The Dawn of the Golden Age of Women's Cycling

How an exceptional woman is closing the 50-year status gap between the sexes

                     There are many titles a cyclist can earn – domestique, king (queen) of the mountain, campionissimo – but the greatest of all is less a conferred name presented by an organized body, which can be taken when a rival rises to prominence, and more of a lifetime achievement award. It’s a status that can only be granted by the cycling community as a whole, only once per generation, and it can never be taken away. There have been, to date, only two people to earn this legendary herald. One is a man, the other, a woman. They’re called: The Cannibal – and – The Cannibal.

            Eddy Merckx, The original Cannibal, earned the name through his unparalleled dominance of the professional peloton during the ‘60s and ‘70s. He fed off his competition, smiling at their grimaces while taking a bite out of them on each leg of a grand tour. Over an eighteen-year career he won over 500 races, many of which he did in the fashion of “slechts een op de foto,” –a phrase from his native Flemish meaning, “alone in the picture,” –implying the gap between him and his competition was so vast that by the time second place crossed the finish the race organizers were taking down the bleachers. He entered, and won, every noteworthy professional race in the world, ushering in a new era of professionalism. Before him there were few cyclists making a year-round career out of racing bikes. They survived off of winner’s purses and sponsorship during the season then worked regular jobs in the off-months. Most of them traveled with just a coach, who often doubled as a masseur and sometimes mechanic. Eddy Merckx changed that. He had an entourage: coaches, doctors, masseurs, mechanics, cooks, drivers, journalists, photographers, and representatives from his many wealthy sponsors. In a time when a racer’s bike was their Excalibur, a rare and precious extension of their self, Merckx rolled up to races with a personal fleet, all identical, all made by the greatest frame builders of the day – though some of them were never ridden for more than a couple stages. This was a time when bicycle racers were limited to one of two disciplines: road racing on the cobblestoned country roads of Europe, or track racing on the paved or wooden velodrome ovals found in most cities. In his wake of his victories, cyclists without his budget became more specialized, thinking that if they couldn’t beat The Cannibal in the grand tours like Le Tour de France or Giro d’Italia, maybe they could beat him in a spring classic, or a relay, or a hill climb… Other super-pros emerged using The Cannibal’s support model, sponsorship money flowed, races expanded, and the modern full-time professional male bicycle racer came to be the only type of cyclist in the peloton. In the current incarnation, every racer has a specialty – sprinters, climbers, even the “all-rounder” is specialized at being at being OK at everything – and very few male pros hold titles in more than one discipline. Never again would a cyclist dominate all mediums of bicycle racing, that is, until the next Cannibal.

            It would be mistake to think women haven’t been racing just as hard as men, for just as long. A generation before Merckx, Lyli Herse set volumes of records in distance riding and hill climbing. Doris Kopsky won the first US women’s championship in 1937 (it was called the “girls championship,” back then). And Alfonsina Strada raced the grueling Giro d’Italia in 1924. Because of (___name your sexist reason here__) the winner’s purses and sponsorship dollars for women never reached the amounts they did for men, and thus, there existed very few professional female racers. What women’s cycling needs, what men’s cycling had fifty years prior, is a super-star. A cross-discipline master without peer whose personality on and off the bike represents the paragon of humanity all sports-watchers dream of. The symbol of who we aspire to be, the demigod in our communal epic who lets us share, vicariously, in a life of unquestioned superiority. Marianne Vos, the 29-year-old perennial champion track, road, cyclocross, and mountain bike (soon) racer is for this generation the greatest cyclist on the planet: The Cannibal.

            Printing The Cannibal’s full palmares here would put too much strain on my ISP's server storage. So, in short, she’s won a lot of races, on a lot of mediums:

Track: In the same year that she lapped the field to win gold in the Beijing Olympics, she also won gold at the annual world championship in Manchester. Then, three years later, while ostensibly focusing on road and cyclocross, she decided to take another world championship in track, just for fun.

Road: Off and on, she’s been winning world and European championships since 2006, with a gazillion silver medals too. Oh, and a gold medal in London during the 2012 Olympics. In a sport of regular photo-finishes, she’s famous for challenging her opponents in finish-line sprints, then sitting up for the last twenty feet and coasting to first place.

