Dutch Dominance: What makes the Netherlands so successful?

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The 2018 Dutch world championships team(Image credit: Getty Images)

Isabel Best is the author of 'Queens of Pain: Legends and Rebels of Cycling', and has contributed to Cyclingnews with feature stories 'Vital Statistics', 'Can women race a three-week Grand Tour?' and 'International Women's Day: 7 remarkable women who made their mark on cycling's history'. You can follow more of Best's historical writing on Cyclingnews during the 2019 season.

Dutch women took the most prestigious races on the calendar, from spring Classics like Strade Bianche, the Tour of Flanders, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège (all of which fell to Van der Breggen) to the high-summer specials of the Giro Rosa and La Course (which went to Van Vleuten). And they did it with such panache. Who can forget Van Vleuten’s dogged pursuit of Van der Breggen in the final 14km of La Course, finally overtaking her by barely a second on the finish line? Or Van der Breggen’s invincible strength, riding the last 39km of the Worlds road race on her own to win with a jaw-dropping margin of 3:42? Or Van Vleuten’s utter grit in the same race, riding through the pain of a broken kneecap to finish in seventh place?

Many countries have had their great moments and their stars – think of the Lithuanians in the early 1990s, the Germans in the 2000s or the British track riders in the last decade. The Dutch, however, have always been strong. They top the World Championships road race medals list, with 11 gold, 14 silver and 5 bronze medals – 30 in total compared to France in second place, with 17. They hold four Olympic road race victories out of the nine that have taken place since 1984.

You can trace a direct line back from today’s champions to 1966, when Bella Hage won the second-ever Dutch national championship, planting a stake in the ground with her family’s name on it. For the next decade, she and her younger sister Keetie swapped the national title between them. In between dominating races on home turf, Keetie won 19 medals at the Worlds, of which six were gold, and took two consecutive editions of the premier women’s stage race, the Red Zinger (later the Coors Classic), beating the queen of American women’s racing, Connie Carpenter-Phinney.

When Keetie and Bella retired, their youngest sister Heleen picked up the baton, winning three stages and coming second in the inaugural women’s Tour de France in 1984. By then, there was more than a team’s worth of impressive Dutch racers, with riders like Tineke Fopma and Petra de Bruijn, world champions in 1975 and 1979. There was Heleen’s teammate Mieke Havik at the 1984 Tour, who won five stages. There was Hennie Top, later hired to coach the American women’s national team in the hope she might pass on some Dutch brilliance.

The 1990s were dominated by Leontien van Moorsel, with 10 World Championship titles and four Olympic gold medals to her name, and her arch rival Monique Knoll, also an Olympic champion. When those two were just about done, it was Marianne Vos’s turn to shine. When people compare Vos to Eddy Merckx, they aren’t exaggerating. There’s a room in her house stuffed to bursting point with all the medals and jerseys she has won, in just about every discipline: road racing, time trials, stage races, sprints, track, cyclo-cross and mountain biking.

Vos is still one of the best riders in the peloton, despite struggling with health problems and injuries in recent years. As her crushing dominance has waned, Van der Breggen and Van Vleuten have become more prominent, yet these three champions represent but the crest of a wave of Dutch talent, with riders like Ellen van Dijk, Chantal Blaak and Kirsten Wild – to name but a few – also dominating on the world stage.

"They have a lot of big clubs who take care of young riders from a really young age," he says, adding that most clubs are extremely well provided for, with things like training tracks that might be 1.5-3km long. "It’s like a park for cyclists. The younger generation starts there and rides small criteriums in quite big groups. They start from a young age. A lot of other countries are afraid of letting their kids out on the streets, and these clubs can run this training on closed circuits."

He also stresses the importance of the social side of club life, arguing that most girls don’t want to be the only female in a large group of boys. In the Netherlands, Vestby explains, there are a lot of girls who take up cycling from a young age. "I think that’s probably the starting point for building a strong foundation. To get a lot of top riders you have to have a lot of young kids to start with."

The Dutch federation itself routinely sends promising riders on training camps. For example, younger riders go to the Belgian Ardennes, where they can gain valuable experience in climbing and descending. At the same time, camps allow the federation to conduct tests to identify future champions. At elite level, there are camps to prepare for major races; last year the national women’s team took two trips to Austria to prepare for the Worlds.

