Dutch cyclist Anna van der Breggen has had a pretty impressive run on the road since last summer when she took the Gold medal on the road in the Olympics and then three days later a Bronze in the TT. She followed those up just a month later back in France to win the European women’s road champion title as well. Those wins were enough to get Specialized to make her up a custom painted S-Works Amira to race this season. And she has done well with the bike, riding it to wins in each of the three Ardennes classics this spring. We caught up with her racing in Belgium a few weeks back and got a close look at her customized bike set up for the classics…
Anna van der Breggen’s S-Works Amira is pretty similar in build to the Amira of her Boels-Dolmans teammate and current World Champion Amalie Dideriksen that we featured before. But we caught up with Anna’s custom painted bike in its race ready format where it gets a few nice customizations, like a #slamthatstem certified custom carbon bearing cap to get a low bar position.
The blue and white paint job commemorating her EU road title win is the most standout look of her bike and matches her blue and white kit as well. But just as gold accents pop up on her aero race helmet, her bike gets some bling too. Another champion’s bike for Specialized means another shiny gold S headbadge. But it keeps going with gold braided brake housing from that looks like Jagwire’s.
Van der Breggen was racing in Flanders on tubulars with the same Turbo tread pattern as the 28mm ‘Hell of the North’ edition tubulars of Philippe Gilbert & Tom Boonen, glued up to her own Zipp 303s. But her tires are a bit different, with branding on the rubber itself, a lighter color casing, and a 26mm width indicator printed on the sidewall. Those all seem to point towards these tires actually being handmade by someone like Dugast, with Specialized’s rubber glue onto the cotton casing.
Of course that’s not the only custom bit on the rear end of this bike, with a gold anodized number plate holder that even gets a small tricolour of the Netherlands.
Name decals aren’t for champions, so van der Breggen gets her name nicely painted on the toptube together with a little Rio Olympic Gold medal. While the world champ’s bike got her Specialized logos outline in a rainbow, gold is the order of the day here,
A SRAM Red eTap group handles shifting without the need for any wiring. Like some of the other pros who are already hitting right at or below the magic 6.8kg limit, her mechanics have opted for the slightly heavier, slightly quieter PG-1170 cassette in place of the more expensive single piece machined PowerDome version.
Gearing for the classics is a pretty standard 53/39 set of chainrings spinning an 11-28T cassette. Like the rest of her team, van der Breggen races on Quarq DZero power meters with carbon Red arms, and Look Keo Blade 2 pedals.
The rest of van der Breggen’s bike is rounder out with a suite of Zipp Service Course SL alloy bar & stem and carbon post, topped off with Specialized’s carbon-railed S-Works Power saddle.
