“I really love the feeling of being in the final five kilometres,” says the cyclist Lucy Garner. “Maybe it’s a bit crazy, but I love that feeling of taking the corners really fast and fitting through spaces that might not even be there. But that’s probably what makes me a sprinter because I really like the thrill of that.”
There are easier ways of making a lot more money than being part of the senior women’s peloton but Garner speaks of the often brutal path she has chosen in a reverential manner that suggests she would not have it any other way.
As a 12-year-old she announced to her parents she wanted to relocate to the Netherlands and join a Dutch cycling team and, eight years on, that is exactly how life has panned out for the 20-year-old from Leicester.
After winning the second of back-to-back junior world road racing championships, she left school and the country at the age of 17 to join the professional peloton, where she now rides for Liv-Plantur, the women’s arm of the German sprinter Marcel Kittel’s Giant-Alpecin team.
Although still an infant in road cycling terms, Garner hopes to compete in the women’s road race at Rio 2016, albeit on a hilly 130km course ill-suited to a woman of her explosive talents. If selected, she expects to work diligently in the service of another, specifically the 2012 silver medallist Lizzie Armitstead.
“It is frustrating,” she says of the undulating Rio course. “Since I’ve started as a senior, my climbing has got better, but I’m never going to be Chris Froome. That’s not who I am and that’s not the rider that I’m going to be. I can get over the shorter climbs but it’s going to be hard in Rio. I don’t know what the team are going to be looking for and which riders they’re going to be taking but I’d love to help Lizzie. I think that, with the results she’s had this year and the form she’s been showing, she could win it. It would be great to be part of that team.”
Garner, who is the elder sister of emerging track star Grace, was handed a promotion of sorts at Liv-Plantur this year, following the departure of her former team-mate Kirsten Wild. Overcoming persistent knee injuries, Garner finished third in stage three of the Aviva Women’s Tour from Oundle to Kettering, the highlight of an often frustrating season.
It was a result Cycling Weekly described as the potential turning point of a campaign it described as “poor”, an assessment Garner considers “a bit harsh”. Like many cyclists, she points out, much of her best work goes unheralded as she expects it would in Rio next year.
“I haven’t had the results that I wanted but I don’t think I’d had a poor season up to that,” she says. “I think maybe the races weren’t for me and I’d been doing my job helping other riders. Cycling is a team sport and I’m often helping other riders on courses that aren’t suited to me. Some of the races I would have liked to finish higher but I think, after the injury, I bounced back quite well.”
What should have been a career highlight recently ended with Garner bouncing off the cobbled surface of the Champs Elysées, when her maiden tilt at La Course ended in painful ignominy. Staged ahead of Froome’s triumphant procession into the Paris at the end of the Tour de France, the women’s race took place in torrential rain. After crashing three times on a surface so slippery organisers would later neutralise the men’s race in order to avoid similar scenes, Garner was forced to hoist the white flag and abandon.
In a sport where earnings are dwarfed by those of their male counterparts, Garner is grateful for the financial wriggle-room afforded to her by Sky’s scholarship scheme, which also provides her with a mentor in the form of Annabel Croft. The former British No1 tennis player has often painful first-hand experience of the pressures that come with being a young athlete trying to hack it with the senior pros.
“It’s good to have somebody to talk to who’s been through top-level sport and knows how hard it can be sometimes,” Garner says. “She’s been in the sporting world for a very long time and knows what it takes. She can’t help me with the cycling part but she knows what’s going on off the bike. She’s a really lovely lady so it’s nice to be able to speak to her.”
Despite her obvious passion for a sport in which low pay, high climbs, violent crashes and throbbing knees are everyday concerns, Garner concedes there have been dark times when she has considered whether all the sacrifices she has made are worthwhile.
“I think as an athlete, at some point in your career, you’ve had those thoughts,” she says. “It is hard being a woman cyclist. A lot of my team-mates also have to work. I cannot imagine training as hard as they do and then having to go to work for another five hours after that. That’s really tough, because their teams expect them to get results even though they’re quite obviously not getting the rest they need, because they’re trying to earn the money they need to live. It would be good to have a minimum wage like the men do.”
The fight for equality is one that has been taken up with some gusto by Armitstead, who ruffled feathers by using the platform afforded to her by her podium finish in a thrilling women’s road race at London 2012 to lament the “overwhelming sexism” she encounters in women’s cycling. It is a drum worth beating and with Garner’s help over 130km in Rio next summer, we may get to hear it again.
Lucy Garner is supported by the Sky Academy Sports Scholarships scheme, helping 12 young athletes fulfil their potential with tailored support including funding and mentoring – www.skysports.com/scholarships
