Tightly gripping the drops of her handlebars, Lorena Wiebes thrashes down on the pedals, shoulders low, head dipped into the wind. The gantry comes into frame. She bows to look under her arm, sees no one, sits up, and punches the air. It’s a finish every cycling fan now recognises: the trademark conclusion to a Wiebes sprint. It could have been Gent-Wevelgem. It could have been stages three or four of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, or any of five stages of the Simac Ladies Tour. In 2025, Wiebes was so imperious she won 25 times – more than any other male or female pro – and usually in exactly this way. But as the season unfolded, it became clear her repertoire was expanding.
For a few years now, Wiebes has spoken of her desire to be dominant beyond the finishing straight. “I want to be more than just a sprinter,” she told the Dutch magazine Ride last month. But does the 26-year-old really have the performance characteristics to be more than a sprinter? Is it even a smart ambition? If you’re a sprinter who can beat just about anyone, why hedge your bets elsewhere?
To gain a deeper understanding of Wiebes, I turn to someone who knows her better than most: her agent of eight years, Andre Boskamp. Does he see her as more than a sprinter? “She is more than a sprinter,” he snaps back. “What she is doing is unbelievable.”
For Boskamp, it’s not just Wiebes’s tally of wins that is impressive, but the success she has had across disciplines. In 2025, she won the UCI Gravel World Championships, as well as omnium and scratch race world titles on the track, proving her versatility. “She’s very impulsive,” Boskamp adds. “She needs challenges – that’s Lorena.” It’s a phrase he’ll repeat again and again over the course of our conversation, stressing her uniqueness: “That’s Lorena.”
(Image credit: Alex Whitehead/SWPix)
A former Dutch national coach in the 1980s, Boskamp met Wiebes when she was a teenager and among the world’s most promising junior talents. She’s one of around 130 cyclists the agent has represented, alongside Olympic speed skaters. In all his career, he says, he’s never met anyone more professional than Wiebes. How has she changed over the past eight years? “Mentally she’s become very, very, very, very strong,” Boskamp says. It’s what gives her the drive and determination to go after new goals. “She’s looking at what she can do to grow better and better. Actually, she’s going to the south of Holland, to Limburg, so she can train for hilly situations, and so on. That’s Lorena.”
Not content to rest on her sprinting laurels, Wiebes’s hill training has taken her to new heights. It’s likely what helped her climb the 6km Cipressa and 3.7km Poggio with ease to win the inaugural women’s Milan San-Remo this spring, a victory that kickstarted a triumphant streak through the Classic Brugge-De Panne and lumpy, cobbled Gent-Wevelgem – her milestone 100th win.
Wiebes’s climbing ability surfaced again in May, at the Vuelta a Burgos. On a 6% incline, she sprung off the wheel of Giro d’Italia winner Elisa Longo Borghini and outpunched her to claim the stage win. It hit home that she was one to watch outside of routine sprint finishes. The nature of the win may have seemed uncharacteristic from the Dutchwoman, but it really shouldn’t have. “Hilly stages are, for her, no problem anymore,” says Boskamp.
This is a rider who refuses to be a one-trick pony, a sprinter typecast to simply ride fast. “I need that challenge,” Wiebes told Ride. “I think that’s what will keep me going in cycling for longer. If I were to focus solely on sprinting, I’d be done with it at some point.”
Lorena Wiebes’s year in numbers
25 – road victories
51 – road race days
49% – win rate in road races
2 – track world titles (omnium, scratch)
1 – track European title (omnium)
1 – gravel world title
Does this explain her need to be more than a sprinter? Is it a way to stave off boredom? A decade ago, Kirsten Wild was in a similar position. Like Wiebes, Wild was the sprinter to beat; she’d regularly rack up double-figure win tallies, turning up to flat races such as the Tour of Qatar and Tour of Chongming Island and all but clean-sweeping the stages. Thanks to those victories, the now retired Dutchwoman is also part of the 100 club, having earned her centennial victory in 2018 at the age of 35. Did she ever feel greedy for wins? “No,” Wild says, and bursts into laughter. Did she ever find winning boring? “No,” she laughs again.
