“I’m essentially obsessed with greatness in this sport,” Katie Archibald says. From many athletes this would seem insufferably self-indulgent, if fairly standard athlete-speak. From Archibald – a softly spoken, philosophically inclined Scot – it makes absolute sense. It also comes caveated with a wry smile as she decides, on a call with The Independent and other outlets, that she will actually say what she means. “I know you’re print media, so you know where you’re about to say a sentence and you can see it written down, but here we go…”
Everyone except Archibald herself would probably already say she has achieved greatness. To date the track cycling star has two Olympic golds, six world titles, and a record 20 European titles, to go with 12 national titles over the last 11 years. You get the sense from speaking to her that it is not enough, that further history, further records, are just around the corner.
The 31-year-old’s huge successes have been matched by extraordinary lows. In 2022 she lost her partner, fellow cyclist Rab Ward, to a cardiac arrest, and endured the harrowing experience of being unable to resuscitate him as he lay beside her.
Having returned to the escape of sport, there then came the freak injury that ruled her out of the Paris Olympics, when she broke two bones in her leg and tore ligaments off the bone in a fall last summer. For an athlete whose entire sense of the passage of time is tied up in the four-year Olympic cycle, it was an utterly crushing blow.
Four months later, this time last year, she roared back to win team pursuit gold in the World Championships, the GB quartet defending their title from 2023. They were so far ahead of the rest of the field that they caught their opponents in the final.
Rather than feeling on top of the world at such a triumphant return from injury, Archibald says she “felt a little bit in freefall” after the body blow of missing Paris.
Contrary to expectation, it was actually easier preparing for last year’s World Championships – despite the highly condensed timescale provided by her forced layoff – than this year, with the Worlds set to take place in Santiago, Chile, next week. “Injury can provide a fairly intense focus, and I was also injured off very good form and prep otherwise had gone well into…” she trails off, before putting it delicately: “No more ankle.
“It’s kind of been the fallout off the back of that that’s been quite difficult. Your life goes in seasons, and this four-year season between Olympic Games has been a strange one.
“But what’s very handy about us speaking today is I do now feel very settled, very motivated, and like I’ve really found something that, I don’t necessarily think will come out in this Worlds, it feels like a slightly perverse thing to say, but the sense of structure that I’ve found – working with my brother, I’m based up in Glasgow these days – and I have this imagined future that if things keep going as well as they’re going, my career’s fine after all. I’ve got a nice imagined future on the horizon, which in a sense starts with this Worlds in Santiago.”
Archibald speaks in sentences that require at least four commas as she meanders on tangents, circles around, and finally forces herself back to the original question. She is refreshingly candid, unafraid of expressing herself, willing to break down the mechanics and the ruthless, single-minded determination required to succeed at this level.
To that end, she has moved her base away from the National Cycling Centre and is coached once more by brother John, a former Commonwealth Games silver medallist. “He’s fantastic in both roles - probably a slight edge on the coaching front,” she laughs.
The pair started working together in the run-up to the Paris Olympics before her injury put a stop to that, but after her recovery, she says: “I kept trying to try something new and I knew that my brother was there, and in my experience we were fantastic together. So this year I was like fuck it, I’m just gonna see if John will coach me again.” She jokes, “I’m paying him less than I did pay him before Paris. His services haven’t changed at all but I guess my situation has – but he still said yes! I’m enjoying it a lot.”
This time Archibald will only contest the elimination race and the Madison, the latter alongside current European silver medallist Maddie Leech. It is the first time since 2017 that Archibald is not in the team pursuit squad. To say the Scot is passionate about team pursuit as a discipline is an understatement, but missing it is a deliberate move as she builds towards the Olympics in 2028.
“I would say I’m essentially obsessed with greatness in this niche sport,” she says. “The pinnacle of that is the Olympic Games. So if I’m interested in becoming the best track cyclist that I can be, that is going to LA. The two are inextricably intertwined. So it’s never too early [to think about LA], but it is too early to make a plan to lay out a path that’s set for that.”
Instead, she she has her life planned out until the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow next year, and the longer-term path – to be in the team pursuit squad – has involved “lifestyle changes” this year, hence the return to Scotland. “That experience will inform how I best get to LA. If the answer is ‘well, you’re not gonna’, of the infinity options available, that’s one of them…”
It seems unlikely now, but after the disappointment of Paris it feels like Archibald is hedging her bets, all too aware that things could go wrong once again. Riding a different programme in training for Chile has also been an adjustment, but it is all in search of a greater goal. “I find it a wee bit tricky because I use team pursuit as a feedback mechanism because you’re so familiar with your sensations in that event. It’s a bit harder preparing for just bunch [events] to know exactly where you are. But I’m happy, so that seems like enough.”
She ascribes to a theory that while the sport works according to the four-year Olympiad, her cycling career is working in seven-year cycles, from joining the Great Britain Cycling Team in late 2013, to the delayed Olympics in 2021, to the LA Games seven years later. “[Being] this kind of person that needs to chase growth or chase reward, that needs to be on this treadmill of sorts – I thought was particular to the Olympics. The older I get, [that] has spread out to other goals. I like having LA as that target on the horizon.”
At this point she realises that she’s gone on something of a tangent from the original question, on whether the season after an Olympic year is a difficult experience, with the next Games a distant speck on the horizon. She comes straight back down to earth: “No, this year’s been hard. But eventually you start to sound like a broken record.”
She laughs. “2022 was the worst of my life. 2023 was just blank, it’s just blank space, also crap. 2024, I actually had a fantastic time but I missed the Olympic Games. 2025 has not been brilliant, at all, and so it sounds like maybe a me problem. Like, that’s not bad luck, that’s bad reacting. I guess the project is reacting better for 2026! But that’s life.”
It certainly owes her a better, fresh chapter – hopefully starting next week in Santiago.
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