My unglamorous exit from bike racing at the Setmana Ciclista Valencia
My unglamorous exit from bike racing at the Setmana Ciclista Valencia
Every time the Setmana Ciclista Valenciana rolls around, I am reminded of the disastrous and abrupt end to my cycling career.
It was the beginning of 2019 and I was 24 years old. It had been three years years since I graduated from a middling British university with a first-class degree in English literature and no clue, resulting in me taking the next logical step — a shelf-stacking job at a supermarket. I had started riding bikes in my final year, just for fun with my dad. Somewhere along the line I ended up getting into racing, and then shepherded onto the conveyor belt of joining a team, and then deciding I wanted to ‘make it’.
After a year of getting my head kicked in at national level in the UK (I was racing the year that Lizzy Banks burst onto the scene and won basically everything — you could say our cycling careers have taken very different paths) I ended up, for reasons not entirely related to racing, moving to Girona.
A year on a local team (the same one that Olympic champion Anna Kiesenhofer rode for — sliding doors and all that) restored the balance and I remembered that it is quite fun, actually, to be able to participate in a race instead of watching it ride away into the distance.
After that confidence boost I started to take myself Very Seriously. I wanted a ‘better calendar’ and so for 2019 I joined a French amateur squad. I could go into detail about that one weekend where we rode to the coast in the rain and then – for reasons known only to the staff – sat in a freezing cold van all the way back. Or the training camp with the busy main roads and the pointless drills. The worst part, though, was that I don’t speak French and so felt pretty isolated. Still, none of that mattered because I was ready to hit the 2019 season. Which is how I found myself heading to my first UCI race – the Setmana Ciclista Valenciana.
Regular listeners to Freewheeling may have heard my self-deprecating accounts of my time racing bikes and think “I’m sure she wasn’t that bad.” Reader, I was that bad. While it’s true that I could be slightly above average in the power stakes on a very good day, and my handling skills were alright, I was simply too scared to crash and didn’t want it enough.
Yet, before February 2019 I was refusing to acknowledge this truth because I wanted to be like the pros (read: I just wanted to get paid to train although, ideally, never have to race).
A few days before heading to Valencia, I got a message on Instagram from a girl called Molly who definitely wasn’t on the French squad. She wanted to know if I was going to Valencia with the team. I checked her profile. A triathlete, great – what was she doing coming to this Very Serious Race? I replied (probably very curtly) in the affirmative and she told me she would also be coming and getting picked up by the team in Girona.
I retained this misplaced suspicion until we met at a petrol station in an industrial estate, in the shadow of the Nescafé factory, and got into the rickety old team van. En route, she told me she had never done a road race before and was here simply to make up numbers. I tried to hide my horror but my icy reception thawed as I got to know her. I’m going to be a bridesmaid at her wedding later this year.
In the van with us was the team soigneur who also lived in Girona. She told us she had recently been suffering from a nasty cold but was fine now. After the cursed year of 2020 such a confession would have precluded her from coming to the race. But this was 2019 — a simpler time.
When we arrived I discovered I would be rooming with Molly with whom I had become fast friends. I was glad to have an English-speaking companion. At dinner, a procession of the world’s best riders filed through the doors as I grew increasingly nervous and intimidated. The WorldTour was yet to come into existence but, just like this year, most of the teams that would have qualified for that status were there. My team wasn’t the only small-fry outfit but I certainly felt out numbered by riders exponentially more talented and experienced and knew I was in for a kicking.
Stage 1 got off to a ridiculously fast start. Right after the neutral rollout Molly rode up to me and announced that she had just thrown up, possibly right next to Katie Hall. I didn’t know whether to be disgusted or impressed that she had continued, so we both ploughed on.
The race averaged 40 km/h for the first few hours and it was carnage in the bunch. After witnessing probably the fourth crash of the day on an unexceptional stretch of straight road I bottled it and began to lurk at the back — thus subjecting myself to the yo-yo effect. My race was doomed from the start but now it was really knackered.
After around 100 km, and about 20 crashes, the elastic snapped and I started to get dropped. Ahead of me I saw Molly reach across to give our teammate – who was also getting spat out – a push. Seconds later, Molly was on the ground.
