Marianne Vos

Vos grew up in Babyloniënbroek in North Brabant and started riding at six, after watching her older brother race. She was too young to enter events herself, so she trained with his club and rode cyclo-cross through the winters. In 2004, in her first year as a junior, she won the junior road world title in Verona.

The elite breakthrough came in 2006. She won the cyclo-cross world championship at Zeddam in January, outsprinting Hanka Kupfernagel, and the road world title at Salzburg in September, aged nineteen. Two years later she took the points race at the track world championships and then the Olympic points race in Beijing, making her the first woman to hold world titles on the road, on the track and in cyclo-cross.

She was second at the road world championships every year from 2007 to 2011, then won again at Valkenburg in 2012 and Florence in 2013. Most of her road wins came from small groups on hard finales rather than from flat bunch sprints, and she climbed well enough to still be in them.

She took the Olympic road race at London in 2012 from a three-rider move in the rain, the Giro d'Italia in 2011, 2012 and 2014, and the Tour of Flanders in 2013. The cyclo-cross world title was hers every winter from 2009 to 2014.

Vos campaigned for a women's Tour de France alongside Emma Pooley, Kathryn Bertine and Chrissie Wellington, under the name Le Tour Entier, and won the one-day race that came of it, La Course, in 2014 and 2019. Then 2015 fell apart: a broken rib, a hamstring injury that would not settle, and an admission that she was overtrained. She sat out the following cyclo-cross season.

At Jumbo-Visma from 2021 she won Amstel Gold that spring and again in 2024, and took the cyclo-cross world title back at Fayetteville in 2022. At the first Tour de France Femmes she won stage two into Provins for the yellow jersey, then won stage six while wearing it, the first woman to do that. Paris 2024 brought Olympic road race silver behind Kristen Faulkner.

In 2025 she won two stages and the points jersey at the Vuelta Femenina, and opened the Tour de France Femmes by winning at Plumelec, taking the first yellow jersey of a race her team-mate Pauline Ferrand-Prévot went on to win overall.