So I was looking through the stack of source
material you sent over for today's deep dive.
Yeah, the giant pile of articles. Right, the
giant pile. And I got stuck on this one word.
I mean, it's in the title of half the articles.
It's all over the fan forums. I think I know
exactly which word you're talking about. The
animal. The animal. Ellen Van Dyke. Right. And
I have to be honest here. Usually when we look
into women's sports or really any elite athletes,
the nicknames are, well, They're elegant, right?
Yeah, totally. You have things like the queen
of the classics. Or for the men, it's the professor
or the sheriff. Right. But the animal, that just
feels so different. It feels almost, I don't
know, aggressive. Is that actually a compliment
in the professional cycling world? It is the
ultimate compliment. But you are completely right
to pause on it because it tells you, well, everything
you need to know about why we're doing this deep
dive on her today. Okay, lay it out for us. So,
to set the context for you listening, we are
recording this in February 2026. And Ellen Van
Dyke has just retired. She officially hung up
her wheels at the end of last year, the end of
2025. End of an era. Truly. And that nickname.
It wasn't given to her because she was wild or
chaotic on the bike. It was given to her because
of her capacity for suffering. Suffering in what
sense? Like enduring crashes? Because I know
we have some brutal injuries in these notes.
No, no. Although she did plenty of that, and
we will definitely get to the crashes later.
I mean metabolic suffering. Oh, interesting.
See, in cycling, you have riders who win with
pure tactics. They sit in the wheels, they hide
from the wind, they protect their energy, and
then bam! They sprint for the last 200 meters.
Exactly. They are snipers. But Ellen Van Dyke
was a blunt instrument. The animal implies a
rider who can just go to the front of the pack,
stick her nose right into the wind, and hold
a power output that literally breaks the people
who are just trying to follow her. So it's not
about being tricky. It's just about torque. Raw
wattage. It is entirely about the engine. The
ability to endure physical pain longer than anyone
else in the field is willing to. Wow. And our
mission today is to unpack exactly how that engine
was built because, and I think this is the most
fascinating insight from our source material,
Ellen Van Dyke did not start as a cyclist. Right.
She spent the first decade of her athletic life
on ice. Exactly. Speed skating. Which, knowing
she's Dutch, feels almost mandatory, doesn't
it? It basically is a religion over there. But
if you want to understand why she became a five
-time world champion and why she could hold a
brutally painful aerodynamic tuck for an hour
straight, you have to look at the biomechanics
of speed skating. But before we get deep into
the physics of it, let's lay out the timeline
for everyone, because this career, it spanned
nearly two decades. Two decades is just an eternity
in pro sports. Right. Most pro cyclists burn
out in, what, five or six years? Pretty much.
But she is a monument. Retiring at the end of
2025, she really defined what I like to call
the long game in women's cycling. The long game.
Yeah, she overcame this incredible fourth place
curse. She survived horrific injuries and she
reinvented herself multiple times over different
eras of the sport. All right, let's start at
the very beginning then. You mentioned the ice.
Take us back to her origin story. Harmelin, right?
Harmelin Utrecht, right in the heart of the Netherlands.
So I want you to picture a really flat, watery
landscape. And in the winter, all those canals
freeze over solid. Sounds beautiful. It is. And
Ellen started skating on them when she was just
a kid. By age eight, she's doing these long natural
ice tours. And by 12, she's training daily at
the local rink. Daily? At 12 years old. That
is the Dutch discipline for you. And she wasn't
just showing up to participate. She was fiercely
competitive. The records show she was top 10
at the Junior Dutch All -Round Championships.
Okay, so she was elite. Very much so. She actually
held a local track record for the 5 ,000 meters.
Right, so she is a high -level skater. But help
me bridge this gap here. Because I watch speed
skating and I watch cycling. And sure, I get
that they both require big leg muscles. But...
Are the sports really that physiologically similar?
