Founder Knaven leaves ‘cycling kid’ due to a difference of vision and insight

• Arthur Huizinga

  cycling editor

“It feels a bit like a funeral,” says Natascha Knaven-Den Ouden on the phone. “I get all kinds of flowers and sweet messages. But I’m not leaving cycling, you know. I’ll be back.’

She left AG Insurance-Soudal on Friday “in good consultation”, the team she founded in 2018 and led step by step to the top of women’s cycling. But now that significant investments are being made in the formation, Knaven-Den Ouden is no longer there.

Belgian sponsor AG Insurance will own 76 percent of the women’s team. Decolef, the company of Patrick Lefevere (team boss of the men’s team Soudal-QuickStep), accounts for the remaining 24 percent.

The sudden departure raises questions. “I can’t say everything about it,” says Knaven-Den Ouden when asked. “It is about an insurmountable difference in vision and insight.”

“I think it is very important that the focus is not only on the result. It takes time to achieve results. Setting the bar too high so that you just can’t reach it results in disappointment and demotivation. Always setting the bar so high Determining that this can just be achieved results in growth and then performance will take care of itself.”

With that in mind, former professional cyclist Knaven-Den Ouden started the NXTG training team in 2018 with six riders, including daughter Britt and junior world champion Rozemarijn Ammerlaan.

“Of those six, five riders have now opted for a social career. And that is not a bad thing at all. Ammerlaan, for example, became world champion among the juniors. But I saw something about her and called her to me. ‘Roos, what is it?’ I asked. “I just can’t bear it,” she said. “My friends are on a gran fondo (long-distance race, ed.). And I had to go to this race.”

“‘But Roos,’ I said, ‘do you hear what you are saying? You don’t want to be here at all…'”

“A week later she called me,” Knaven-Den Ouden continues. “‘It’s such a weight off my shoulders after talking to you,’ she said. ‘Now I just dare to see that my interests also go elsewhere.'”

It may sound non-binding or ‘soft’ in the tough world of top sport. But attention to people and results can go together. The road to the top for riders such as Charlotte Kool, Daniek Hengeveld (now DSM-firmenich-Post.nl) and European champion Mischa Bredewold (now SD Worx-Protime) went through the Knaven-Den Ouden team.

In 2022, Knaven-Den Ouden joined forces with Lefevere’s renowned QuickStep team and took her young team to the Tour de France.

Big steps, but soon rumors spread that the ambitions of the Belgian financiers went further. Lotte Kopecky’s name came up regularly. This spring, however, the world champion signed a lucrative new contract with SD Worx.

But Knaven-Den Ouden thinks it is a bad development to pay a lot of money to a few top riders. “We have to stop discussing equality between men and women in cycling. There is not even equality within the women’s peloton itself.”

“We must first start building from the bottom up,” says Knaven-Den Ouden, “and not focus on equal prize money and comparable salaries as the men. That is not possible if there are too few riders to even fill a decent calendar. As long as there are riders who have to survive on 250 euros per month, those top salaries make little sense. We need to broaden and develop the base.”

Husband Servais Knaven will remain in his position as sports manager with the team for the time being. But it will take some getting used to for the family. “My two eldest daughters (Britt and Senne, ed.) have chosen their social career this year. But my two youngest (Mirre and Fee are both active in the AG Insurance-NXTG training team, ed.) are of course in the middle of this.”

“They are having a hard time with it, because they also know how much energy and stress it has taken in recent years. They arrived with flowers for me. My reaction? ‘Hey, I’m not dead, am I’.”