Lorena Wiebes is the dominant sprinter in women’s cycling. There’s no debate to be had about it. 29 wins last season, four already this year. If there’s a sprint and she’s in the race, it’s a near-certainty she’s winning it. But dynasties don’t last forever. At some point in the coming years Wiebes will no longer be unbeatable – she will be beatable, and a new top sprinter will emerge. Visma-Lease a Bike are confident that they identified Wiebes’s heir a long time ago, and now it’s beginning to bear fruit.
Nienke Veenhoven was signed to Visma aged 18 in 2023. After a slow start to professional life, she won her first professional races last season, and she’s now predicting that she’ll be a regular competitor of Wiebes from this campaign onwards. The sprint world is undeniable Wiebes’s, but it could be Veenhoven’s not long from now. “I believe in the future, when I am a few years older and bigger and stronger, and with a good team around me, we will come close to beating her one day,” the 22-year-old tells Rouleur. “That’s also the goal, otherwise we’re riding for second place and that’s a bad thing.”
Veenhoven’s first steps in sport were not so different to many of her Dutch compatriots in that speed-skating came before bike racing. She also did gymnastics and aged 10 she added a third sport: cycling. It was only when she was 14, though, that she parked speed-skating and gymnastics for two wheels. “My parents said it would be good to choose one sport because if I did everything it would be too busy for me,” she recalls. “I chose cycling because I enjoyed it. We had a nice group of girls at the local cycling club and we rode together every Tuesday evening.” It helped that Veenhoven was good, too. “From around 14, 15 I was one of the strongest,” she says. Wins at the likes of the junior Gent-Wevelgem were evidence of that and why Visma recruited her straight out of education for the 2023 season.
Celebrating her first pro win last summer. Image: Getty/Luc Claessen
But that first season wasn’t easy. A comparative lack of training miles as a junior caught up with her when she joined the elite ranks. “I didn’t do crazy hours as a junior and I really missed the ability to do the same efforts after 120 or 130km because I’d never done those hours before,” she says. The reason why that was the case has an easy explanation. “I think every girl I raced with as a junior had a parent, brother, nephew or uncle involved in cycling, but I was the first one from my family and I didn’t take it too seriously,” she says.
“That has a benefit and it’s why I think there’s still a lot of growing in cycling to be done for me, but it did also make it quite hard at times. And when I joined Visma every week was really hard because all of the training sessions were new. Maybe in the beginning we did too much and suddenly I was in the biggest race of the world – Paris-Roubaix.” Indeed, that was her second race as a pro.
“You’re in the team with Marianne Vos – it’s crazy!” she laughs. “I was used to going to the start of a race in my parents’ car and suddenly I was in a hotel or a team bus and mechanics were caring for my bike. That was quite a big transition and at first I didn’t handle it really well. I had a lot of DNFs in my first year, but the team helped me and in the second winter we said, ‘OK, we can do this, this and that to get better’ and from then we’ve made big steps every year. It’s good to know when you’ve sometimes done too much.”
Veenhoven was better in 2024, and then a lot better last season – after a series of impressive top-10s, she claimed her first pro victory at the Baloise Ladies Tour in July, following that up with victory at September’s Tour de Gatineau in Canada. The sprinter Visma have tied down on a contract until 2028 – a mark of their confidence in her – was up and running.
“It was more like a relief,” she says of her maiden win, “because all of the coaches and everyone else were saying that they believed in me, and when Lorena wasn’t there I was one of the fastest and I could do it. The day I won was more relief to show that I could do it and also to my teammates that it was not for nothing that they believed in me – that really counts for a lot, and also just the feeling that I was the fastest that day was really, really nice.”
Focused on the future. Image: Visma-Lease a Bike
Beating Wiebes is her short-, medium- and long-term goal. She has the advantage that she knows her from the track; Veenhoven has won multiple national medals on the track and hopes to be part of a prospective Dutch team pursuit team at Los Angeles 2028. “I know Lorena from the track and admire that she is two people in one – she’s really a different person in training and racing,” Veenhoven says. “In training we can talk about general things, I can ask her how she does things and how I see things, but then in a race she really shows strong leadership towards her teammates. I have to learn how to be a better leader.”
She’ll get her opportunities this year, but she’s also conscious that Vos and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot are Visma’s two leaders. “They both have big goals but I know I can have my own chances outside of those races,” Veenhoven says. “For the big Classics, I have to work for them but for me that’s fine as I get to learn. In races like Ronde van Brugge I’ll have a sprint train for me, and we’re really wanting to make our sprint train better and better every year.”
What success would constitute in 2026 is an easy answer. “To win, and for sure more than one race,” she says. “In the end, that’s the goal: to win races. In a WorldTour sprint or in fact any sprint, being in the top-5 as a standard would be nice.”
Veenhoven is coming. She’s not promising to topple Wiebes just yet, but she’s planning on becoming a thorn in her side more and more. And not just in stage racing – Veenhoven wants to be a success in one-day Classics as well. In Flanders Field (formerly known as Gent-Wevelgem) is one race she’s targeting this spring. “I want to try to be there in the final and go for a good result,” she says. “And at Bruges a few days after I want to finish on the podium which is realistic.”
Cover image: Visma-Lease a Bike
