A fresh face for the 2024 campaign, Abi joins the team after progressing her way through the ranks of the peloton from club to Continental teams, and to more recently the WorldTour. It has been a bit of a whirlwind time for the young Brit who has suffered bouts of injury and illness but she’s excited to start afresh and on a clean slate with the team.
Coming from an active family, Abi’s mum did a lot of mountain running and her dad was active too, but it was through some friends that she got into the sport of triathlon at around the age of eight and kept it up for a further eight years.
“I was catching everyone on the bike leg, and I was okay at the running but wasn’t very good at the swimming to be honest, so I thought instead I would just focus on cycling.”
Going to a few local youth events, she was spotted by talent coaches at British Cycling and brought onto their junior academy program for the track and road. It was the first time Abi rode on the track, so she found it “pretty daunting” but kept it up for a couple of years, yet her love was always road as she is “such an outdoorsy person”.
Alongside the enjoyment of riding outdoors, Abi also loves the adrenaline of being on a bike and that “cycling is just fun”. Of course, as a professional athlete a smirk comes across her face when she admits that “winning is fun too” but she really enjoys the teamwork aspect of it all.
“It’s important to function as a team, you have people in different roles that all have to work together. I get a lot of joy and satisfaction from helping someone else too and it seems like a really nice family vibe in the team.”
Describing herself as “creative”, and “over-thinker” and “inquisitive”, she thinks those qualities also help in her professional life as she likes to come up with new ideas for how to do things or wants to learn as much from the team’s experts as possible to improve her training or be more aero. Although she does half-heartedly joke that sometimes the over-thinking attribute isn’t so great when going down a descent sometimes, but that’s something she’s working on!
A determined and driven individual, Abi has had to face a lot of setbacks due to bad luck, but she always tries to keep a positive attitude and used one of her favourite pastimes of painting, to “free her mind”.
“It’s all about making new goals and resetting. I always try and look back on the good moments too and know that I will be back there again.”
Still young and very much in her early twenties, Abi is still unsure of what type of rider she might become but thinks it could be a cross over between the classics and stage races and she just wants to “initially learn and grow” and see what follows after that. Plying her Yorkshire hard-working attitude and inspired by her idols, triathletes the Brownlee brothers, Abi will no doubt give her all in the coming years.
When she’s not on the bike, Abi enjoys spending her time painting and drawing; letting her creative side flow. Possibly she’s also dusted off the piano and viola for a practice, or if you are really lucky then you might even hear a Yoda impression from her!