The story emerged while Cooke was testifying at the UK Parliament's Department for Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s inquiry into 'Combatting Doping in Sport', in the context of the mystery package delivered to Team Sky at the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2011. Simon Cope, the man who delivered it, was, at the time, the British women’s road team coach, yet British Cycling appeared to have no qualms about him taking several days out of his actual job to act as a courier at the behest of a commercial men's team.

René Koppert, a retired pro who runs the Dutch Cyclist of the Year Award – a glitzy end of year affair that gets covered on national TV – cites the example of the bitter rivalry between Van Moorsel and Monique Knoll in the 1990s, which led to Knoll leaving the national team in order to launch her own women’s team. With her commercial sponsors, this marked the start of a professional women’s scene in the Netherlands.

"We have conversations," says Veneberg. "Don’t put it under the table. Just talk about it. They both – and all the other women – say, 'Yeah, I want to win, but it’s more important that one of us wins.' That’s the main thing they say to each other. The worst thing that can happen is that one orange lady rides against another orange lady. They really hate that. The main goal is that an orange lady wins.

Marion Clignet remembers being similarly taken aback by her Dutch rivals' friendliness. "Contrary to other girls, they were really nice girls, and would encourage you. We would go tooth and nail to the line, and after the race we moved onto something else," she recalls. "It seemed odd to me at the beginning that we could actually be friends with each other and be competing against each other. I think that’s part of the Dutch education."

"They had their sprinters and their climbers and their lead-out riders. That degree of coherence was still unusual in women’s racing. They always seemed very organised, you know – a meeting before and a debrief afterwards. It seemed very professional and very well done. The impression I definitely got with the Dutch was that it was a team. They raced as a team and they looked after their leader, and that was definitely something that commanded respect."

There are many ingredients in Dutch success that are not unique to the Netherlands. It’s puzzling, for example, that the Belgians don’t play a similarly dominant role, given the importance of cycling in their national culture and the fact they taught Dutch women how to race. When Bella and Keetie Hage started out in the late 1960s, they learned everything in the explosive Belgium criterium races held on cobbled city centre streets.

"In France they organise the biggest bike race in the world, but they do fuck-all for women," she says. "The problem begins with the mindset at the federation, which, even though it recently appointed a female vice president, Marie-Françoise Potereau, also seems to consider it necessary to launch an initiative on the féminisation du vélo. Already that’s a term that drives me nuts because what the fuck does that mean?"

Ironically, one of the greatest female riders of all time, Jeannie Longo, was French. The French also created the first women’s stage races in the 1950s. There have been many other brilliant French riders who have excelled on the international stage, like the sprinter Geneviève Gambillon – a Mark Cavendish of her era – or Longo’s rival Catherine Marsal, who now coaches the Danish women’s team.

But the majority of these riders had to make it on their own. One of the main criticisms of Longo’s many detractors – beyond the cloud of the EPO scandal surrounding her husband and coach, Patrice Ciprelli – is the fact she made no effort to help bring up other riders, to create structures or an environment in which women’s cycling could flourish. She takes on such criticisms in her autobiography by pointing out that she was an athlete, not a sports administrator, and one, at that, who had such a bad relationship with her national federation that she toyed with the idea of becoming American.

In Germany, cycling as a whole is still struggling from the doping scandals of the Ullrich/Armstrong era. The years of Soviet Union investment in sport are long gone, and the last athletes who came up through that system have long since retired. Other countries like Spain, Italy, the UK, Australia and the US all have strong individual riders or great teams, but none seem to boast all the elements of the Dutch formula combining national grass-roots interest in cycling, infrastructure, and commitment to gender equality.

Vestby thinks those old generalisations – that the British are good at time trialling, for example, or that the Dutch are good at riding in the wind – are no longer so relevant. "Of course, you have quite a big influence from the kind of racing you grow up with, and of course in Holland they’re really good at riding into the wind and echelons," he says, but adds that you now also see strong Dutch climbers.

"It’s just about how they develop riders or take care of their different skills. If you’re not the best and strongest riding in the wind, they still have a system to see your talent and develop that in different ways. Of course, Annemiek grew up riding in echelons and criteriums, and handling that kind of racing," he adds, pointing out that she has also developed into an excellent climber with all the related skills.

On the other hand, "If you don’t have that many riders starting from a young age, then you need to have a really good system to take care of the riders that you have, taking them through the ranks and educating them. In Holland, they have both. What you see now reflects the work that’s been done in Dutch cycling in the last 10-20 years. That’s bearing fruit, and that's why you’re seeing a lot of top riders from Holland.