Tracy Moseley has had the world as her playground, Pete Scullion finds out whether it’s all swings and roundabouts ahead now that she’s a mum and a rider.
Words & Photography Pete Scullion
There are few better places to talk shop with a multiple World Champion than over bolognese at the two and a half kilometre mark in the Swiss Alps. While my brain and lungs struggled to make sense of the thinning air, there’s a composure that comes with any physical exertion from a professional athlete of two decades.
Despite having not all that long ago become a mum, keeping ahead of our motley assortment of European journalists doesn’t seem to be troubling Tracy one bit. My prying questions are dealt with in a similar manner. Lack of fuss, matter of fact, and full of insight that any successful athlete would be able to muster, but in a manner that is uniquely Tracy Moseley.
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When it comes to discussing riders who might well be the UK’s best, or the best ever, Tracy has certainly done her bit to make sure that she’s at the sharp end of that list. World Cup wins, World Championships, the first-ever British woman to win a World Cup, EWS Championships, British cross-country medals… The list of accolades is long enough.
Chasing Rainbows.
The titles themselves are well documented, but what we know far less about is the approach, learning when things don’t go right, the parts of the job that aren’t super glamorous. We kick off with calling time on racing downhill, and racing full stop. Probably the biggest decision anyone who’s found themselves at the sharp end of a sport most of their life will have to make.
Winning the inaugural Fort William World Cup, Tracy proved to everyone that she could do it and it was the launch pad to the career we’ve all followed since way back in the baby blue Kona days. After qualifying 20th, a six-second win certainly wasn’t on the cards for finals, but with Anne-Caroline Chausson and Missy Giove going down on the track or having mechanicals, the door was open for anyone with a clean run. Of all the wins, Tracy makes it clear this one is the standout for not only being her first World Cup win, but also taking that slice of history that is being the first British woman to win a World Cup.
Fast forward eight years and seven previous unsuccessful attempts at taking home the Rainbow Stripes. The 2010 World Championships would see the return of Sam Hill, but also the year Tracy became a world champion herself. For a rider who analyses each and every performance, Tracy is somewhat lost to put a finger on the one thing that led to that win. A pair of twisted forks spotted by Fox technician Justin Frey might have been the answer as once untwisted, everything fell into place. Despite the rain, there would be no close-fought racing in Canada that day and the win would be a comfortable seven and a half seconds.
On the flipside of that, there are the races that slipped through the net. For Tracy there are two that still sting a little and it’s not difficult to see why. The World Championships headed to Nevis Range for the first time, and the first time the event had been on UK soil. A home win and a first World Champs title were at stake. Five seconds into Tracy’s finals run though, it was all over. After hitting a rock hard, the rear wheel decided to implode and that was that – game over.
Another race that stands out was in Val d’Isere in 2014, for the Enduro World Series. The weather conspired against the race in spectacular fashion, including a lightning strike on a chairlift. Trailing Anne-Caroline Chausson after a solid battle, but going into a stage that definitely favoured the Brit, Tracy lost her back number plate and was caught by a commissaire at the start of the final stage. No time to find another… Tracy rode into the stage not knowing what the outcome would be. She pedalled her heart out and did enough to take the win, but the lack of number board saw her punished with a 30-second penalty and a silver medal… Tracy now keeps that memory to call on for a bit of anger to get the best out of herself.
Breaking out, breaking sweat.
Despite the highs that taking home those coveted Rainbow Stripes can bring, 2010 was a turning point to the Tracy Moseley we know today. Keen to seek out new challenges and visit some new places, the departure from downhill, with its tendency towards repeat venues, wasn’t as hard a decision as calling time on racing full stop, rather unsurprisingly. Time on the bike, getting fitter and seeking out new challenges and adventures were the order of the day.
We all know what happened next. The transition to enduro from a downhill background wasn’t the most straightforward, but big rides came in fairly naturally as one Mr James Richards became a more permanent fixture. Being from a cross-country background, three minutes of madness on a downhill bike wasn’t at the top of his agenda. A sharp reality check at the first Enduro World Series fitness-wise led Tracy to enlist the assistance of Phil Dixon, the GB cross-country team coach, to seek out new levels of dedication and pain when it came to training.
Once fully committed to enduro, Tracy became the only female rider who would consistently challenge both French heavyweights in the form of Anne-Caroline Chausson and Cecile Ravanel, especially when it came to longer, more physical stages. Having only taken one World Cup win during Anne-Caroline’s reign in women’s downhill before her retirement, Tracy relished the challenge of facing her again, a rider who when “I first started racing she was the only girl that looked like a ‘boy’, in terms of her style, and speed on the bike. She was super quiet and just let her riding do the talking… I wanted to be just like that.” Fitness was certainly one of the keys to beating Anne-Caroline, Tracy feels, with enduro lending itself better to the Trek rider than the French legend.
Following the French lines.
