Eline Jansen (VolkerWessels) will join Team SD Worx-Protime from 2027 after signing a two-year contract with the Dutch Women's WorldTour team following a breakthrough 2025 season and further success across the 2026 season.
The team confirmed the move on Friday, August 28, securing the 24-year-old through the end of 2028. Jansen has developed into a versatile one-day racer since committing fully to cycling in 2024, with SD Worx-Protime also identifying potential for hilly races and shorter stage races.
Jansen won La Classique Morbihan in 2025 before recording three top-10 finishes at that year's Tour de France Femmes. Her best Tour result was fourth on the stage to Poitiers, won by Lorena Wiebes.
Her progress continued this spring with fifth places at Dwars door Vlaanderen and Omloop van het Hageland, seventh at La Flèche Brabançonne and eighth at Nokere Koerse. She then won the Grand Prix du Morbihan in May.
“Eline still has enormous potential,” SD Worx-Protime sports manager Danny Stam said. “There are opportunities for her especially in hilly terrain. I also expect that she can develop into a general classification rider in the smaller stage races.”
Stam considers Jansen capable in the Flemish races but expects her range to extend into hillier classics. Her combination of one-day results and repeated high finishes during the Tour also gives the team scope to test her in general classifications away from the longest stage races.
From speed skating to the WorldTour
Jansen initially used cycling as summer training while pursuing speed skating, before recognising that her ability on the bike could support a professional career. She made the definitive switch in 2024, when VolkerWessels gave her an opportunity in the professional peloton.
“I never thought my transition from ice skater to cyclist would happen so quickly,” Jansen said in the team's announcement.
Her first full season with VolkerWessels included a stage victory at the Tour Cycliste Féminin International de l’Ardèche. She also finished sixth overall and won the young-rider classification at the Tour of Britain Women, before adding further strong results in 2025 and 2026.
Jansen said she initially questioned whether joining SD Worx-Protime would be too large a step, but accepted after discussing her development with Stam. She expects her first season to centre on learning and wants to become capable of contesting race finales.
She also hopes to learn from Anna van der Breggen (Team SD Worx-Protime), focusing on positioning, tactical decisions and remaining calm late in races.
Jansen follows a route already established by other endurance skaters, for whom riding can begin as cross-training before becoming a second career. The sports reward some of the same raw qualities, notably a large aerobic engine and the ability to produce repeated, powerful efforts, but transferring that fitness into road racing requires a different kind of endurance and extensive tactical learning.
Sandrine Tas (Lotto–Intermarché Ladies) offers a recent illustration. The Belgian made her Tour de France Femmes debut in 2026 after finishing 0.13 seconds outside the medals in the Olympic 5,000 metres, a transition covered in our report on her first Tour selection. Tas contrasted a longest skating race of around seven minutes with road races lasting three or four hours, requiring her training to shift towards endurance.
Fitness was only part of that adjustment. Tas identified positioning, taking bottles, negotiating feed zones and making split-second decisions in the peloton among the skills that had to be learned through racing. Her background in inline skating gave her some experience of pack competition, but the demands still illustrate why Jansen's rapid progress from summer cycling to Tour top-10 finishes is significant.
The crossover has deeper roots. Riejanne Markus and Femke Markus both came to cycling from speed skating, while Demi Vollering also skated before establishing her cycling career. Clara Hughes reached the highest level in both sports, winning Olympic medals in road cycling and speed skating. Jansen's path is therefore familiar, particularly in the Netherlands, but her development into a rider suited to classics and stage-race general classifications is still her own rather than an automatic product of skating fitness.
Jansen will complete the 2026 season with VolkerWessels before beginning her SD Worx-Protime contract next year.