They seem totally different, right? Yeah, one
is sliding on blades, the other is pedaling in
circles. How does one actually translate to the
other? It's a really great question. On the surface,
the motion looks entirely different. But physiologically,
the two sports are practically cousins. Think
about the body position of a speed skater. Picture
them flying down the long straightaway of a rink.
Okay, I've got it. They're bent way over at the
waist. Chest is almost parallel to the ice. Hands
usually tucked behind their back. Perfect. That
is called the skating crouch. Now, think about
what muscles have to be engaged to hold that
shape. To stay in that crouch, your body is in
a state of constant isometric tension. Mainly
in the glutes and the lower back. Exactly. The
glutes and the lower back. You aren't just pushing
laterally with your legs. You are holding up
a heavy torso against gravity and against wind
resistance. So it's basically like doing a wall
sit. A wall sit while moving at 30 miles per
hour on razor blades. That sounds exhausting.
It is. Now, transfer that exact physical demand
to a time trial bike. In a time trial, which
they call the race of truth, you are trying to
make yourself as small as humanly possible to
cheat the win. You literally fold your body in
half over the handlebars and you have to hold
it there for 40, 50... Maybe 60 minutes. I see
where this is going. So for a normal cyclist,
getting into that folded position is just sheer
agony for their back and hips. Exactly. Most
road cyclists spend years trying to train their
core to just handle that position without losing
power to their pedals. If you aren't used to
it, your diaphragm gets completely compressed.
You can't breathe properly. Your lower back just
screams at you. But for Ellen Van Dyke. She had
been doing that since she was eight years old
on the canals of Utrecht. Her body was already
perfectly molded for the aero tuck. Precisely.
She had developed what biomechanists call a posterior
chain. The glutes, the hamstrings, the lower
back. Hers was made of absolute steel. Wow. So
when she started getting on a bike at age 10
just for summer cross training, she didn't have
to learn how to suffer in that weird hunched
position. She just had to learn to pedal. That
is a massive head start over the competition.
And there is one more vital layer to this skating
connection, the rhythm of the power delivery.
What do you mean by rhythm? In speed skating,
you push, then you glide. Push, then glide. It
requires a very specific high torque output.
It is not a rapid light spinning motion like
you see climbers do on a bike. It's a slow, grinding,
heavy motion. And that translates perfectly to
pushing a massive heavy gear in a cycling time
trial. It translates perfectly. So she's got
all the physical tools ready to go. But looking
at the source material here, she also had the
mental tools because she wasn't just a physical
powerhouse. She was incredibly academic. This
is a detail that I think gets overlooked in all
the sports highlight reels. Ellen Van Dyke is
incredibly smart. She did not sacrifice her education
just to pursue sport. Which is rare at that level.
Very rare. She graduated from Minkema College
and then went straight into the Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam. And wait until you hear what she studied,
folks. What was her degree in? Human movement
sciences. Get out. That is just too perfect.
It really is, isn't it? She earned her bachelor's
in 2011. Now think about what that specific degree
entails. It's all about biomechanics. It's exercise
physiology. It's the literal physics of drag
and force vectors. So when her coaches are sitting
there telling her to adjust her saddle height
by two millimeters or to change her hand position
to improve her aerodynamics, she isn't just nodding
along blindly. She actually understands the math
behind what they're saying. She understands the
why. And in a discipline like time trialing,
which is basically just a complex math equation
on wheels. Power versus aerodynamic drag. Exactly.
Having that academic knowledge is a lethal advantage.
She knows exactly how much energy she is expending,
how her muscles are recruiting that energy, and
exactly where it's going. She even started a
master's degree later on, though the sources
note she had to pause it when the Olympic preparations
became too intense. Makes sense. Okay, so we
have this cerebral, incredibly powerful, former
speed skater, basically the ultimate prototype
for a cyclist. But she eventually had to make
a choice, right? You can't be a world -class
speed skater and a world -class pro cyclist forever.
