Annemiek van Vleuten
Annemiek van Vleuten (born 8 October 1982) is a Dutch professional road racing cyclist, who currently rides for UCI Women's WorldTeam . In 2011, she won the UCI Women's Road World Cup and in 2018 she was the UCI Women's World Tour winner. She is the 2017 and 2018 winner of the time trial at the UCI Road World Championships. In 2018 she won both the points and the overall ranking in the Giro Rosa, considered the most prestigious stage race of the women's road cycling calendar. Only two days later she took the  crown at the fifth edition of La Course by Le Tour de France, a high-profile women's cycling race held in France, on 17 July 2018, prolonging her 2017 title. In 2019, she became the UCI Road Race World Champion. In 2021, at the COVID-19 pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics she won the gold medal in the time trial and silver in the road race. Early life. Before starting a career in cycling, Van Vleuten studied at the University of Wageningen and graduated with a masters degree in epidemiology in 2007. She took up cycling after a knee injury forced  her to stop playing football. Career. Together with Ellen van Dijk, Marianne Vos and Loes Gunnewijk, Van Vleuten represented The Netherlands in the Women's road race at the 2012 Summer Olympics, which was won by Vos. She also competed in the 2015 European Games for the Netherlands, in cycling, more specifically, the women's time trial; Van Vleuten won a bronze medal. On 7 August 2016, while leading the road race at the 2016 Olympic Games, Van Vleuten crashed head first on the descent from Vista Chinesa after missing the brake timing of a sharp bend, before the finish . The crash resulted in her being hospitalised with three lumbar spinal fractures and a severe concussion. Though she was out of the race due to severe injuries, her team-mate Anna van der Breggen took home the gold medal for the Netherlands. Despite her injuries, Van Vleuten was riding a bicycle within ten days of her accident and made a winning return to competition one month later, taking the overall victory and two stage wins at the 2016 Belgium Tour. In 2017 Van Vleuten became the ITT World Champion in Bergen, an achievement she repeated the following year in Innsbruck . 2018 was a very successful year for Van Vleuten as she won the Giro Rosa, La Course by Le Tour de France and the final classification of the UCI Women's World Tour. She ended the 2018 season with a total of 13 victories. In 2019 she became the World Road Race champion in Harrogate where she rode solo for 100 km of the 149km race holding back the chasing groups. In July 2021, she was one of four Dutch cyclists competing in the -long women's Olympic road race in Tokyo, where she won the silver medal in  the race, crossing the finish line 75 seconds behind Austria's Anna Kiesenhofer. With around left in the race, Van Vleuten crashed, but rejoined the race. Her attack with to go secured her second place. When Van Vleuten finished the race, she celebrated thinking she had won, as she was unaware of Kiesenhofer being in front of her. Three days later, she became Olympic champion by winning the gold medal in the time trial. In October 2021, Van Vleuten crashed in the first ever Paris–Roubaix Femmes, breaking her pubis bone in two places.