RIDE BEYOND LIMITS STAGE FOUR TO MEDAL FORM

Illness threatened to end Yuli van der Molen's career before it had really begun. She tells Tom Davidson how she made it back

- Tom Davidson

Yuli van der Molen had only been home for 20 minutes when the doctor rang and told her to come back to the hospital. Typically, the scan results would take a week - but hers were urgent, the doctor had realised at first glance. It was a cold day in January 2024, and Van der Molen, just 20 at the time, rushed back with her parents. She remembers the diagnosis hitting hard: the doctor explained she had Hodgkin lymphoma, a rare type of blood cancer that affects the body's lymphatic system, the network of vessels, nodes and organs that form part of the wider immune system. It was stage four – the most advanced.

“I just froze,” the Dutchwoman, a road and track rider from the outskirts of Amsterdam, says. “Then you go into survival mode. I cried a lot. You just go into your own bubble. Hodgkin’s is [one of] the most treatable [types of] cancer – that’s what they told me – but I still needed chemo, and I still needed to lose my hair, and go through that horrible...” her voice trails off, her eyes welling up. “I’m thinking back, I just froze.”

Almost two years on, the memory is still raw. Van der Molen is sitting on a plastic folding chair at the end of a long corridor at London’s Lee Valley Velodrome. It’s the second night of the London 3 Day track competition, and the now 22-year-old is clutching her right arm, having crashed hard in a race two hours before. The dull ache, she says, is nothing compared to what she’s been through.