No, the human body just cannot handle that dual
training load at the elite level. The critical
year for her was 2007. She was 20 years old at
the time. And what happened in 2007? Well, she
was up for selection for the regional speed skating
team. And in the Netherlands, making that regional
team is the primary gateway to becoming a professional
skater. Okay. But at the exact same time, she
had just won the Dutch National Cycling Championship.
For the fifth time. Talk about having a good
problem just sitting there deciding which professional
sport should I completely dominate today. Right.
But she had to choose. And she chose the bike.
And frankly, the cycling world should be very
grateful that she did. So she joins a cycling
team called Frenden van het Platteland in 2006.
And almost immediately, she starts winning stages
in major races in France and Italy. She did.
But... And this is a really big, but she also
started breaking things. The crash. The crashes.
The toll on her body started early. In 2006,
she fractured her clavicle, her collarbone. Ouch.
Yeah. It's almost a rite of passage for pro cyclists
to break a collarbone. But for her, it was the
start of a very painful recurring pattern. However,
the real test of her character early on, the
moment where I think the animal was truly born,
it wasn't a crash. It was a rejection. The 2008
Beijing Olympics. Beijing. She was young. She
was young. She was incredibly hungry. And she
was targeting two very specific events for the
games, the individual pursuit on the track velodrome
and the time trial on the road. OK, let's break
those down one at a time. Let's start with the
track. What happened? So she went to the track
world championships in Manchester in March 2008.
This was the final qualifying event for the Olympics.
To get her ticket to Beijing, the rules stated
she needed to be in the top 11 in the UCI world
rankings after that race. Okay, top 11. She rode
a genuinely great race. She finished fifth on
the day at Worlds. Fifth at the World Championships.
That sounds like an absolute lock for an Olympic
spot. You would think so. But the ranking system
was cumulative over the entire season. So despite
that amazing fifth place finish on the day when
the officials tallied up all the points for the
year. She ended up 12th in the overall ranking.
Oh, no. You're kidding. She missed the Olympic
cut by one single spot. One spot, 12th place
after years of training and sacrificing everything.
It is just gut -wrenching. That is awful. But
wait, she still had the road events, right? She
was the Dutch national time trial champion. Surely
she gets to go for the road race. This is where
the story gets pretty ugly. And I think it highlights
a side of cycling that the sport doesn't like
to talk about very often, which is this immense
obsession with weight. Oh boy. The Dutch national
selectors looked at the time trial course in
Beijing. It was routed near the Great Wall, and
it was quite hilly. It wasn't a massive high
-altitude mountain stage, but it had significant
punchy elevation gain. Okay, so a hilly course.
Then they looked at Ellen. Now, remember everything
we just discussed about that speed skating physique.
She is incredibly powerful. She is tall. She
carries real functional muscle mass. She is not
a 100 pound climbing specialist. I think I see
where this is going and I don't like it. The
selectors told her. explicitly to her face that
she was, quote, too heavy for the Olympic course.
Unbelievable. They said her power to weight ratio
just wasn't good enough to get over those hills
fast enough, so they left her at home. Too heavy.
I mean, she is an elite athlete at the absolute
peak of human conditioning, and a panel of selectors
tells her she's too heavy. For a 21 -year -old
woman, that has to be incredibly psychologically
damaging. It's completely brutal. They basically
treated her like a faulty math equation instead
of a human competitor. They just looked at the
watts per kilogram numbers on a spreadsheet and
said, computer says no. So picture her sitting
there. She's got a rejection letter for the track
in one hand, missing by one spot. And she's got
a body image critique keeping her off the road
team in the other hand. Most people would just
crumble right there. I know I would crumble.
I'd probably throw my bike in a canal and never
ride again. And that right there is the massive
fork in the road of her career. This is the defining
moment. Because she didn't go home and quit.
