Marianne Vos: How Paris–Roubaix victory would cap off an extraordinary career

Marianne Vos before March's Strade Bianche, when she came seventh. Elias Rom / Getty Images Share full articleAlmost 20 years to the day since Marianne Vos’s first win as a professional road cyclist, she racks her brain to recall the finer details. “I think it was Gracia–Orlová?” women’s cycling’s greatest tells The Athletic. Correct, and more than 250 wins on the road have followed her solo breakaway on the fifth and final stage of the modest Czech stage race, beating Judith Arndt by over two minutes on the last day of April 2006. The iPhone had not yet been released. Her current Visma–Lease a Bike team-mate Viktória Chladoňová was not even born. One-hit wonder Daniel Powter’s signature song was topping charts around the world. Little did the Dutchwoman’s rivals realise that there would be a lot more bad days in store for them over the next two decades, powerlessly watching Vos accelerate into clean air and leave them behind. Still enrolled in her university biomedical science degree back then, the teenager had no inkling of what would unfold either. “I was not expecting anything. I was just doing what I liked most, what I still like most,” Vos says. “I was not looking ahead much, just racing, enjoying it and giving my best. At that point, I didn’t think about age, and I still don’t. “It’s a cliché, but age is just a number. Back then, I just thought if opportunities came, I would try to take them.” Vos did just that. For a decade, she bestrode women’s cycling. Bunch sprints, flat one-day races, cobbled Classics, hilly leg-hurters, mountain stages, stage races: The rider nicknamed “The Cannibal” won them all, sometimes in crushing, emphatic fashion. She won one 124km stage of a French stage race by five and a half minutes. It is hard to overstate the aura of invincibility Vos exerted over the women’s peloton in her heyday. On the road, there were seasons where she won 60 percent of the races she started (31 out of 51). In 2013, she won five of the seven individual World Cup races she competed in on the way to an emphatic victory in the now-obsolete season-long series. She has triumphed in five editions of Belgian classic Flèche Wallonne and taken three titles at the Giro d’Italia Femminile (which had been the blue riband stage race for women) and 32 stages, just one record she has set among so many others. Vos roots around in her vast collection of victories to pick the one that has made her happiest, opting for the 2012 Olympic road race in London when she outsprinted home hope Lizzie Deignan (née Armistead) to the gold medal. Yet Vos is also a multi-disciplinary marvel, with an Olympic gold medal and world titles on the track, more than 100 cyclo-cross successes, mountain bike race wins and a gravel world championships title in 2024, the latest in her collection of 14 elite rainbow jerseys. She can stake a claim to being the greatest cyclist of all time, with a longevity that also trumps any fellow giant of the sport. Twenty years after that first success, Vos is still a hungry contender, finishing sixth at the Trofeo Alfredo Binda and seventh at Strade Bianche last month. During her epic career, Vos has also been the figurehead of her sport during a period of immense evolution and disenfranchisement. “Everything has changed,” she says. “It just got a lot bigger and more professional, and the team structures got better. There is more media attention, which is not the biggest thing, but it also means more money is involved and that more riders can do this sport full-time with good support — and that means higher-level, more interesting racing.” Many more women’s races are now being broadcast, while minimum salaries and a two-tier UCI team system, including WorldTour designation, have been introduced in recent years. “There has been such a step,” she says. “If I only look at the last 10 years, the growth has been huge.” She has also been a leader off the bike, voicing her desire for more out-of-competition anti-doping tests and long championing a women’s version of the Tour de France before it existed. When she unleashed her trademark finishing kick to win the opening stage of the 2025 edition in Plumelec and pulled on the yellow jersey for the first time, it was a profound, full-circle moment. “It’s the biggest thing in the sport of cycling. The first time I wore it, I had goosebumps,” she says. “It’s been fantastic to have that on the calendar and be able to race there.” Vos’s biggest setback came from a traditional injury, but from the weight of everything catching up with her. Her 2015 was “the year that I had a period of overreaching,” she says. “It was probably mainly due not to riding my bike too much but saying yes too much.” It was a season when she paid the price for wanting to do everything, only participating in two road races. Vos took a break, barely touching her race bike for six months. She was forced to step back and ask herself who she was without professional sport. “Next to cycling, the balance between rest and activity was gone. But in that period, even when my body didn’t recover so well anymore, I still felt OK because I love cycling so much. I needed to rest and take a break, but I wanted to find the way back again,” she says. “During your career, you have some