The roster included riders who had won or would go on to win 21 World Championships, four Olympic gold medals and three Tours de France Femmes, and many are still racing today.
Cor Vos and courtesy
Before there was live coverage of nearly all the women’s races, in the years when the calendar was based around World Cups instead of the WorldTour, when the Giro Rosa was the premier stage race on the women’s calendar, there existed a team so elite you could hardly believe they all wore the same jersey.
The year was 2014. Wherever you went, “Happy” by Pharrell Williams played on the speaker while youths in frayed denim and knit dresses talked about the wedding of Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. No one could escape the ALS ice bucket challenge.
In the world of women’s cycling, one team topped the charts: Rabobank-Liv, home to Marianne Vos, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney, Anna van der Breggen and Annemiek van Vleuten. For those counting, between them they have 21 elite World Champion jerseys across road, mountain and cyclocross, four Olympic gold medals, nine Giri d’Italia Women, three Tours de Frances Femmes and a couple dozen major one-day Classic wins. Although we couldn’t know it at the time, in hindsight the 2014 Rabobank-Liv team was the greatest assemblage of talent that women’s road racing has ever known.
Vos was already a legend at that point after having won almost everything in sight. And Ferrand-Prévot would memorably win that fall’s World Championships in mountain biking and road racing, and follow it up with the cyclocross title to become the first rider ever to own all three rainbow jerseys at the same time. But Van der Breggen and Niewiadoma were relative youngsters, in their third and second pro seasons, respectively. Van Vleuten, though older than Vos, was also newer to pro racing and hadn’t yet developed into the force she would become.
Over the course of the 2014 season, the team amassed 47 road victories, including six stages and the overall of the Giro, but regularly swept all three spots on the podium. Most of their victories were from the 2013 road world champion Vos, but some youngsters like Ferrand-Prévot, Van der Breggen, and Van Vleuten also took wins.
By 2017, a new super team started to take shape: Boels-Dolmans, the team that would eventually become SD Worx-Protime, but for many years, Rabobank-Liv was the best in the business thanks to an absolutely stacked roster of riders.
A decade later, where are all these riders now? Most lead their own teams, while a few have stepped off the bike. Unsurprisingly, those who remain in the sport also remain on the top step even after over 11 years in the peloton.
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