I rode on. It was a race after all.
I finished the stage in a small grupetto with an enormous sense of achievement at having simply crossed the line and not hit the tarmac – despite only achieving this feat by virtue of not being part of the race at all. I was in 159th position out of 167 finishers.
Later that evening, while trying to force bland race hotel food into my face in the name of ‘carb-loading’ or something, I started to feel a chill and a headache. I thought about the soigneur and what she had said in the van but decided I was just tired and that a good sleep would set me right.
Overnight, I had the worst fever of my life. At breakfast I felt like death warmed up. I started stage 2 because cycling is a sport built on maintaining a ‘tough’ facade that makes it imperative to carry on unless your leg has literally fallen off. I bought right into that image.
Returning to put myself through the mercy of such a chaotic peloton with a fever felt like a kamikaze act, but I went through the motions in the name of being A Serious Athlete. This time I managed to get dropped after even fewer kilometres. I crossed the line dead last and felt like I’d been hit by a bus — this was more than just a lack of form, skill, and talent (although it was all of those things, too).
On the way back to the race hotel, another teammate started throwing up while I sat shivering even though it was 25 ºC (77 ºF). I started to wonder what the hell I was doing here anyway.
Molly had cracked her frame (her own bike) on stage 1 and so pulled out of the race. Later that evening my Very Serious Athlete mentality cracked too and, as we both sat at the hotel bar feeling sorry for ourselves, nursing Estrella Damms and eating crisps, we spotted cycling legends and Trek-Segafredo DSs Ina Teutenberg and Giorgia Bronzini sitting across from us. We took two more beers up to our room.
At breakfast the next morning the decision was made that I would not start stage 3 and so Molly and I got into the van to follow the race with the soigneur. By now I was truly feeling like the walking dead and so far removed from the superhuman pros I was surrounded by that I didn’t even give the idea of my doomed race a second thought.
One of our team’s best hopes in the race was a young Canadian who showed promise, especially on the climbs. We stood cheering her on at the side of the road and I realised that maybe I preferred being on this side of the proverbial fence. Next time the race came past, however, she wasn’t there. Later, we learned that she had crashed and hit her head — another one down.
On stage 4 the young Canadian — who was fine — joined our growing collection of racers-turned-spectators. We sat at the side of a climb waiting for the race to pass, and while the temperature was hovering around 30 ºC (86 ºF) I was head-to-toe in a grey tracksuit (which Molly dubbed a ‘grout fit’) and I still felt cold — the soigneur meanwhile, had stripped down to her bra and sat sunbathing.
The last stage culminated on an incredibly steep rise that almost burnt out the van’s clutch, but both the van and our two remaining riders made it up and over the final finish line of the race. Watching the podium presentation I realised that the chasm of form and talent that separated me and the top three riders was too large to fathom. On the way back in the van I was less disappointed with the way my race went than I was excited to return home and put the whole thing behind me.
A few days after the race I got a text from Molly. She had a temperature and felt unwell – she had not, as we hoped, avoided the illness we had christened ‘Setmana Fever’.
As she recovered from what we truly believe was some kind of horrible precursor to COVID-19, I — still going through the motions of chasing the same doomed dream — packed my bags and headed to the team training camp on the coast near Girona. If getting beyond humbled and then falling ill at your first UCI race doesn’t stamp out your enthusiasm to continue then I recommend attending a French team training camp in a run-down coastal resort.
Having survived that particular experience and with Molly recovered, she and I began meeting up for social rides and coffees. It took me another few weeks to make the decision, but I started to admit to myself that this whole bike racing thing was going nowhere and that at 24 years old I should probably do something else with my life.
So, the Setmana Ciclista Valenciana was both my first UCI race, and my last ever bike race. I don’t care that I ended my ‘career’ on such a disastrous note; rather, it seems fitting that such an omnishambles was my bike racing swansong.
While my foray into racing at Valencia merely expedited an inevitable outcome, I hope that for those who genuinely have a chance of ‘making it’, the lack of lower-level UCI racing doesn’t bring them to the same conclusion.
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