I mean, she might have cried, sure. But then
she got really, really angry. Good. The very
next day. I mean, literally 24 hours after finding
out she missed the Olympic track cut in Manchester,
she decides to enter a different race at those
same world championships. A race called the Scratch
Race. Okay, explain the scratch race to us. Is
that just another type of time trial? No, it
is the exact opposite of a time trial. A scratch
race is a mass start bunch race on the wooden
velodrome. So everyone's on the track at the
same time? Everyone starts together. It's usually
about 10 kilometers or so. And the premise is
simple. The first person across the finish line
wins. But because of that, it is pure chaos.
It requires throwing elbows, playing deep tactical
games, surfing wheels, and usually having a massive
explosive sprint at the very end. Which sounds
completely antithetical to a steady -state, pacing
-focused time trialist. It's not her natural
habitat at all. Not even slightly. So she enters
this chaotic bunch race, basically entirely fueled
by rage and rejection. Oh, it happens. She doesn't
wait around for the sprint finish. ignores the
tactical games everyone else is playing. With
eight laps remaining in the race, she just attacks.
Just goes for it. She pours all of that frustration,
all of that rejection from the selectors straight
into her pedals. She goes completely solo off
the front. She just rode away from the entire
peloton. She just rode them right off her wheel.
And she held off the entire chasing field for
eight laps and won the world title. Oh my God.
Talk about making a statement. Just, you won't
take me to Beijing. Fine, I'll just take a rainbow
jersey home instead. Exactly. And this response
established her psychological profile for the
entire rest of her career. She learned how to
channel massive disappointment into absolute
dominance. She doesn't wallow in it. She works
through it. That is such an incredible turning
point. So she has a track world title. But clearly,
as we look at the trajectory, the road was her
real future. And as we move into the early 2010s
in the source material, she enters what we can
definitely call her golden era. The golden era.
He joined some of the biggest teams in the world.
First, HTC High Road, and then Specialized Lululemon.
Now, if you followed cycling at all in that specific
era, Specialized Lululemon was the team. They
were the Galacticos of the women's peloton. But
they were famous and feared for one very specific
discipline, the team time trial, the TTT. The
TTT. I feel like this is an art form that is
kind of dying out a bit in modern cycling, unfortunately.
But back then it was huge. For anyone listening
who hasn't watched one, can you explain how a
team time trial actually works? Sure. Imagine
a pace line of six riders on time trial bikes.
They are riding in a single file line, literally
inches apart from each other's wheels, moving
at nearly 40 miles an hour. They have to move
as a single organism. No room for error. Zero.
The rider at the very front is breaking the wind.
They are taking 100 % of the aerodynamic drag.
It is agonizing. But the riders tucked in close
behind them are saving maybe 30 % to 40 % of
their energy because they are in the slipstream.
So the whole strategy is to rotate who is at
the front. Right. You smash yourself at the front
for maybe 30 seconds, pushing massive watts,
and then you peel off to the side, drop back
to the rear of the line, and recover in the draft
while the next person takes over. Specialized
Lululemon turned this rotation into a literal
science. And Ellen Van Dyke was the engine room
of that train. Exactly. Because she was so incredibly
strong, she could take much longer turns at the
front. While a normal rider might pull for 30
seconds, Ellen could pull for a minute or more.
She could hold the speed artificially high, while
the smaller climbing specialists on her team
sat in her draft and caught their breath. That's
a huge tactile advantage. And by 2011, she really
starts winning individually on the road as well.
The sources highlight her winning the Ladies
Tour of Qatar. Now, looking at Qatar, it's flat,
it's intensely windy, and it's sandy. It sounds
miserable to race in. It is a race designed for
the hard men and women of the sport. It's all
about surviving crosswinds. In Qatar, if you
lose focus for one second and let a gap open
to the wheel in front of you during a crosswind,
the race is over. The race is completely over.
You get blown backward into the desert. But Ellen
thrived there. She won the overall golden jersey.
She won the points classification. And she won
the young rider classification. She just cleaned
up everything. But there is a story attached
to that specific Qatar win in the source material
that really stuck with me. Because it isn't about
the racing at all. It's about what she did with
the prize money afterward. Yes. This really reveals
the human side of the animal. Just a few weeks
before that race in Qatar, her teammate... Carla
Swart had been killed. Oh wow. That's tragic.
