About Fem van Empel
Why I think a rider with zero professional victories is a threat to win a monument
It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and I—like many Americans—just got back from a trip to see family. It’s the dead of the offseason, nobody’s thinking about cycling, to be honest, this would’ve been a great moment to blow off the newsletter for the first time.
So this is a bit of compromise post. I’m going to milk a third straight installment out of the futures draft idea, and I’m going to keep it short.1 But Tuesday’s edition generated a little bit of pushback, so I wanted to take a few hundred words to explain my reasoning.
The Future Cobbled Monuments Winner Draft2 was partially a bit, but mostly just a straightforward list of riders I think could win one or both of the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix at some point in the future. And I—through my avatar, Crazy Arvid—spent the fourth pick in the draft on Dutch rider Fem van Empel. Before Wout van Aert, before Lorena Wiebes and Jasper Philipsen, before Arnaud de Lie, before anyone you’d actually pick if you were taking the exercise seriously.
Van Empel, who just turned 22, has just 52 days of professional road racing in her career, with zero wins and just one top-three finish.3 And I don’t care that much. Because when it comes to stats-scouting future classics contenders, I think road racing results are far less useful than cyclocross results.
There are four reasons for this. First: Cyclocross races are often won and lost in the sprint to the first corner, which requires top riders to generate huge power from a cold start. Second: Cyclocross is raced over uneven dirt tracks, which rewards good bikehandling, and that has obvious implications for classics races in the wet, or on gravel or cobblestones. Third: A cyclocross race is about an hour of constant solo effort. There’s no drafting to speak of. And while sprinters and climbers race in—and attack from—a big peloton, the major classics races break up into small groups across the road, where there’s less room to hide.
In short, cyclocross is arguably a better testing and training ground for classics riders than the classics are themselves.
And here’s reason no. 4: On the men’s side, cyclocrossers dominate the cobbled classics.
I looked back to 2020 at World Tour one-day races with significant cobbled or gravel sections. For the men: Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Omloop Het Niewsblad, Strade Bianche, E3, Gent-Wevelgem and Dwars Door Vlaanderen. For the women: Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Omloop, Strade, Gent-Wevelgem.
That makes 32 individual races for the men since 2020, of which 14 were won by former cyclocross world champions: Mathieu van der Poel, Wout van Aert, and Tom Pidcock. All three won the rainbow bands on the dirt before their first World Tour wins on the road. They accounted for 27 of 93 podium placings on those races. Two other riders—Julian Alaphilippe and Tim Merlier—podiumed a World Tour cobbled classic and won a senior pro cyclocross race. Matteo Trentin, Florian Vermeersch, and Dries van Gestel are classics podium finishers and cyclocross regulars. Dylan van Baarle—winner of three cobbled classics since 2020, most notably Paris-Roubaix in 2022—was a cyclocross race winner on the junior circuit.
The cyclocross-to-road racing boom is founded not only in the results but in how dominant these riders—especially van der Poel and van Aert—have looked relative to their competition. But it’s not just these two guys doing all the work. Scroll back to the 2010s and you’ll find a ton of classics wins for Alaphilippe and three-time world cyclocross champion Zdeněk Štybar. And then there’s Tadej Pogačar and Peter Sagan, who weren’t regulars on the senior cyclocross tour, but won national junior championships as cyclo-curious teens.
Over on the women’s side, riders with cyclocross experience have taken just under half of the podium places in cobbled World Tour classics since 2020—33 out of 72. That includes riders of varying experience, from World Cup race winners to riders who tried it out a couple races a year several seasons ago. But only three wins and eight podium places have gone to riders with a senior elite cyclocross race win. Those riders: Anna van der Breggen,4 Shirin van Anrooij, and world champions Lucinda Brand and Marianne Vos.
Vos is the key here, a champion mountain biker as a junior and world cyclocross champ at 19 before she took her first professional road race win in 2006. She prefigured, by more than a decade, what van der Poel and the CX Boys have done over the past five or six years. She’s also currently van Empel’s teammate.
Someone is going to follow in Vos and van der Poel’s footsteps.
Why do I think it’s going to be van Empel? It’s a fair question, because her road results have been 1) unremarkable and 2) focused on stage races, of which she’s started six in the past two seasons against just seven professional one-day races.
But based on cyclocross form, it’d be silly to pick anyone else. She won her first two World Cup races in 2021-22, at the age of 19. In the past two seasons and change, she’s started 53 elite cyclocross races and won 40, with eight second-place finishes, three third-place finishes, a fourth place and a DNF. In World Cup and World Championship competition, she has 15 wins from 23 starts since the start of the 2022-23 season.
It’s not quite on van der Poel-level dominant; In the two cyclocross seasons before he won his first monument, Big Matty won 56 out of 59 cyclocross races. Maybe he’s just in a class of his own. But in van Aert’s last two World Championship seasons—which led into his debut as a World Tour classics rider in 2018—he took 34 wins and 66 podiums out of 73 starts.
And van Empel is younger now than either van der Poel or van Aert were when they started taking road racing seriously. So yeah, I think she’s got a cobbled monument in her if she wants one.
Or rather, I’m going to try to keep it short.
Which is the worst headline I’ve come up with in almost 20 years, I realize now
Second place in Stage 3 of last year’s Tour de Romandie, behind Lianne Lippert in a sprint. Which is not terrible as runner-up finishes go.
Who’s mostly a cyclocross dilettante