Cyclocross: It’s not hyperbole to say that off-road endurance racing should be renamed VosCross. She owns the discipline. At the 2013 world championship in Louisville (the first ever to be held outside of Europe) she won ‘slechts een op de foto,’ while holding two-wheel power-slides around curves just to show off. Between 2005 and 2014 she won every world championship, except one in 2007, when she was busy getting gold medals in road and track.

What’s impressive about Vos is her hunger to win everything available to her. Most athletes stick to one skill, master it, and keep winning at it over and over – Lance Armstrong and Le Tour de France, for example. Yes, the Cannibal wins over and over at cyclocross, but it’s almost like that’s a by-product of her general bicycle prowess. She seems to think like, “I’m working on winning the six-day track national championship, so I might as well win a cyclocross medal to get in the habit.”

The wonder and magic of this is how fundamentally different the skill sets needed to win in the various genres are. Road racing demands tactical thinking. Dramatic sprint finishes aside; she plans attacks over miles or days and slowly erodes her competitor’s confidence with subtle shows of strength. But in cyclocross, especially in her homeland of Holland, subtle tactics have little bearing on an hour-long race where the competitors might spend as much time slogging through mud on foot as they do riding. She can stay upright on a bike in conditions that most people can’t even crawl through, but she’s also a master at time trialling, a solo race that requires a Buddha-like self-knowledge in order to keep her heart rate and breathing just at the verge of overloading, and holding it there for dozens of miles. And then there’s mountain biking. Though she broke some bones when she flew off trail last year, and she says she learned her lesson, there’s a good chance she’ll be back. In men’s cycling they have the Triple Crown, which consists of winning the Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, and the road world championship race in a single year. Only The Cannibal (Merckx) and one other man have completed the Triple Crown. But if The Cannibal wins gold in, say, the 2016 Olympic mountain bike race (which she has admitted to having interest in), she could become the world’s first “Quadruple Crown” winner: having mastered every world competition available to a female bike racer.

            Vos’s heroic abilities make her the closest thing to a modern Hercules, but they’re also emblematic of a problem. Though Vos no doubt likes her cross-genre master status, she also needs it. Just like Merckx in the ‘60s, Vos has to win every race available to her to maintain her lifestyle as a full-time, year-round professional. Examine, for contrast, Chris Froome. The two-time Tour de France winner has one job: win the Tour de France. For that mission he’s given a wheelbarrows of cash, access to the best coaches, the best doctors, the best bicycles, and year-round support on and off the bike. His sponsor, Team Sky, even trucks his home mattress around whenever he’s on tour so that his body doesn’t have to adjust to a new arrangement while sleeping.

The Cannibal hugging Ferrand-Prevot

            The Cannibal never got/doesn’t get any of that. Not only is there no Tour de France equivalent for women – or any three-week grand tour – but even if there was, current race purses and sponsorship dollars aren’t enough to maintain a singularly focused, specialist, woman racer. In terms of development, women’s cycling is fifty years behind the men.

            This means that right now is a crucial time in women’s cycling. If history is any indication, the era of the super-pro who can dominate any peloton is at its zenith. Women like France’s Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, who won both the mountain bike and cyclocross world championships for 2015, are vying for the Cannibal’s queen status. There are more full-time international female racers now than any other time in history, and the winner’s purses and sponsorship dollars are steadily increasing as the fifty-year gap between men and women shrinks. Soon we will have the specialists who focus on a single race with a small set of dedicated skills – and the cross-genre hero will go the way of so much sexist rhetoric about women’s natural limitations.

            The women’s professional peloton is made up of the planet’s best cyclists, not just the best female cyclists, but the most expert handlers of human-powered two-wheel racing machines the world has ever seen.  Right now, before the corrupting (and also empowering) and inevitable influence of money, which leads to problems that have plagued men’s cycling –like drugs and cheating– begins to strangle the women (as well as provide a viable occupation for thousands of athletes, coaches, doctors, masseurs, mechanics, cooks, drivers, etc), the sporting community has a rare opportunity to watch legends be born. If the point of bearing witness to bike racing is to watch something transcendent, or to share in the creation of myth, then future generations will look on this time and say The Cannibals were indeed the golden people.