It was an awful training accident. She was hit
by a truck while out on a ride. The entire team
was just completely devastated. They were deep
in grief. And when Ellen won Qatar, which actually
carries a pretty decent prize purse, she didn't
keep a single cent of it. She donated all of
her winnings directly to Carla Swartz's family.
That really shows the level of loyalty there.
It wasn't just a group of coworkers. It was a
family. It really galvanized them as a unit.
They were out there racing for something much
bigger than just keeping those. sponsors happy.
And I truly think that unity and trust is a big
part of why they were so utterly dominant in
the team time trial in the years that followed.
You have to trust the wheel in front of you with
your life. That makes total sense. So we roll
into 2012, London Olympics, and she makes the
team this time. No more of that too heavy nonsense
from the selectors. No, they couldn't ignore
her anymore. She made the Olympic team for everything.
She did the road race, the time trial, and the
team pursuit on the track. A completely packed
schedule. Very packed. In the road race, she
played the role of the loyal soldier. She rode
as a domestique for Marianne Vos. A domestique.
That's the French term for servant, right? The
helper riders. Exactly. In pro cycling, you often
have to sacrifice your own chances of winning
to help your designated team leader win. Ellen
buried herself into the ground, chasing down
attacks to help Vos, and it worked. Vos won the
gold medal for the Netherlands. So that was a
massive success for the team. But what about
her own target event? What happened in the individual
time trial? She finished eighth. Eighth. And
for a rider of her absolute caliber, eighth place
is a failure. What went wrong? Was it the course
layout in London? Did she have a mechanical issue?
No, it was entirely in her head. She openly admitted
it in interviews later. She said she was, quote,
afraid to start too fast. She hesitated. Interesting.
See, in a time trial, it's a very delicate balance.
If you hold back too much in the first half of
the course to save energy, you can never mathematically
make up that lost time in the second half. You
have to be willing to ride right on the absolute
limit of blowing up from minute one. She played
it slightly too safe and she lost. It's kind
of ironic that for someone whose nickname is
the animal. Her big weakness in that moment was
overthinking it and being too cautious. It was
a very rare moment of doubt for her. But, and
here's that psychological pattern repeating itself
again, she didn't let that failure break her.
She used that London disappointment as premium
fuel. Because 2013, 2013 was essentially the
perfect season. Let me look at this list of wins
from the notes for 2013. She wins the overall
at the Energy Vox Tour, the Grasse Orlova, the
Belgium Tour, and the Holland Ladies Tour. She
is winning multi -day stage races now, not just
one -day efforts. She was completely untouchable
that year. But her main obsession, the big target
on the calendar, was the world championships
in Florence, Italy. She wanted that individual
rainbow jersey in the time trial. She needed
to erase the memory of London. And the preparation
she did for Florence was borderline obsessive,
right? The sources mentioned something about...
5 .0 a .m. training sessions. This is where that
human movement scientist degree really comes
out to play. She traveled to Florence well before
the race. She knew the course was highly technical.
It had lots of sharp corners, tricky descents,
narrow roads. She wanted to ride the perfect
racing lines. The fastest path through every
single corner. Exactly. But you can't practice
the fastest racing line through a city street
when there's normal daytime traffic. You have
to use the whole road. So she got up before the
entire city of Florence woke up. Every single
morning, 5 a .m., writing the course over and
over and over again in the dark. She even mounted
a camera and video recorded all the corners so
she could go back to her hotel room, watch the
footage on loop, and visually memorize her exact
breaking points. That is just next level dedication.
And it paid off perfectly. On race day, she absolutely
destroyed the field. She won the individual time
trial world title very comfortably. And just
to put a cherry on top of the week, she drove
that specialized Lululemon train to a gold medal
in the team time trial as well. Two world titles
in a single week. She was the undisputed queen
of the clock. But you know how sports media is.