ups and downs. There are always periods you doubt how fast you’re going to come back or which level you’ll get back to, but there has never been a serious moment that I thought, ‘No, I don’t want [to do] this anymore’.” Naturally, Vos has changed as a rider. She is still a threat in any bunch sprint and a Classics contender but no longer as feared as those seasons between 2007 and 2014, when she averaged 21 wins per year. While triumphs are now the exception rather than the norm, does she enjoy them more? “Yes. I did enjoy winning, but I embrace the moment a bit more instead of just heading on to the next again,” Vos says. “That doesn’t mean I go out and party, but I give it a bit more time to sink in. And not only the wins — a team win is fantastic, and a camp (together).” In the past, it could sometimes seem there were two Mariannes: the competitive beast on the bike and the shy introvert off it. “I got more in balance,” she says. “The bike is always a nice way for me to express myself. I feel at ease there, in races.” “I’ve gotten to love riding my bike. Maybe at first, it was competition that I liked even more, but the longer I ride and race, the more I appreciate the journey, the training and everything that comes with it,” she says. There is a lot of appreciation for Vos the racer and the classiness with which she behaves. For so long, she has been a reference point, an icon, the “idol of women’s cycling”, in the words of rival Lorena Wiebes. Even after all the years of compliments (and dominance), it’s enough to make the modest girl from the Dutch Bible Belt feel a little uncomfortable sometimes. During the Visma–Lease a Bike team presentation in January, the compere called her an exceptional example and role model. She pulled a face. “I don’t feel like a role model,” she said on stage, with typical Dutch directness. “I just want to be myself, try and be the best version of myself … but I’ll take it as a compliment.” So, how does Vos perceive herself and her own achievements? “I don’t look at myself so much. Definitely not,” she says. “Because I’m just focusing on what I need and want to do, what’s good for me, to be ready for what’s next. I’ve learned to live more in the now than in the future.” That has been especially true for Vos during the last eight months. Her father, Henk, was in hospital with “health issues” last year and passed away recently. Marianne skipped the 2025 World Championships road race in Rwanda and the cyclo-cross season, spending much of the winter close to home in the Netherlands. “That was a logical choice,” she says, speaking in mid-January, ten weeks before his death. “Then cycling is relative. It was also the place I wanted to be. When I’m racing, that’s the main thing, the only thing that matters. But when something is going on with your loved ones, that’s where your mind goes.” While she calls that period “not optimal” preparation, Vos wants to be at her best in 2026 and Paris–Roubaix is the one big race that has got away from her in recent years. She finished second in 2021 in the inaugural women’s edition, fourth from a five-woman sprint in 2024 and fourth again last year as Visma–Lease a Bike team-mate Pauline Ferrand-Prévot escaped to victory. “It gives me extra motivation to know that I was there, able to race the final in those editions,” Vos says. “Last year was just fantastic to be part of the winning team, to have Pauline up front. Knowing if they didn’t start riding fast, she was gone.” Her passion for the race even has physical tells. As Vos talks about the inaugural edition and thinks about chasing Deignan in vain over treacherous, muddy cobbles, she shows me the goosebumps on her forearm. “Having the crowds at the Carrefour de l’Arbre and coming into the Roubaix stadium was just fantastic. Before that moment, I already had a special feeling about the race. But in that edition, it grew even bigger,” she says. Dans le secteur pavé d’Auchy à Bersée, 🇳🇱 @marianne_vos attaque en tête du peloton. 😈 🇳🇱 @marianne_vos attacks in the peloton in the cobbled sector from Auchy to Bersée. 😈#ParisRoubaixFemmes pic.twitter.com/4CFp5rn7bR — Paris-Roubaix Hauts-de-France (@parisroubaix) October 2, 2021 Time waits for no woman. Vos is running out of opportunities to raise the hefty cobblestone trophy aloft in the Vélodrome André-Pétrieux. Even though she signed a “forever” contract with Visma–Lease a Bike in April 2025, she cannot go on ad infinitum. “Somewhere, somehow, there will be an end. And I’m also aware that the beginning of my career is further away than the end,” Vos says. “But I’m not thinking about that. For now, I’m just focusing on being as fit and ready as I can be for the races. “As long as I can be competitive and add value to the team, and as long as I enjoy it — especially with this winter, which I realize put things into perspective.” “But it’s also made me realise that I just really love to do it. So there is nothing in the back of my mind that thinks about the end.” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Andy McGrath is an award-winning freelance sports journalist. Formerly editor of Rouleur magazine, he has also written for The Telegraph and The Guardian. He is the author of Tadej Pogačar: Unstoppable and Tom Simpson: Bird on the Wire, which won the 2017 William Hill Sports Book of the Year prize.