I have interviewed a number of professional cycle racers over the years and it has been great to hear their stories. One person I had not managed to meet was champion downhill mountain-biker Tracy Moseley. I was keen to meet her, particularly as her name was regularly being mentioned by other mountain bikers who mentioned her as their inspiration to push themselves in mountain biking. And it's no surprise that people wanted to emulate Tracy. She was at the top of her game for 20 years, racing downhill and enduro mountain biking events. In 2010 she was crowned World Downhill Mountain bike champion, and subsequent to that she gained world titles in Enduro mountain biking events too. I finally got to meet this member of the downhill and enduro mountain biking royal family at the London Bike Show earlier this year, and she talked about how she would like to encourage girls into racing downhill.
Tracy Moseley, aged 38
From: Malvern, Worcestershire
4-time World MTB Champion, Downhill & Enduro & coach at
TMO Racing
“I grew up
on my parents’ dairy farm in Malvern, so we had that freedom of the outdoors to
ride and play and make tracks in the woods.
It was my brother,
Ed who inspired me to do downhill racing. He’s two years older than me and started doing
cross country racing when he was about 15 or 16. So it was more about following
him, and riding with his friends.
Ed helped me out so much at the start and he
was the one who said, “You know what Tracy? You need to have a go at racing.
You can ride better than all the girls I’ve seen and most of the boys I ride with!”
So he was the one who pushed me and encouraged me, and in the first few years
he was a massive help.
My classmates and teachers didn’t really understand what
I was doing but I think they thought it was quite cool. Certainly the schools
were quite encouraging of me doing something at quite a high level. Even now, I
get the odd facebook message from my classmates saying “I can’t believe you’re
doing this after all these years later!”
Ed still
rides lots as well and we hope to do some kids’ coaching camps with my brother
and my husband. So it’s going to be a family unit, which is great to still be
able to share that fun on the bike with him, nearly 30 years later.
I still
live in Malvern, so it feels like I haven’t actually gone very far. I’ve just
been away to uni and then travelled so much with the racing. Even my brother
still lives there. We’ve converted some of the old farm buildings and we’ve
both got our own little place.
It’s been a great base to have. We’ve got
great riding locally both on-road and off-road. I love going to our local
trails and our local club, Malvern Cycle Sport has been great. At the moment I
don’t see any need to go anywhere else!
Malvern
doesn’t really have anything technical in terms of downhill, but we can be in
Wales within an hour. We can easily get to Bristol, and London is less than two
hours away. So we’re in a nice location that is central to get to places.
My first
world downhill mountain bike championship title came in 2010, after
many years of trying, and then after that I had a good spell of titles for the
last few years of my career, with three world enduro titles too.
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| From www.tracymoseley.com |
In a way gaining
my first title was a huge amount of relief. I’d spent 10 years or more with
that goal, and then I suddenly achieve it and I’m like – now what? I’d sacrificed
so much for my training - lifestyle, friends, family - everything to try and
achieve that goal.
So winning
that title led me to carry on and try a new challenge – which is where
the enduro biking came in. It was a new discipline, I had to get fitter, lose
weight, and become an all-round athlete rather than just a downhill focused
athlete. That gave me that next step kind of feeling of trying to achieve
something else, hence the enduro titles. Then when I achieved that I wanted to try and find that next
thing. I still race and challenge myself, though not at elite level.
I did the
Snow Bike Festival in Gstaad at the end of January this year, and then I went straight
from minus 11 degrees to plus 40 degrees, and did the Andes Pacifico, a five-day enduro in Chile. It was a kind of
adventure race where we were high, in the Andes Mountains for the first three
days and then descended towards the sea. There was a lot of time on the
bike, with three or four timed stages of 8-10 minutes each day. It was really raw terrain, that wasn’t really
well marked and needed a bit of navigating. It was a really good adventure.
I also took part in this year's national cyclo cross championships in Bradford. I’d been supporting a few
youngsters in my local cycling club, Malvern Cycle Sport, and we went up to help in the pits and the bike
washing, so I thought I might as well enter the race if I’m up there! It was very slippery, I was super out of shape
and I suffered. It hurt a lot but I just pushed hard, and I was happy with
where I finished, considering.
I am always
looking for the next crazy challenge. Hopefully one day I will be able to stop
those desires!
When I
started racing downhill I looked up to Anne Caroline Chausson, who was at that
time, the 10-time world mountain bike champion. She’s always been quite
introverted, but an absolutely amazing bike rider. And that, for me was always
the most important thing. I didn’t want to be this huge celebrity; I wanted to
be known for my riding and how good my riding was, and that was the thing I
really admired about her. She could keep up with the guys, she
was as stylish as the guys, and she didn’t shout about it. She just got on with
it.
Often these days you get many many characters that can talk a good bike
race but actually can they do it themselves? I’ve always liked that side of
making sure that your riding does the talking for you and Anne Caroline Chausson did that really
well.
It’s quite
cool and really nice of Rachel Atherton and Manon Carpenter to say that they
looked up to me, and it makes me take account of what I have done in the past.
It feels good to know that I have done something to help the next generation. Rach was someone I raced against, and racing against her kept the level high and
inspired me to raise my game.
It’s great to see what she’s gone on to achieve in
the downhill world, and again hopefully she’ll be an inspiration for the next
batch of racers and we will continue to have a great nation of downhill riders.