People always love to put athletes into neat
little boxes. They say, oh, sure, she's a time
trialist. She can ride fast in a straight line
alone, but she can't win a real road race. She
can't win a classic. And Ellen took that narrative
very personally, which brings us perfectly to
2014 and the Tour of Flanders. The Rondin Flandrin.
Yeah. One of the monuments of cycling. For you
listening, if you don't know Flanders, it is
pure chaos. It is raced over ancient cobblestones
of incredibly steep, muddy farm roads with thousands
of Belgian cycling fans screaming in your face.
It is absolutely not a race designed for a pure
steady state time trialist. It requires explosive
punch. It requires agility and bike handling.
But Ellen had a plan, didn't she? She did. She
knew she couldn't out -sprint the smaller, explosive
riders over the top of the short hills. So she
decided to just turn the most famous road race
in the world into a time trial. How do you even
do that in the middle of a chaotic road race?
You attack from incredibly far out. With 25 kilometers
still to go in the race, she just rode away from
the front group. 25 kilometers solo. In Flanders.
Into a headwind. That's usually tactical suicide.
For almost anyone else, yes. But for the animal?
That's just a 30 -minute sustained effort. She
put her head down, engaged a massive gear, and
basically dared the rest of the peloton to try
and catch her. And they couldn't do it. They
couldn't even get close. She crossed the finish
line entirely solo. And the sources note that
she considers that Flanders win to be equal in
importance to her world titles, specifically
because it proved to all the critics that she
was a complete cyclist, not just a specialist.
So by 2014, she is literally on top of the cycling
world. 2013, 2014. These are her absolute high
watermarks. But as we know in pro sports, gravity
always wins eventually. And after this massive
peak, the source material shows we enter a period
that looks really, really tough on paper. Yeah,
I call these the dark years, or at the very least,
the frustrating years. And it started with a
new nemesis for her. number four the fourth place
curse you know there's actually a lot of psychological
research on olympic medalists regarding this
the studies show that silver medalists are often
miserable because they just missed gold bronze
medalists are usually thrilled because they at
least got a medal right But fourth place, fourth
place is a very special kind of torture. You
are the very first loser. You get nothing but
a pat on the back. And Ellen just started collecting
fourth places like they were trading cards. Rio
2016 Olympics. The time trial was her absolute
obsession for four straight years after the London
disappointment. And she finished fourth. Ouch.
Just mere seconds away from the podium. That
has to haunt you late at night. You just sit
there thinking, man, if I had just taken that
one corner a tiny bit tighter. if I hadn't touched
my brakes on that one descent. Exactly. The counterfactuals
just eat you alive. And it wasn't just Rio. She
was also fourth at the European Games road race,
which was especially frustrating because the
sources say that was due to a mix -up with team
tactics on the road, and she was constantly finding
herself finishing fourth in these bunch sprints.
It just seemed like she was permanently stuck
one single step away from the glory. And while
her soul was taking a heavy beating from all
these near -miss results, physical body was taking
a literal beating from the tarmac. The injury
list in this period is just horrific. The crash
years. It started in 2015 at La Course by Le
Tour de France. Massive pileup in the rain. She
goes down hard. Broken collarbone again. Just
brutal. But 2016 was so much worse. She was racing
en loupette news blood. She crashes heavily on
the cobbles. She breaks multiple ribs. Have you
ever broken a rib? I haven't, but I hear it's
a nightmare. Yeah. You can't breathe deeply.
You can't laugh. You can't even sleep. And worse
than the ribs, she had a potential punctured
lung scare from the impact. She had to be hospitalized.
And this is the critical moment where the physical
trauma really starts to accumulate in her mind.
Every time you hit the deck at 40 miles an hour,
your brain naturally registers that mortal danger.
It starts to plant this insidious seed of fear.
