Nancy van de Ven announced a shock retirement from WMX racing last year but it was a decision she was forced into due to injury. The Dutch talent and former WMX champion has actually been back on the bike for around three months as she missed racing.
There was a possibility she could come back and race the full series in 2025 but her body still needs recovery time after a long day riding. She will, however, race the WMX round at Arnhem this year which will be the final WMX round of her career.
It’ll be nice to see her race her home GP without any pressure and just enjoy the event.
Van de Ven told MXPlanet.nl, the following regarding her wildcard WMX appearance at Arnhem:
The situation is pretty easy actually. I will race in Arnhem at the MXGP. Last year, in November, I announced my retirement.
After that retirement, I started thinking like, is this my life now or did I make the wrong decision? And there was only one way to find out and that was that I started riding again and I started to do some training. But at some point, I came home with our van with my boyfriend from the local race and I felt so good that day. I said to him, what if we do it one more time and prepare ourselves for like a couple of months.
We do some serious training, we prepare the bikes and we just go there to have fun. Like how it started. I found my body is not really 100% to do this anymore. I knew this, that’s the reason why I retired. But at some point you think, I had some rest, probably I feel better now. When I go training in Lommel, I need three days on my back to recover from that.
To really go one more time all in for this GP, I found out that this is the last one and it’s hard. But I did everything for myself to consider, will I line up in 2025 or will this be the last one? And it’s the last one.
