This article first appeared in the October 2016 edition of Procycling magazine.
A more disruptive, terrifying race scenario for a competitor in an event on the scale and importance of the Olympics would be difficult to concoct. You round a blind corner on a descent and see your team-mate face down, motionless and crumpled in a ditch. You search for clues of life. Nothing. There’s a bystander beside her, doing nothing. You think the worst. You think they’re dead.
What do you do? That single, chilling frame of the limp, unconscious Annemiek Van Vleuten filled the minds of Anna van der Breggen and co-pursuers Emma Johansson and Elisa Longho Borghini as they rode past the stricken 33-year-old, just as it did the millions who watched the women’s Olympic road race on TV.
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“Annemiek was just lying there in a really strange way,” Van der Breggen recalls to Procycling. “I don’t know why but I thought Annemiek was dead because otherwise the guy would do something – sit next to her, talk to her, do anything. But she was just lying there.”
Van der Breggen is recounting this three weeks later. As she talks, she’s being driven back from a celebratory garden party with the Dutch Olympic team at The Hague. There, in the courtyard at the Noordeinde Palace, honoured by king and queen, she wore two medals: one bronze for the time trial, one gold from the road race. Most importantly, Van Vleuten, de facto tutor to Van der Breggen and a former room-mate for two years while both were at Rabobank, is returning to full health. The good times are rolling but to Van der Breggen the events of Rio are still visceral. It’s as if she is determined not to let the memory fade away by simply going through the motions.
“You’re thinking about all these things in the next few kilometres,” she continues, her mind back in the closing kilometres of the race of her life. “We were going pretty slowly for a while afterwards or at least I wasn’t really contributing. Then I realised I’m doing a race and that I’m now the first in the team. There was nothing I could do for Annemiek anyway.”
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