part, MVDP has four wins under his belt in 2021. The Dutchman showed glimpses of his phenomenal talent in 2019 - thanks to wins at the Tour of Britain and Amstel Gold Race - but this has only blossomed. A General Classification win at the BinkBank Tour and an emphatic sprint victory at the Tour of Flanders finished 2020 on a high, but the Cyclocross World Champion’s form in 2021 has been ominous for everyone else in the peloton.
He attacked in grey, murky and windy conditions to take a breathtaking breakaway win at Stage 5 of Tirreno-Adriatico, having muscled to a sprint victory in Stage 3. But it was at Strade Bianche - so named after the white, gravel roads it is raced on in the Tuscan countryside - that MVDP showed his brutal talent. Whether magnified by the lunar-white roads or not, there was something other-worldly about his final explosion up the punishing climb into Siena (see the video below).
Headlines spoke of a 20-second, >1000 Watt rampage, but in reality the stats don’t matter. He distanced the current Road Race World Champion Julian Alaphilipe with frightening ease, in turn bounding up a near-vertical climb like it was flat as a sheet of lasagne. Take MVDP anywhere near the finish line and he will sharpen his elbows and fight.
It would take a whole blog in itself to break down the palmarès of Anna Van der Breggen. From Olympic gold in the 2016 Road Race to her three victories at the Giro d’Italia Femminile (Giro Rosa), she has dominated the sport alongside compatriots Marianne Vos and Annemiek van Vleuten.
Now 30 years-old, the two-time World Road Race champion (2018, 2020) was in imperious form last year in Imola, Italy. Breaking from the rest with around 30km to go to the finish, the Dutch rider never looked like she would get caught. This, coming just two days after she claimed victory in the World Time Trial Championship, and a mere week on from her third win at the Giro Rosa.
Van der Breggen has won La Flèche Wallonne Féminine six times in a row, alongside two Liège-Bastogne-Liège Femmes wins, two Omloop Het Nieuwsblad victories and a Tour of Flanders win in 2018. In short, she’s the complete cyclist; able to tactically battle for days on end in pseudo-Grand Tours and out-punch the rest in the cobbled classics. And through it all, Van der Breggen’s style is endlessly fluid. There’s no sense that she’s battling her bike, but instead in a shared symbiosis. Where Van der Poel explodes, Van der Breggen fizzes, but to equally devastating effect.
In the months ahead, both will be targeting the Monuments, with Van der Breggen undoubtedly also eyeing up another turn in the Giro Rosa. Who can stop them? Well, Van der Poel has himself stated that his red hot form may only last for a month, which would take him through Milan-San Remo and onto Paris-Roubaix, two of the cycling calendar’s most revered one-day events.
He won’t have it easy. The Dutchman’s tussle with the industrious Belgian Wout Van Aert - which has also played out in Cyclocross - is dominating much of the media space around mens’ cycling at the moment. More so, the aforementioned, majestic Alaphilipe will be wanting to make the most of his year in the rainbow bands of the World Champion.
But in terms of personal weakness, MVDP is looking infallible. The only failures this year have come through unfortunate positioning and a last-minute, broken handlebar at Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. Yes, there are better climbers than Van der Poel, but there are few that can match him across undulating routes, or keep tabs on him when he decides to break away from the peloton.
AVDB’s competitors are becoming stronger and more numerous by the month. The calibre of womens’ cycling is growing expotentially, and the Dutch great will have to contend not only with her countrywomen Vos and Van Vleuten, but also the excellence of Elisa Longo Borghini, the peaking form of Lotte Kopecky and the British star Lizzie Deignan, who was sensational in 2020.
In fact, the only thing which will definitively stop Van der Breggen is retirement, which is, perhaps surprisingly, coming after the 2021 Tokyo Olympics. She is due to take up a coaching role with SD Worx, the team which is currently dominating the womens’ race. But for now, and with the Olympics hanging in the balance, the Dutchwoman will without doubt leave nothing on the road.
If this is to be her final year, then what an opportunity to cap a wonderful career with a blazing twilight.
Cycling isn’t always a simple sport. It just feels that way when you’re Dutch.
General Classification: In a multi-stage race (i.e. one which is competed over a number of days), the person with the cumulatively lowest time across all of the stages wins the whole thing. So, you could technically win ‘on GC’ having not won an individual stage of the race.
Cyclocross (CX): Born in Belgium and the Netherlands, but growing in popularity across Europe, this type of winter cycling sees competitors travel over all terrains. And when I say all, I mean all. Whether it’s sand, bog, snow or smooth tarmac, CX riders battle in short, sharp courses. The sport has also gifted road cycling with some of its biggest names of late; from MVDP through to Marianne Vos, Wout Van Aert and GB’s own Tom Pidcock.
Watt(s): Of course, you know what Watts are! But in a cycling context, people have gone a bit Watt crazy. Fostered through the rise of accurate power metres, and platforms like Zwift for the casual cyclist, Watts have become a way of measuring effort and providing concrete performance zones for professionals. Purists say this is detracting from the romance of the sport, and that it should be raced ‘by feel’ and not cold, hard numbers. Yet to some extent, Watts just codify what cyclist’s legs are feeling. See, all a bit technical isn’t it.
Palmarès: Effectively, a cyclist’s CV. A list of all the big races they have won.
Grand Tour: The cycling calendar is made up of three Grand Tours, so named because they’re long (three weeks, as opposed to the usual one day, or one week affairs), they’re historic and they’re frankly the most well known. For the statisticians among you, it’s worth noting that victories here also get you more UCI points. The three Grand Tours are the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España.
On the women’s side, there is currently just the Giro - or Giro Rosa - which only features 10 days of racing. The women’s TdF is translated into a one day event (‘La Course’). Plans for a full, multi-stage women’s version of the Tour de France have been pushed back, again, for paper-thin reasons. (We’ll talk about this - a lot - in coming posts)
Cobbled classics: The early stages of the season are punctuated with one day races which take place in northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands. These are the races that ‘real’ cycling fans look forward to; mostly because they can be completely brutal. Horrendous rain, sideways winds and broken chunks of old-fashioned paving can leave many cyclists believing they’ve raced through a washing machine. We’ll talk about these more in the weeks to come!
Monuments: The Monuments are to one day races what the Grand Tours are to multi-stages races. They are some of the longest, toughest, most revered and historically significant of the lot, and usually involve 6 hours of slogging followed by half an hour of electric racing. The mens’ Monuments are: Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders (The ‘Ronde’), Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and the Giro di Lombardia. There are currently womens’ editions of LBL and the Tour of Flanders, with 2021 also seeing the first ever womens’ edition of Paris-Roubaix.