Niklas Behrens

Niklas Behrens is a German road cyclist who rides for Team Visma | Lease a Bike. He was born on 6 November 2003 in Bremen and stands 1.95 m tall, which is unusual for a road rider. Before concentrating on cycling he also competed as a triathlete and a swimmer. He is known as a sprinter with a fighting, opportunistic style, and his team has pointed him towards one-day races.

As an amateur he rode for Stevens Racing Team in 2022 and 2023 and won stage 1 of the Flanders Tomorrow Tour in 2023. In mid-2023 he joined the German Continental team Storck–Metropol as a trainee, and in 2024 he rode for Lidl–Trek Future Racing. That year he won the Youngster Coast Challenge and Rund um Steinfart and became German under-23 road race champion. On 27 September 2024 he won the under-23 road race at the World Championships in Zurich. He bridged across to the Swiss rider Jan Christen about ten kilometres from the finish and then beat Slovakia’s Martin Svrček. He became the second German to win the title, after Gerald Ciolek in 2006.

Behrens joined Visma | Lease a Bike in 2025 on a contract that runs to the end of 2027. A broken collarbone suffered at the UAE Tour in February 2025 interrupted his first season, and in September 2025 he was fourth on a stage of the Okolo Slovenska.

His 2026 season started late. He broke a collarbone in a crash at a training camp in Sierra Nevada in February. On 13 March the team announced that he would undergo a planned medical procedure and would not race for several months. ProCyclingStats lists his first race of the year as the PostNord Tour of Denmark, which began on 29 July. He then rode the Renewi Tour, was sixth on stage 3 of the ZLM Tour, finished 53rd at the Sparkassen Münsterland Giro and closed the season at the Tour of Guangxi.