The Canyon-SRAM all-arounder talks with Escape about skimo, stoic suffer faces and how her horse Hugo helps her handle the stress of being a rising star in pro cycling.
Antonia Niedermaier, Cor Vos
Women’s cycling is on the rise. The salaries are up, especially for a rider with the potential and palmarès of Antonia Niedermaier. And what would a top rider, winner of a Giro d’Italia stage, second overall at the Giro in 2026, and potential future winner of a Grand Tour do with their first big paycheck? Buy a horse. Of course.
“I always said when I’m a grown-up woman, and I have the money to buy a horse, I will buy a horse,” Niedermaier told the Wheel Talk Podcast.
“I was always horseback riding; I was sitting on a horse even before I could walk. My mother is a horseback rider, and it was part of my childhood. I always had a horse.”
Hugo, Niedermaier’s horse, is her therapy. After hard training sessions, and when the pressure gets to be heavy, Hugo is there. “When I go to see Hugo, it calms me down,” Niedermaier said. This year, Canyon-SRAM tapped Niedermaier to be the team leader at the Giro d’Italia, a responsibility that came with a significant boost in pressure.
Performance under pressure
“My biggest goal was this Giro,” she explained. “I had a lot of pressure, but in a good way. I really feel like the team was giving me the trust and believed in me to have a great result in the Giro, and I showed that [I could perform].”
Antonia Neidermaier’s superb climbing and time trial performances at the Giro made her the only rider within a minute of Demi Vollering in the final classification.
Niedermaier walked away from the Giro second overall behind Vollering after some consistent performances. But her jump from third to second, past four-time Giro winner and then-race leader Anna van der Breggen, was largely due to a gutsy final stage where the German rider attacked a group of favourites and, together with Elisa Longo Borghini and Niamh Fisher-Black, shook the stage up.
“For sure, we just wanted to defend the podium, but I was also telling them I really don’t have anything to lose, you know. I expected a really hard race because I knew that for sure Demi wanted to have a hard race to somehow try to get into the pink jersey, and I knew that it’s gonna be really hard and there would be a lot of attacks.”
As the trio gained time on the pink jersey of Van der Breggen and their biggest rival Demi Vollering, Niedermaier started to sense she could walk away with something massive: second place at a Grand Tour.
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