“Cycling you are fcked but I love you,” was a line from an Instagram post by Matilda Raynolds earlier this year.
It wouldn’t seem unreasonable if she was leaning into the negative side of this love/hate relationship with the sport right now. This week she was meant to be lining up at the Lotto Belgium Tour, having staked a huge amount of training, time, effort and money into utilising the race as a potential opportunity to launch her dream of becoming a European-based professional cyclist.
The Australian picked out the UCI 2.1 five-stage race, scheduled June 14 to June 18, as one where she could potentially make an all-important mark in Europe, pretty much a necessity to catch the eye of a team that could offer a professional contract and the opportunity to become a full-time cyclist.
Raynolds, who has plenty of impressive results to her name in Australia, had found a team to race with that had an invitation to the event. She travelled to Belgium early, so she wasn’t launching in cold but could race a string of crits in the lead-in, which are not necessarily races that suit her but did provide a good bit of run-up competition between reconnaissance rides. She’d even knocked back a start at the Giro d’Italia Donne as she was so convinced that the Lotto Belgium Tour was the event that would best showcase her strengths.
Raynolds was all-in, but then, just over a week before the planned start date, the race was cancelled.
“This was such a shock that the Belgium Tour has been cancelled,” Raynolds told Cyclingnews over the phone as she grappled with the decision of what to do next. “I’d been training through all the races that I’ve done so far. This was the goal. This was really why I was over here, why I chose this team.
“But the experience has been fantastic,” added Raynolds, who is not one to overlook how fortunate she has been to have had the opportunity to chase her dreams and currently be injury free so she can continue to do just that. “I’ve loved where I’ve been in Belgium, but now it’s just really about trying to take stock and look at what’s in my control.”
Raynolds had planned to race the Lotto Belgium Tour with club team Keukens Redant. While her teammates could just hop on a train and return home to friends and family when the Tour was cancelled, it wasn’t such an easy decision for the Australian, who currently resides in New Zealand. Home and the support systems that come with it are an expensive 20-hour-plus flight away.
Raynolds, too, was far from the only rider who had come a long way to try and make their mark, with Australian-based Continental squad Team Bridgelane also on the start list. The obstacles of geography and cost mean the opportunities to try and race in Europe – let alone race enough to adjust to the heightened level and have things run well enough your way to make a mark at the front of the field – don’t come along that often for up-and-coming Australian riders. And to make it in a race that will deliver enough exposure to cut through is even more of a rarity.
“The Belgium Tour had great parcours and, more importantly, live coverage, which continues to be the most important aspect that can propel women’s careers. It’s very difficult to show yourself in these non broadcasted 1-day classic kermess style races,” she added.
If all had gone to plan, Raynolds would now have been nearly halfway through the five-day race and looking ahead eagerly to stage 4. That stage held plenty of promise for the Australian. She wasn’t expecting to be able to rival Lotte Kopecky, with her powerhouse SD Worx team behind her, on the five laps of the hilly 20.4km course which included La Croisette, Le Grinquier and the cobbled Mont Saint-Laurent, but was hoping still to make a big mark on the route she had repeatedly ridden in preparation.
The cancellation of the Belgium Tour, however, means that on Saturday instead of taking on the climbs Raynolds will be back in New Zealand while favourite Kopecky was reportedly on the hunt for late entries into junior boys races to find an alternate way to get into competition rhythm given the cancellation.
Being willing to fail
Raynolds, a former triathlete, was a latecomer to cycling but quickly showed considerable strength in Australia, making a mark in the international field as early as 2019 at the Tour Down Under with a third behind Women’s WorldTour riders Chloe Hosking and Lotta Henttala on the opening stage. She has also twice won the women’s category of the long-running 267km Melbourne to Warrnambool – a race Chris Froome described as “brutal” when he took it on this year – and in 2023 she also started the season with a stage win at the Australian season opener of the Bay Crits.
“It feels like I’ve been on the cusp a lot the past few years,” said the 35-year-old, also keenly aware that she is currently on the wrong side of a swing in the focus toward investment in young talent. “I just need the one result, that one performance, and that is the same in so many sports. One putt, one wave, one rally can completely change the course of an athlete’s life.”
The rider who is well connected and well versed in the cycling industry – currently working at apparel brand Black Sheep – only really branched out to international racing and decided to chase a professional contract in the last couple of years. She based herself in the Netherlands for a month of European racing last year and has also had a number of US stints, making her way straight to Belgium this year from the United States.
This year’s six-week European trip delivered a solid start, with Raynolds slotting into the top 20 at the 1.2 ranked Leiedal Koerse even though she’d just arrived. However, the next race, she was caught up behind a really bad accident, requiring stitches to her head, and she also flatted in the recent Dwars Door de Westhoek.
As Raynolds put it, “Cycling is the most beautiful sport in the World on the precipice of it all going shit at any moment.”
After taking a couple of days to assess her options, Raynolds had made the decision that it was time to head home, taking on one last race – the Flanders Diamond Tour where she came 28th – before jumping on a plane.
Though leaving Europe doesn’t mean it’s game over, with Raynolds emphasising that she is not giving up, just taking time to regroup and reset before heading to the US again to take on some gravel racing, a style of riding that plays to Raynolds leaning toward long and hard races. In fact, in 2021, she raced SBT GRVL, and somehow even on an aero road bike, managed to make it through to the end in 15th place.
Whatever happens there, Raynolds plans to be back on the road again in 2024, in Australia, for the summer of cycling and beyond as she continues to chase that hard-to-come-by contract which means she can race full time.
“Maybe I make it. Maybe I don’t. Years from now, am I going to think about the result or the experience? A country girl from a one pub town in New South Wales, Australia, these experiences continue to exceed what I thought life would be,” said Raynolds in an additional piece of correspondence following on from our interview. “Whilst this trip feels like a bit of a failure, imagine if more people chased goals and weren’t afraid to fail.
“If you’re not willing to fail, then you’re not going to go for it.”