Annemiek van Fruten announces her last race calendar before retirement.

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Annemiek van Fruten announces her last race calendar before retirement.

Annemieke van Fruten has revealed her final season race schedule of 13 races, interspersed with three high-altitude training camps, before officially retiring as a professional cycling rider at the end of this year.

The reigning world champion will start the season with the Setmana Ciclista Valenciana in February, progress to the spring classics series, and then later in the season his main targets will be the Giro d'Italia Donnay and Tour de France Femme in July and the World Championships in Glasgow in August

Van der Valkenburg.

Van Vleuten is currently in the middle of a six-week training block in Colombia and will join his Movistar teammates at the Setmana Ciclista Valenciana in Spain on February 16-19.

Van Vleuten will then head to the Spring Classic, which begins at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, where he won in 2020 and 2022. He will then travel to Italy for two-time winner Strade Bianche before heading to Tenerife in March for a high-altitude training camp.

With the spring classics in full swing, Van Vleuten will not compete in Paris-Roubaix, but will compete in the Tour de Flanders, which he won in 2011 and 2021, and three Ardennes classics: the Amstel Gold Race, Flèche Wallonne, and the 2019 and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, which she won in 2022.

Her stage race calendar starts with La Vuelta Femina, which she has won twice before, but this year the race has been expanded to seven stages and moved to May 1-7 on the Women's World Tour calendar.

A second training camp in May will be followed by the Dutch National Championships in June, and then the Giro d'Italia Donnay and Tour de France Femme in July.

Van Vleuten announced his retirement last June and later revealed that he wanted to defend his titles in two Grand Tours before ending his 16-year career.

"I want to compete in both the Giro and the Tour again. I have already discussed that with my coach and team. I still like racing in Italy and I want to race the Giro again," Van Vleuten said.

Van Vleuten won the Giro d'Italia Donnay in 2018, 2019, and 2022, and the new edition of the Tour de France Fam Avec Zwift in 2022.

The last two races of her career will be the UCI Cycling World Championships in Glasgow in August, where she will compete for her third title in the individual time trial and elite women's road race.

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