Katie Archibald: ‘Competing helps but that moment ends and the other stuff returns’
In her first interview since a bittersweet World Championships, British cyclist Katie Archibald discusses competing after the tragic death of her partner and returning to the Track Champions League in London.
Katie Archibald’s life revolves around, in her own words, cycling for breakfast lunch and dinner. So how did she find escape after a difficult World Championships at which a catalogue of brutal injuries and the deeper scars caused by the sudden death of her partner took their toll? She got on a mountain bike, naturally.
“I rode the mountain bike marathon course from the Worlds [in Glentress Forest, near Edinburgh] – well, actually I only rode half of it because it’s a bit f***ing epic – and it was honestly one of the highlights of my holiday,” the Scot tells City A.M. “I did a bit of gravel as well, just stuff that I don’t typically do because I have a habit of crashing my brains out.”
Archibald, 29, also visited the Inner Hebrides as she took stock after a World Championships in Glasgow at which she shared in Team Pursuit gold but failed to medal in the Omnium and was not selected for the Madison, despite being Olympic champion. Afterwards she revealed she had struggled with pressure after an enormously traumatic 15 months.
In May last year she was already on the comeback trail from injury when she went over the bonnet of a 4×4, suffering two broken ankles and missing the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. Weeks later, her partner, mountain biker Rab Wardell, suffered a cardiac arrest while they slept next to each other. She tried unsuccessfully to revive him.
Archibald takes a deep breath before reflecting on the World Championships, now almost two months ago, where the strain surfaced. “I did it to myself, 100 per cent. I made it this massive deal in my head and the months leading into it just went really badly. The ambition I went with was big and even with the success in the Team Pursuit I found it overwhelming.
“I’d been talking about it for years, since it was announced that Glasgow would be hosting, how special it is and how ready I’ll be. The way that my life was when the call was in the distance was, ‘I’ve figured this out, I know how you do this now, I’m just going to do it again and again, day after day, and I’m sure it will be easy’. And it wasn’t.”
No one would have blamed Archibald if she had packed in the sport – taken a year off, even – after Rab’s death. But she prefers life when she is on two wheels, whether that is mountain biking in the Tweed Valley or hurtling around a velodrome. It has brought her 28 gold medals across European, World, Commonwealth and Olympic races.
“Competing helps,” she says. “Afterwards doesn’t help, I suppose, because you can have such a focus that it’s a complete escape. Because my career and all of my dreams are wrapped up in this sport, you can convince your mind to solely be in that moment. But eventually that moment ends and all of the other stuff returns.”
She never wanted to quit, though, even if she feared that injuries had weakened her forever. “I thought I was heading for failure. I can say this now, but I suppose I was running away because I didn’t want to face up to being awful. Then when everything changed last August, cycling was the one thing that I could have some stability around so I couldn’t imagine losing this.
“It’s the foundation of so many other things: how you view yourself, how you approach goals. Hopefully when retirement comes I’ll be able to move these mindsets or skillsets into other domains, but at the moment I don’t think I’m quite robust enough to do that. So I’ll just be reliant on the systems I’ve built up over the last decade to make life a little bit easier.”
Archibald is good humoured despite everything, not least the “career’s worth of injuries” that she has already accrued. “You know this idea that you’d want to go inside someone else’s brain and see if they see blue the way that you see blue? I would love to go in the body of another 29-year-old and check if everything is meant to feel like this,” she says.
“Ankles that are always hurting, I’m missing a ligament in my knee, hips that have been wrecked countless times, I’ve had collarbone surgery three times – it’s all either filled with metal or a bit battered. My body feels pretty good, but I don’t know if we all wake up and everything cracks. I suspect that we do. I get the odd acute thing but the chronic is probably fine.”
Archibald’s next focus is on the UCI Track Champions League, which culminates with a double header in London next month. Having won the Women’s Endurance title in 2021, finished second overall last year and experienced other career highlights at the Lee Valley VeloPark, she is excited about racing in the capital again.
“It is massive,” she says. “The sensation of being in that building is really something special. I’ve raced at busy tracks – the Paris and Berlin crowds are good – but in my experience nothing touches that London crowd. I felt it in my bones, especially racing with Laura [Kenny] because in a sense it’s her velodrome.”
A bittersweet Worlds has heightened Archibald’s hunger for the Paris 2024 Olympics but checked her confidence. Anything beyond that, she says, is “tbc”. “It’s a line that I’ve said so many times now because two years ago I could see the road map. I can still see the road map but I don’t know if I’ve got the hiking shoes any more.”
