Visma-Lease a Bike have form for plucking riders from different sports and walks of life. First came Primož Roglič (he was a ski jumper, in case you hadn’t heard), then Bart Lemman, a captain in the Dutch Air Force. Jørgen Nordhagen, a junior world champion in cross-country skiing, followed the increasingly worn path, and now Anton Schiffer, a German triathlete and coach, has added his name to the roll call. The best teams have the financial might to sign the best riders, but they also think creatively to recruit the next race winners.
Aged 26, Schiffer is the latest Visma gamble – if you can call it that. In his two-and-a-bit years riding the Continental scene he scored enough promising GC results to suggest that his true calling was always WorldTour cycling, not combining the bike with swimming and running as he did in his teenage years. And 14th on GC at the Tour Down Under, his debut race for Visma, indicates that it won’t take him long to settle into top-tier racing. “It was my first WorldTour race and I wasn’t sure of how big the difference would be compared to the races I’ve done in the past, but it was a nice confirmation that I don’t get dropped on the climbs,” he says.
Schiffer is just the latest rider Visma who have recruited who has a background in a different sport. Image: Bram Berkien
Slipping into a pair of running shoes is what the Schiffers do. Anton’s father, Frank, was a middle distance runner in his youth, specialising in the 800m. “Quite a few times he finished on the podium of national championships,” Schiffer, from Cologne, tells me by phone call from Mallorca, where he’s training when we speak. “He’s where I got my endurance talent from.” Schiffer was inspired by his Dad, and he took up athletics himself aged six. “We did a little bit of everything to see what we were best at. And it was running for me.”
Aged 12, Schiffer added two more sports to his training schedule: cycling and swimming. He was a strong triathlete, often in contention for podium spots as a junior, and competing against the best German athletes in the domestic scene. “It was a big achievement just to be on the startline of the Bundesliga races,” he says, “and I was one of the youngest guys there, looking up to all of my idols who were racing next to me.” He competed in European Cups, too. “I was always between 15th and 20th,” he says.
Schiffer knew from a young age, however, that he couldn’t rely on his own sporting talents to make a living, so he studied sports science at the German Sport University Cologne. He wasn't a passive learner, a student only there to get the degree papers; he was fascinated by how the body works, eager to further his knowledge.
“The area that interests me most is endurance physiology and energy metabolism, how the body processes all the energy for muscle contractions and all the pathways,” he says. “With some colleagues at university, we’d test athletes, including ourselves. It was good to test all of the training interventions that would come out in the papers.” He reels off the list of experiments enthusiastically. “We had a metabolic heart measurement tool; we did lactate measurements; and we could measure how much oxygen was in the muscle. Plan A for my professional career was to be a coach or a performance staff member in a WorldTour team or for amateur-level cyclists.”
At the height of his coaching career, he had around 30 athletes on his books, split between triathlon and cycling. “No WorldTour riders,” he points out, “but some Continental riders, and national-level triathletes, as well as amateurs racing or completing Gran Fondos.” He was well on the way to making a sustainable living out of coaching. And then Covid came along – a sliding doors moment.
Schiffer in the pool in his triathlon days. Image: Anton Schiffer.
Shut out of swimming pools, and nursing one too many running-related injuries, Schiffer spent the pandemic years training on his bike more and more. “This is how I found out that only cycling is really quite fun,” he says. “Running had been my strongest sport, but then swimming and cycling caught up, and I struggled with running injuries. More and more I enjoyed cycling more, and triathlon went further into the background. It was a gradual switch, a natural development, to focus more on cycling.”
At the age of 20, Schiffer made the call: he’d quit triathlon and take up bike racing. “I had no hard feelings as I’d done triathlon for a long time, and it was nice to do new competitions with new people. But it was a new world for me.” In his first races as a cyclist he immediately saw he was above the level of most other amateurs. “When you have success in the beginning, it makes you want to pursue that path more,” he says.