You start asking yourself, is this really worth
it? Honestly, most normal riders would have just
retired. Right then and there. Yeah. I mean,
she already had the world titles. She had the
Flanders trophy. Her legacy was secure. Why keep
putting yourself through the meat grinder? Because
she knew deep down she wasn't actually done yet.
She knew that massive engine was still fully
operational. She just needed a total change of
scenery to reset her mind. So in 2019, she leaves
her old squad and moves to Trek -Segafredo, which
is the team now known as Little Trek. It's a
fresh start. New kit, new bike, new vibe. And
it worked wonders. She took on a new role as
a mentor to the younger writers on the team,
but she definitely kept winning herself. She
actually won the European Time Trial Championship
four years in a row from 2016 to 2019. She basically
owned that European jersey. But the really big
prize, the World Championship Rambo jersey. Yeah.
That had completely eluded her since Florence
in 2013. That is a massive drought. for a rider
of her caliber eight full years and you have
to understand in professional cycling eight years
is an entire lifetime entire generations of riders
come into the sport peak and retire in an eight
-year span a lot of the media and the fans had
completely written her off as a serious contender
for the world title enter the 2021 world championships
and fittingly it was held back in flanders belgium
the site of her greatest road race victory she
was 34 years old at this race she was lining
up against phenom women who were in their early
But on that specific day, the animal came roaring
back. She powered through that core. She was
perfectly paced. Her aerodynamics were flawless.
And she took the massive win. Bridging an eight
year gap between world titles is almost unheard
of. It really speaks to her incredible daily
discipline. She never let her fitness slide.
She stayed at that razor edge elite level for
a full decade. It's astounding. And the crazy
thing is she wasn't even done making history
after that. Because in 2022, she decided to take.
on what is arguably the ultimate physical challenge
in all of cycling, the hour record. Oh man, the
hour record. For those listening who might not
follow track cycling, this event is equally simple
and deeply sadistic. You go to an indoor velodrome,
you get on the track by yourself, and you just
ride as far as you possibly can in exactly 60
minutes. It is the distillation of pure suffering.
And remember, she's doing this on a track bike.
There is no freewheel coasting on a track bike.
It is a fixed gear. If the bicycle is moving
forward, your legs have to be moving. No micro
-rests. None. There are no hills to coast down.
There are no road corners to freewheel through.
It is just you, the black line painted on the
wood, the intense g -force in the banked corners,
and a... rising tide of lactic acid. What is
the actual pacing strategy for something like
that? Do you just go out as hard as you can and
hold on? It is a terrifying tight rope walk.
If you go out just slightly too hard in the first
10 minutes, Your legs completely blow up at minute
40 and the attempt is ruined. But if you pace
it too slow and conservatively, you miss the
record distance entirely. You have to ride directly
on the precipice of muscular failure for an entire
hour. And she chose to do this attempt in Grenchen,
Switzerland. Why go all the way there? Altitude
and air pressure. The air up there is thinner,
which means there is less aerodynamic drag pushing
against her body. Again, we see the human movement
scientist degree coming into play. Every variable
was calculated. And what was the final result
after the 60 minutes were up? 49 .254 kilometers.
Good Lord. Nearly 50 kilometers in an hour from
a standing start. That is basically sprinting
speed held for an entire hour. It was the absolute
ultimate animal feat. It was just a pure test
of the engine. And just to prove to the world
that her 2021 title wasn't some fluke, she went
over to Wollongong, Australia later that same
year and won her third individual world time
trial title. So at age 35, She was arguably producing
better numbers than she was at 25. Exactly. Which
brings us to the final chapter of our source
material, the winding down, looking at 2024 and
2025. Right. So she's still highly competitive.
The notes show she was winning time trials at
smaller stage races, like the Omlup on Borsell,
and getting stage wins in the Volta Extrema Dura
in 2024. But... 2025 was officially designated
as her farewell season. And she had this one
last incredible flash of brilliance that really
proved a major point. It happened at the Amstel
Gold Race in April. Another absolutely huge historic
spring classic. She finished second. Second place.
