Fem van Empel Is Back — And Her Return Is About Far More Than Winning Races

Nine months is a long time to be away from the sport you built your identity around. For Fem van Empel, that absence started with a single, devastating decision: stepping out of the Koppenbergcross on November 1, 2025, one lap into the race, and not coming back. Not for weeks. Not for months. Now, announced on September 17 and effective immediately, she's back — signed to FDJ United-Suez through 2027, wearing new kit, and already fielding questions she isn't quite ready to answer about race schedules.

But here's what is genuinely interesting about this return, beyond the obvious headline: the way FDJ United-Suez is handling it is a meaningful departure from how professional cycling teams typically manage high-value athlete comebacks. And for every enthusiast cyclist who has ever pushed through burnout rather than rest, the story is worth paying attention to.

How It Unravelled — and Why

Van Empel is 24 years old and already holds three consecutive elite cyclocross world titles (2023, 2024, 2025), an U23 world title from 2021, and 50-plus career victories in her primary discipline. By any external measure, her career was at its peak. Internally, the picture was different.

At the end of the 2025 cyclocross season, Van Empel stepped away from racing entirely, citing mental health challenges and a loss of the motivation that had driven her since junior ranks. She had previously pulled back from road racing due to concerns about her mental wellbeing and physical issues, narrowing her focus to cyclocross — but even that narrowed commitment ultimately became untenable. She terminated her contract with Visma-Lease a Bike, where she had been supported through the process, and entered 2026 as a free agent with no competitive programme and no timeline for return.

The Dutch cycling media added pressure that, by some accounts, did not help. Critics questioned team management decisions. Commentators speculated publicly about her future. Van Empel's own explanation was straightforward: she had lost the joy.

The FDJ Approach: No Performance Targets, No Pressure

The framing of her signing with FDJ United-Suez is worth examining carefully because it is unusual in professional sport. Team general manager Stephen Delcourt has been explicit that results are not the immediate priority. "Our priority above all is to support her so that she can rediscover the pleasure of riding, her smile and the freedom to express herself fully," he said in the announcement.

No debut race has been named. No programme has been confirmed. The team has not announced whether Van Empel will focus on road racing, cyclocross, or some combination. That ambiguity is deliberate — and refreshing. In a sport where contract clauses typically mandate race-day deliverables and teams publicly parade signings with win targets attached, FDJ's stance is a genuine structural statement about athlete welfare.

Van Empel's own words match the tone: "I'm ready for a new adventure and very excited about starting from scratch. Above all, I want to have a lot of fun."

The Team She's Joining

FDJ United-Suez is not a development team offering Van Empel charity. This is one of the most ambitious women's programmes in the WorldTour, built around Demi Vollering — herself a Dutch rider who left SD Worx to join the French outfit ahead of 2025. Van Empel joins a squad that already includes Kate Courtney (2025 XCM world champion) and Anja Grossmann (XCO junior world champion), making FDJ's multidisciplinary off-road vision increasingly tangible.

The move fits a pattern. FDJ has signed athletes with crossover profiles — road, gravel, mountain bike, cyclocross — in what Delcourt describes as building "a genuinely multidisciplinary project capable of welcoming great champions with their own unique backgrounds, personalities, and ambitions."

For Van Empel specifically, joining a team led by Vollering rather than being positioned as the outright leader herself is arguably ideal for a comeback. The pressure of being a team's primary result-generator is exactly the dynamic that wore down her previous tenure. Here, she can rebuild a programme around races she actually wants to ride.

What the Cycling World Is Watching

The most consequential question about Van Empel's return isn't whether she can win another cyclocross world title — the betting markets will get around to that by November. The question is whether she can come back on her own terms and sustain it. Her earlier season with Visma in 2025 included wins in Woerden and Heerderstrand before another break became necessary, which suggests the challenge is not physical capability but sustainable motivation.

The cyclocross season doesn't get truly underway until October, and given FDJ's stated emphasis on enjoyment over a fixed schedule, it would be reasonable to expect a low-key, selective re-entry into competition rather than a full calendar block.

What This Means for Your Riding

Pro cycling burnout and amateur burnout sit on the same psychological continuum, even if the external pressures differ by an order of magnitude. Van Empel's trajectory — from prodigy to champion to mental health break to rediscovery — is a compressed, high-stakes version of something thousands of enthusiast cyclists navigate every year.

The FDJ model offers a useful framework: remove the performance target, prioritise enjoyment, and structure re-entry around what you actually want to ride rather than what you feel obligated to complete. If your Garmin training load has been creeping upward for three months and every ride feels like a chore, that's data worth acting on before you need nine months off. Take the week. Ride without a plan. The fitness comes back. The motivation, if you ignore it long enough, might not.

Van Empel's return is, at its core, a story about sport getting something right for once. Let's hope it sticks.