The difference, perhaps, is that Wild was always, in her words, “a bit of a doubter”. Even when she was the favourite, she never took winning for granted. “Maybe that was a strength, that I always doubted if I was good enough – so I had to go faster. I always had the motivation to go harder, faster.” She picks out a brace of victories as her favourites: Brugge-De Panne and Gent-Wevelgem in 2019, her 104th and 105th wins. Coincidentally – or perhaps not – the woman in second in both races was a 20-year-old Wiebes.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
I ask Wild what she has made of her compatriot’s progress. “She’s more dominant than I ever was,” Wild says bluntly. Wiebes herself acknowledges that winning “seems like a normal thing” for her nowadays. Wild continues: “I was quite equal to [Ina-Yoko] Teutenberg, Marianne Vos and [Giorgia] Bronzini, so it was never certain that I was going to win. It was always one of us. I think Lorena is above everyone who’s sprinting right now.”
Wiebes’s rise to the top hasn’t been without its blips, though. At last summer’s Tour de France Femmes, which started in her native Netherlands, the SD Worx rider left empty-handed, second best in the sprints to DSM-Firmenich PostNL’s Charlotte Kool. Boskamp remembers his client feeling “very, very, very disappointed” afterwards. But she came back stronger to this year’s edition, and won comfortably twice. Now she is peerless in bunch sprints. It’s no surprise, then, that she’s looking to the track, gravel racing, cobbled Classics and punchy road finishes for excitement and jeopardy. She’s even raced cyclo-cross, placing as high as seventh in an event last October.
Wild retired in 2021 after 16 years as a pro. She won 109 road races, nine track world titles, and an Olympic bronze medal in the omnium. As Wiebes closes her eighth season, what is Wild’s advice to her for a long and successful career? “I loved what I did, and I think that’s one of the main things, maybe the most important. I kept challenging myself,” she says – a characteristic she knows Wiebes shares. “She’s doing gravel, the track, the road. She loves the sport, and I think that’s also her strength.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
As if to illustrate that fact, Boskamp reveals Wiebes recently spent a chunk of her winnings on a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van, into which she plans to bundle her bike to go on riding holidays. Cycling remains a joy before it’s a job for the Dutchwoman. As the wins keep totting up, and she morphs more into a multi-discipline all-rounder, the question will be posed: is she one of the greatest riders of all time? Is it a question, this legacy one, she dares to consider? “No, no, no. She’s not busy with that,” says Boskamp. “Maybe in the coming years her mind will change, but she’s not busy with that. Every race is new for her. Every race she’s focused.”
There’s still more to conquer, more challenges to take on. “Maybe she’ll try and take 30 victories next year,” Boskamp says. Wiebes herself has said she’ll target Amstel Gold – a race with over 20 hills and almost 2,000m elevation – while her agent is tipping her for victory at Paris-Roubaix. Both races are too great an endurance challenge for an ordinary sprinter – Wiebes is not that. As for her longer-term goals, “she’s looking to the Olympic Games and the World Championships [in Abu Dhabi] in 2028,” Boskamp says. Time will tell how dominant she will become, but there’s no shortage of ambition – that’s Lorena.
Destined to be the greatest?
(Image credit: Alex Whitehead/SWPix)
After Wiebes’s haul this season, there are now only two female riders with more all-time UCI wins than the Dutchwoman: Ina-Yoko Teutenberg (148) and Marianne Vos (260). Wiebes’s 118 puts her a long way off top spot at the moment, but what would it take for her to reach it? Let’s run the numbers.
Vos has just finished her 20th season in road cycling, meaning she has averaged exactly 13 victories a year. Wiebes’s win rate, after only eight seasons, is 14.75 per year. If she carries on like this, she’ll reach 295 wins after her 20th season – 35 more than Vos.
Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Vos is still winning races – the 38-year-old won three this year and scored 11 top-threes – and has a lifetime contract with Visma-Lease a Bike, so could keep adding to her tally into her 40s. If we imagine, however, that Vos doesn’t win another bike race, then mark mid-August 2034 in your diary – that’s when we forecast Wiebes will surpass Vos’s 260 and become the outright record-holder. By that point, she’ll be 35 years old.
This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 18 December 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.