But yeah, it’s certainly really nice to realise that they looked up to me and
it’s helped them in their career, for sure.
I stopped racing
professionally in 2015, though I am not fully retired from racing. I didn’t
really want to use the word “retire” because it felt like there was a definite
end. I’ve got that kind of gene, that kind of thing that makes me want to have
the drive to compete so I’m still going to be racing a little bit, but just not
at world series level.
This has
given me more chance to do other things rather than just be focused on training for
those few events that make up the World Series. So change
of direction would be a way to describe it, rather than retiring – it’s not as
though people aren’t going to see me out racing again.
Last year I
did a couple of races, this year I’m doing a few less races and am doing more
coaching, more talks, more conferences doing work with the sponsors. Yeah, it’s
been nice to slowly wean myself off professional racing. I think I would have
struggled to suddenly stop, given I have spent my entire life since I finished
uni just racing bikes.
Nowadays I
am involved in coaching and developing young riders. The good thing about that
is that it still gets me to races, so I go to events with the young girls. I’ve
got two girls that I sponsor in downhill and cross-country with my TMO Racing
grass roots training programme, and I’ve been getting them to do some enduro.
They’re also racing cyclo cross and road, so they’re doing a bit of everything.
I’m a huge advocate of trying to make sure, especially when you’re young, as you definitely
broaden your riding. You don’t just focus on one discipline, as I think you can
gain so much from different skills in the different disciplines.
I was doing
a bit of work with British Cycling and their cross-country programme, working
with the girls in that squad, trying to improve their technical skills and cross-country
racing. I do a little bit of work with my own cycling club, Malvern Cycle Sport,
which is a really active club that has been running kids’ training camps.
I really
enjoy mentoring the next generation. There are plenty of people out there
coaching adults, but I really feel like we still need to keep encouraging,
certainly on the mountain biking side, the next great champions of our country.It would be great if I could help bring in more kids to the sport and see
where we go from that. That’s the plan.
Cross-country
is the only mountain-biking discipline that gets any funding from British
Cycling, as it is an Olympic sport. The disciplines that I enjoy – downhill, gravity-assisted things – are very much dependent on clubs or the parents of those kids. There’s
no system for that so that’s where I really want to put my effort.
There are so many kids out there that aren’t
going to make it in that very select programme that British Cycling creates and
then the kids get put off racing for life, which is a shame. Basically, you
don’t have to be an Olympic champion to enjoy racing your bike. And that’s the
key thing for me – to make sure that kids can still have that love for cycling
and they don’t get put off because they haven’t made that cut-throat world of
high-level racing.
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| From www.tracymoseley.com |
Downhill
racing has been talked about as possibly becoming an Olympic sport but I don’t know if
it ever would. At the moment it is a grass roots underground sport, and in many
ways that’s what a lot of people like about it. If Olympic funding comes in it
will become a proper structured programme, with people being selected. It would
change the atmosphere of the sport a lot. And I’m not sure if it would be for
the better or not.
Cycling is
definitely getting more mainstream. It’s just that for mountain biking it’s
always going to be a struggle when we don’t have the TV coverage. Rachel
(Atherton) has been fortunate with the Red Bull sponsorship as they have put so
much backing into her, and helped to push the sport and make sure the press
know what’s going on. We’re probably the most dominant downhill mountain biking
nation in the world, with world champions in the men, women, and junior categories, yet most
people in the general public would never know, which is a shame when you
consider what we’ve achieved.
Generally,
when there’s a downhill race men’s and women’s races get featured equally.
However, salary wise women are still falling behind then men, but I think that comes down to the
fact that there are so few girls racing downhill compared to the men, and that
makes it hard for bike companies to justify paying them the same. I still feel
that we get a great opportunity as females within our sport and certainly when
you get to the top of your sport.
There are only about 15 or 20 girls
racing downhill at world series level, whereas there are over a hundred guys
competing at those levels. So the thing for me is I’d love to see more girls
taking part. If we can get our field to be equally as competitive as the men’s
then we can be in a place where we can ask for equality in everything. We
just need more girls doing it – we need the numbers. And that will hopefully
bring more support and more opportunities.
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| From www.tracymoseley.com |
I have made
a lot of friends through cycling. I feel like I could travel the world now and
pretty much be able to visit someone I have met through mountain biking almost
anywhere in the world. Just that common bond of the love for riding a bike is
amazing – where it takes you, the people you meet – it’s absolutely incredible.
Every race I do – even the one I did in Chile – I meet new people and I get new
contacts and it’s a lovely kind of extended family, seeing people I know
everywhere I go.
Initially,
cycling was something I was good at – I was competitive, and I liked to win. I
never would have expected to still have a career in racing a mountain bike 20
years after I left school. It was never planned; it just evolved that way and it’s
been amazing.
As I’ve got
older my interests have changed, and cycling has now become so much more than just competing, and if I never raced again it wouldn’t matter – the fact that I could
ride my bike is the more important thing.
The places that cycling takes you,
the feeling that you get from being free to have your own mode of transport and
the achievement of getting from here to the top of a hill, looking down, and
thinking, “I did that all with my own leg power” is quite cool.
There are health
benefits, it’s a sustainable way of seeing places you would never see on
foot or by car, so it’s a lifestyle for me now for sure, and I think it’ll be
with me forever.”
Other Cycling Voices
