Coffee and cake with her little sister. That was how Amber van der Hulst celebrated the moment she realised she might be able to return to professional cycling.
The now 25-year-old, who joined the Liv AlUla Jayco WorldTour team at the start of this season, had spent the previous two-and-a-half years battling with a kink in her femoral artery and been through three surgeries to fix it. For the first time since she first sensed something was wrong, Van der Hulst felt normal again and the dream of returning to the professional ranks was a possibility again.
“I asked my sister to ride with me and to prepare many subjects to talk about because I wanted to think about other things and not cycling,” Van der Hulst says. “But it just felt good. After about 45 minutes, I told my sister that we stop for a coffee and have cake because we needed to celebrate this moment, and to have this memory. It was like the first day of a new chapter. That was a good day.”
Van der Hulst’s problems began back in 2022, when she made her debut in the Women’s WorldTour with Liv Racing Xstra – which merged with Liv AlUla Jayco at the beginning of 2024. She was keen to impress her new team and live up to the expectations she’d set the previous season.
“I was excited to start the winter, get stronger and go racing with the team. I felt strong, I had a personal record in every aspect of training. I was confident, and then I started the season and I got dropped in races in really weird points,” she explains.
It was perplexing, for both Van der Hulst at the team. The solution wasn’t immediately obvious, and so it took several months before they were able to pinpoint the issue.
Answers, and more setbacks
After some advice from her coach in May 2022, Van der Hulst made an appointment with a doctor to get checked out. But the lingering impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the health service meant she had a three-month wait before she was seen.
Examinations confirmed she had a kink in her femoral artery that was effectively reducing the blood flow in her leg and impacting how much power she could lay down. She finally had an answer to what was troubling her and something that could fix it.
“The biggest relief was that it wasn’t in my head,” she says. “I was training on the track for the world championships, and it was just getting worse every week. It was regressing, and I was not enjoying my riding anymore. If you want to be the best, you have to have two working legs, and I knew with this could not go on.”
Van der Hulst finally had an operation in December 2022. She was given a six-week recovery period before she could start riding her bike again. There was finally some light at the end of the tunnel, or so she thought.
The end of her recuperation period coincided with the beginning of her team’s pre-season training camp in Spain so it was a good chance to see how she’d recovered.
“I remember I was quite confident that I would go training and it would be good, but I could feel that it was not good. After a few days, I already called the doctor,” Van der Hulst says. “I trained in Spain for a few weeks because it wasn’t possible to get an earlier appointment, but it was quite hard. The doctor had said you can only do this operation one time, so I knew that this was probably the last time I go to Spain for a training camp.”
Third time lucky
As Van der Hulst prepared herself for the possibility that her cycling career was over, there was a small sliver of hope for her. Examinations showed that the kink was still there, which was not good news, but the kink was further down than the site of the operation, this was good.
It meant the surgeon could go in again without the risk of tampering with the original surgery site and another operation was scheduled for May 2023. Once again, she was sidelined for six weeks before she could start riding again.
She was hopeful, but perhaps not as confident as before, that it had worked. However, it was quickly apparent it hadn’t.
“I tried to give it a chance and I thought maybe it’s in my head, but after riding more I knew I needed to check it again. It felt worse, so I was really not enjoying riding my bike during this period,” she says.
Another consultation showed that the kink was still there. The doctors said they couldn’t operate on her leg again and that Van der Hulst would have to end her career and stop riding altogether. For a long time, it seemed that there were no options until she spoke to a specialist surgeon in Paris who gave her hope again.
There was every chance it wouldn’t work again, and Van der Hulst had to ask herself if she really wanted to go through it for the third time.
“I wanted to have the operation again because I wanted to be pro again. I wouldn’t risk everything for just being an amateur. I like riding my bike, but not that much. I was asking a lot from my body with all of the operations,” explains the Dutchwoman.
“Before the injury, sometimes I wondered how life would be without being a cyclist. Now I’ve had a period not knowing what would happen and I had to think about a life without the bike, and I didn’t want that. That gave me extra motivation, because I was really missing it.”
For the third operation, the surgeon there took a different approach and opted to put in a patch to try and prevent the artery from kinking again. Van der Hulst had to take her return to riding much more gently, doing short rides on the indoor trainer with the handlebars flipped upside down so she could sit more upright.
Ahead of her first ride, she asked her father and sister to leave the house and warned her mother, who was working from home. She needed to create a good environment to distract herself.
“I was really nervous,” Van der Hulst says of her first ride. “After the third operation, with the patch, it was possible I could feel it because the artery had to get used to it. I was prepared for the feelings, and I wanted to stop any negative thoughts getting into my head. I wasn’t allowed to do it every day, but when I could I was getting on the rollers and doing 15 minutes easy, putting on music really loud and singing. I don’t know what my neighbours thought but I wasn’t worried about that.”
The early sensations were good, unlike the previous two operations, and she ventured out on a ride – with her handlebars the correct way around – with her younger sister. Gradually Van der Hulst could start training properly again. At first, she was just happy to be riding again, but soon her thoughts turned to rejoining the professional peloton.
A return to the WorldTour
She’d kept in contact with Eric van den Boom, the former team manager of the Liv Racing Xstra squad and now of the Liv AlUla Jayco Continental team. He’d been monitoring her recovery, and midway through the 2024 season, she signed a contract with the Continental squad for the remainder of the year, before stepping into the WorldTour team for 2025.
Another setback at the start of this year, when she was hit by a car during training, delayed Van der Hulst’s return to the bunch until March, but she’s been growing in confidence since. The early part of the season is about finding her place in the bunch again, but she’s looking forward to getting back to the pointy end of a race.
“It will take some time to be at that level again, but that feeling of being strong, having the race in your hands and doing it together as a team, I’m really hungry for it,” she says. “Of course, I want to win races, but for now that’s the first feeling I want to have. It would give me so much pleasure.”
This weekend, Van der Hulst will line-up at Paris-Roubaix alongside her teammates. It’ll be the first time she’s done the race since 2022 when her struggles began. Alongside races such as the Tour de France Femmes, which she’s yet to ride, it’s one of the events she’s most looking forward to getting stuck into.
“I’m really happy that I can do it this year and it will be a good recon for next year,” she explains. “I like the unpredictability of Roubaix and that it’s not just the strongest that wins. Before my injury, I was really good at positioning in the peloton and riding the cobbles. Finishing in the velodrome is really nice. You feel the history in the velodrome, you feel a part of it. You almost see everything in black and white when you are there.”