So she is standing on the podium of one of the
most prestigious one -day races in the entire
world right in her final year. That definitely
proves that physically she wasn't washed up at
all. She wasn't getting dropped from the Peloton
because of age. Exactly. Which makes her actual
stated reason for retiring so profoundly powerful
and honestly so refreshing. Yeah. Let's really
dig into that because she officially announced
her retirement in July 2025. And in her press
release, she didn't say, my legs are tired. She
didn't say, I've lost my power numbers. What
did she actually say? She explicitly cited, quote,
fears of crashing. Wow. That hit me really hard
after everything we just discussed. You have
to deeply connect that statement back to the
history we covered. The broken collarbones, the
shattered ribs, the punctured lung scare, the
multiple hospital visits. She explained that
in the highly chaotic, stressful finales of modern
races, with the peloton speeds getting higher
every year and the physical risks getting bigger,
she found her hand reaching for the brakes when
she used to just pedal through the danger. Her
self -preservation instinct finally overrode
her competitive instinct. Precisely. She found
herself actively worrying about the fall rather
than obsessively focusing on the win. And I think
that is the exact moment an athlete knows it's
truly time to go. When the inherent risk of the
job entirely outweighs the reward of another
trophy. Especially when you factor in that she
had absolutely nothing left to prove to anyone.
She has the multiple world titles. She has the
monuments. She has the hour record. Why risk
your long term health and mobility for just one
more generic race win? It was an incredibly mature,
highly self -aware decision. It is a very rare
thing in sports to see an ultimate warrior type
athlete voluntarily walk away while they are
still physically capable of standing on major
podiums. Usually they fade away into total obscurity,
or worse, they get violently forced out by a
career -ending injury. She went out entirely
on her own terms. She really did. So let's pull
back and summarize this massive legacy we've
just outlined. Three -time individual road world
time trial champion, world track champion, the
UCI hour record holder, Tour of Flanders winner,
and a European champion more times than I can
even accurately count off the top of my head.
Looking at all of that, she is, without a doubt,
one of the greatest Dutch athletes of all time.
Not just cyclists, athletes. Period. Agreed.
She successfully bridged the gap between the
older, grittier guard of women's cycling and
the hyper -modern, highly technical wind tunnel
era of today. She emphatically showed that you
can be a specialized time trialist and a classics
generalist. You can be a deeply analytical academic
and you can still be the animal. For me, it's
the pure mental resilience that really sticks
with me from this deep dive into the source material.
Bouncing back from that massive 2008 Olympic
rejection. Bouncing back from the Rio fourth
place heartbreak. Bouncing back from literal
broken bones to win world titles an entire decade
apart. She completely redefined the concept of
longevity in a punishing sport. She proved that
being the animal isn't just about outputting
raw physical strength on a bike. It's about the
stubborn, uncompromising refusal to give up when
things go wrong. So as we close the book on the
incredible career of Ellen Van Dyke, here's something
for you to mull over. In cycling media, we so
often glorify the sheer danger of the sport.
We highlight the spectacular crashes, the incredible
risks, the 60 mile an hour daredevil descents.
We package all of that into the promotional highlight
reels to sell the sport. We definitely do. But
Ellen Van Dyke, who is objectively one of the
toughest, most resilient riders to ever touch
a pair of carbon handlebars. retired explicitly
because the sport became too dangerous for her
comfort. It raises a deeply provocative question
for the future of the sport. Exactly. In our
endless quest for faster bikes, more technical
city center courses, and more dramatic racing
footage for television, are we pushing the human
element too far? Did the animal retire because
she couldn't keep up physically? Or because the
sport itself evolved into something where mere
survival became more difficult than actually
winning? That is absolutely something to chew
on. Well, Ellen, if you happen to be listening
to this deep dive, enjoy the retirement. You
have earned every single second of rest. Thanks
for listening, everyone. We will catch you on
the next one. Ride safe out there.