Improving with each passing race, Schiffer wanted to test himself at a higher level. Through a friend, he reached out to Bike Aid, a long-running third-tier German team, and enquired about a spot on their team for the 2023 season. The initial response wasn’t positive. “The boss of the development team said he was sceptical because cyclists don’t like triathletes so much; they usually have a bit of hesitation thinking they don’t know how to ride a bike.” But Schiffer won him over, and Bike Aid signed him to their development team for the following season.
After a half-a-year he was promoted to the Continental team and his stock continued to rise: in his first race of 2024 he finished seventh at the Tour of Antalya, attended by WorldTour and ProTour teams. His phone rang from several teams, including Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe. “I met with Bora once or twice, but I wasn’t super successful later in the year and they gave me quite a clear no.” Yet Schiffer, at this point 24, could smell the possibility of a future as a professional cyclist. “I thought: OK, I’ll do the same next year and see how it goes.” But, he adds, he wasn’t obsessed by the carrot being dangled in front of him. “I was not 100% all in on being a WorldTour rider as I still worked as a coach,” he says.
Towards the end of 2023 and in early 2024, he had a further sniff of life at the top, when he was one of three riders selected for the Zwift Academy finals. “They tell you that 100,000 people apply, so I was really happy to make the cut,” he says. “We had four days training with Alpecin at their training camp and I got to know how a pro team works.” Though he didn’t win the competition, he took with it precious memories, including sprinting against Jasper Philipsen and Mathieu van der Poel. “That was quite surreal,” he laughs.
Spurred on, Schiffer took another significant step forward in 2025. Second at the Tour of Hellas and fourth at the Sibiu Cycling Tour (including a summit finish stage win ahead of Matthew Riccitello who went on to win the Vuelta a España’s young jersey two months later) was proof that Schiffer was worth a punt on. Patrick Broe, Visma’s head of strategy and co-host of the Lanterne Rouge podcast, highlighted his potential, and the Dutch team’s management reached out to him.
“In 2023 and 2024, Visma were the best team in the world, so it was crazy for me that they approached – it was like a dream,” Schiffer says. “But I also knew from the year before that teams have similar conversations with 10, 15, 20 guys a season, so I didn’t take it too seriously and didn’t have too high hopes.” But Visma were convinced: they offered Schiffer a two-year contract.
The German running in a triathlon in his younger days. Image: Anton Schiffer.
The German isn’t setting any grand ambitions now he’s in the WorldTour – it’s all about gradual improvement. “At first I’ll be a support rider,” he states. But, he admits, “my main hope is that one day I can become a GC rider.” His 2026 season will mostly revolve around smaller stage races as he gets familiar to the higher level of racing, and he will be afforded his own opportunities. “Shorter climbs suit me, the ones between five and 20 minutes, but that’s also because I don’t have much experience of racing anything longer,” he says. For the moment, there’s no Grand Tour planned. “My training right now is really focused on high intensity work and shorter efforts, and less on building myself as a Grand Tour rider with lots of long climbing.”
As he gets his feet under the table, Schiffer isn’t ditching his past entirely. He’s still coaching the odd rider – “a few friends who I’ve known for a long time,” he says – and he’s still reading scientific papers. “With the same group of university friends, we meet online once a month and discuss topics that have come up,” he says. “I’m more focused on my own sports career now, but it’s good to still stay involved, read all the papers, and nice to exchange ideas with my coach, too.”
Visma have recruited a studious individual as well as a bike rider who’s shown a talent for going uphill fast. “Most teams just look at whoever is the best junior or U23 rider and try to sign them, or riders who have already been established in other teams before,” he says. “So for me it’s really nice that Visma think outside the box, they are willing to try to do something differently, and give guys like me the chance to show ourselves. Bart [Lemman, current teammate] is one of a few guys on this team whose footsteps I will try to follow.”
Cover image: Bram Berkien.
