Marianne Vos
“The world’s best bike racer is a woman,” Outside Magazine declared in a recent profile. And perhaps it is true: Marianne Vos, a Dutchwoman of 31 who could conceivably race for several more years, received more votes in our survey than any other women’s cyclist, racing or retired, living, or dead.
She currently rides for a team whose name, CCC-Liv, reads like the Roman numeral for 350. And that figure is not much higher than the number of races that Vos has won. Her victories have come in four wildly different disciplines, road racing, track racing, mountain biking, and cyclocross. No man has even approached this kind of dominance in four different cycling disciplines.
Vos is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, a three-time winner of the world championship road race, a seven-time winner of the world cyclocross championship, and a five-time winner of the UCI Women’s Road World Cup, a measure of overall success across the road-racing calendar. She has claimed three editions of the Giro d’Italia Femminile. And we could go on.