Van Vleuten on the rise of women’s cycling: “I earned 800 euros a month and paid 200 euros in rent”

The Dutchwoman signed her first contract with a UCI team in 2008, but there was little sign of a truly professional sport at the time. “When I started, it was actually an amateur sport,” Van Vleuten said on the Domestique Hotseat podcast. “I really grew together with the sport.” She explained that hardly anyone was a full-time rider back then, adding that in her second year she was already racing the Tour of Flanders, something that would now be almost impossible in a far more developed peloton.

From 2011 onward, Van Vleuten could begin to think about making a living from cycling, although life was still far from glamorous. “I earned 800 euros with cycling, I paid 200 euros rent, and I made the decision to go full time,” she said. “I still lived a little bit cheaply as a student, but that’s how I could start and follow my dream.” At that point, only five or six riders in the women’s peloton were earning a proper salary.

That same year, riding for Nederland Bloeit, she won the Tour of Flanders for the first time. The team, which also featured Marianne Vos and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, was later transformed into Rabobank Women Team. Van Vleuten said that move was decisive for her own career. Her first real full-time salary arrived in 2012, and she admitted that timing and circumstance played a role. With Rabobank involved, conditions improved to the point where she could earn more from cycling than she could with her university degree.

For Van Vleuten, stepping into the sport full time was a major moment personally, but women’s cycling as a whole still lagged a long way behind the men’s side. She recalled that from 2012 until after the Rio Olympic Games in 2016, the progress of the sport stalled somewhat. Not many riders had real salaries, and television coverage was still missing. That, in her view, was the key issue, because without broadcasts there was little broader interest in the women’s races. “I really felt in those years that they were not interested in women’s cycling,” she said.

That began to change when more races started appearing on television. The conditions were still far from ideal, with women’s races often scheduled at very early times in the morning, but simply being shown live made a major difference. Van Vleuten pointed to that media exposure as one of the biggest breakthroughs in the sport’s growth. “We were still racing at crazy times, like nine o’clock in the morning, but we were on TV,” she said. “That gave us so much more attention.”

Van Vleuten believes women’s cycling today is almost impossible to compare with the version she entered roughly 15 years ago. The differences can be seen in visibility, salaries, race calendars, and prestige. When she won the Tour of Flanders in 2021, her winner’s cheque was 1,365 euros. Prize money for that race has since been brought into line with the men’s version, at around 20,000 euros. The women’s calendar has also expanded significantly, while stage races have become longer and more prominent. The Tour de France Femmes has arrived, and there are now several Women’s WorldTour races with five stages or more.

At the same time, Van Vleuten feels there is still room for the women’s Grand Tours to grow further. She would like to see those races become genuinely longer so they stand apart more clearly from other week-long stage races on the calendar. In her view, that would help give events such as the Vuelta a España Femenina a more distinct identity.

But Van Vleuten also stressed that more days do not automatically mean better racing. The 43-year-old former world champion argued that extending a race should only happen if it genuinely improves the sporting spectacle. She questioned whether a longer Tour de France Femmes would necessarily be more exciting, suggesting the answer depends on whether the extra days create a different kind of race and perhaps even a different winner. In other words, growth should be meaningful, not just symbolic.