Despite that, Tracy certainly feels the French have it right from the off when it comes to cycling talent that is fostered from a young age and, as a result, riders have a massive strength in depth at all disciplines. Fantastic terrain certainly helps, but cycling and mountain biking as a genuine career is supported from a school level, and supporting and investing in their riders not just at the races, meaning they work well as a nation and a team, something Tracy feels the UK lacks.
Although maintaining that it’s hard to know for sure as an outsider, Tracy is confident that Cecile Ravanel’s EWS domination isn’t bulletproof and that the addition of riders like Junior World Champion Vali Holl, cross-country star Jolanda Neff and multiple World Champion Rachel Atherton would certainly spice things up. That, added to riders who are working their socks off to get that top spot, means the winning run can’t last forever.
Multiple Enduro World Series titles later, and it was time to think about calling quits on racing. For someone for whom racing had been their life since they were 16, turning off the switch wasn’t something Tracy could do. 2016 and 2017 was a chance to wean off the time between the tape, busying herself with work inside the cycle industry for the likes of British Cycling and the Enduro World Series to keep the sanity topped up.
When questioned about whether we’ll see Tracy back at an Enduro World Series, a wry smile moves across her face. “Never say never… When I stopped full time racing at the end of 2015, I said I wouldn’t be competing in a full EWS season again, but I didn’t say you will never see me at another EWS race again… So we will see. It’s still early days after having a baby and I first need to get my fitness and body back into shape and then we will see…”
Watch this space…
Raising the next generation.
2018 saw the arrival of Young Master Toby and a switch between an athlete’s sleep optimisation and a new parent’s sleep deprivation. Far removed from a three-hour ride followed by an afternoon nap and a stretch, Tracy is confident that the human body is built to deal with it, so you just crack on. Likening it to a hard EWS race or a tough training week – but you never get that rest day. Ever. It’s obvious that new challenges and adventures certainly aren’t confined to bikes.
The demands of parenthood have no doubt flipped the riding on its head, leading to an awful lot of clock-watching, although not changing the love of riding and taking risks on a bike. Gone are the exploratory rides with only the setting sun as a reminder that time is passing, replaced with a two-hour ‘smash session’ before returning to tend to the wee one.
A large part of weaning off racing was the chance to explore and travel parts of the world that the racing calendar simply hadn’t allowed in the past. Tracy would eventually end up taking on some cross-country eliminator World Cup events, mass start races as well as a few French and Italian enduros. Having only backing from Trek UK at the time and needing to build up some sponsors on the way, T-MO Racing came about as a banner to race under.
From this came the desire to help some up and coming talent in the same way Helen Mortimer had helped her in the early days. In the first year of T-MO Racing, Tracy worked a fair bit with the British cross-country team and was aware of some young female riders in need of support to get them to the next step. From then it was simply a case of helping out local riders as an easier way of keeping in touch and riding together more, so the now World Champion Evie Richards rode under the T-MO banner for a year before securing a Trek Factory Racing ride.
There are no real grand plans for world domination here, just the wish to help some young kids experience more than one discipline, help them improve as athletes and riders, and excel if they choose to. Work ethic and personality rank higher than raw talent on the bike, but the latter certainly hasn’t been lacking in Tracy’s recent understudies.
Shit talking.
With the niceties out the way, talk turns to the parts of a professional athlete’s life that stink (other than cleaning up baby poo in Tracy’s case) and the response is again, uniquely Tracy Moseley. The horrors of trying to remove errant dog mess from one or both tyres and that it’s one of Tracy’s life challenges not to ride through the stuff. Even after the most meticulous session to remove said mess from one’s tyre, the smell never quite fades. Tracy’s adamant that Switzerland has it sussed, with dog poo bags everywhere, even in the most remote valleys – surely part of the reason Tracy’s spent the last ten summers in Verbier.
With the inevitable poo chat out of the way, I ask about how Tracy manages her work life and private life, and it’s obvious that there’s a clear split between the two. While Tracy feels social media opens up the sport and allows people to see what goes into being an athlete, she’s keen to keep work public and her personal life private. No social media account will give the full picture, and what we see is often the cherry-picked dream world, rather than the harsher realities, making it a double-edged sword in many respects.
It’s funny sometimes how you get an idea of how someone might come across when you sit down for a chat about their professional life. I had only met Tracy briefly once before, but there are few riders quite like her both on and off the bike. You will only hear what needs to be said when you’re getting an answer from Tracy Moseley – she’s not a motormouth, and she’s honest.
There’s a distinct lack of fuss from a rider who’s spent two decades analysing themselves to eke the very best out of every performance, and the answers to my prying questions never really seemed to take much thinking but were full of thought, full of confidence but no arrogance, curt but not impolite…
There are few riders who have excelled at everything like Tracy Moseley has. There is a quiet, fierce drive to everything she does. Just don’t let her tell you that having a child has slowed her down when she hops a Swiss boulder you were struggling to even ride around. An absolute class act.