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When Lorena Wiebes is sprinting, it’s like a dream. She doesn’t feel the pain in her legs. She doesn’t hear the shouts of the crowd. She doesn’t see the parked cars at the side of the road.
She is bent over in the drops, a little more aerodynamic than her rivals, a little more violent in her body movement as she accelerates – and a lot faster. She is like a technicolour flourish against the rest in black-and-white, 1,400 watts of power taking her away.
Any flattish race is her fiefdom: the Ronde van Drenthe, the RideLondon Classique, Women’s Tour, Giro stages. She is winning more regularly – one run of WorldTour results in May and June 2022 went 1-1-1-1-85-1-1, the anomaly caused by a crash – and those victories are more emphatic than ever, aided by a high-powered Team DSM unit. Wiebes is already the worst nightmare for her fellow fast women – and the scary thing might be that she doesn’t want to stop at pure sprinting either.
It started with, of all things, a breakaway. It was April 27, 2015 – Koningsdag, King’s Day – in the Dutch village of Dalen. Amid a sea of orange on her country’s national holiday, this 16-year-old got up the road and outsprinted rivals two years older, on restricted youth gears, for her very first win.
Wiebes had preferred cyclo-cross before that; it was less scary. But the more road races she won with her fast finish, the more she liked them. The need to succeed was already inside her. “Team DSM never really put pressure on me. It always comes more from myself,” she says. “If they say it’s a sprint for you, I want to win. And I will be really disappointed if I don’t.”
Wiebes deliberates but doesn’t know where it comes from; her mother and father never did high-level sport. “If I lose, I can be a bit grumpy for a few hours – not at my team-mates, more like, ‘Ah shit, I should have done it like this.’ I really think about it and then it’s fine afterwards. But I know from when I was a junior: on the drive back home with my parents, it was possible I didn’t say a word at all.”
She turned pro in 2018 with the Dutch development squad Parkhotel Valkenburg. It was the right team at the right time for her. “It was more having fun and playing around,” she says. This was epitomised by the giant tub of Nutella on the table at their first training camp, which riders made a…