![\"Emma](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/Emma_Pooley_wins_Stage_6_of_2014_Giro_Rosa_(picture_credit_Giro_Rosa).jpg\" "\\"Emma")
Emma Pooley wins stage six of the 2014 Giro d’Italia (credit: Giro Rosa)<\/p>\n\u201cI hate being called a cyclist. Because in my head I was never a cyclist. I was a runner who took up cycling as a side gig. Anyway, I try not to call myself a runner anymore. I\u2019m just a person who does as much sport in the mountains as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emma Pooley is not easily pigeonholed.<\/p>\n
During a decade-long stint in the professional peloton, Pooley established herself as one of the best climbers and time triallists of her generation. But it wasn\u2019t even supposed to happen.<\/p>\n
Back in 2002, a stress fracture in her right foot necessitated a break from her first love, running, and Pooley turned to cycling as an alternative, albeit temporary, \u201cstress release\u201d from university work, courtesy of a borrowed bike with an uncomfortable saddle.<\/p>\n
Just five-and-a-half years after embarking on that temporary, \u201cunwilling detour\u201d into cycling, Pooley was stood on an Olympic podium, a silver medallist in the time trial at the 2008 Beijing Games. The climber from Norwich also played a crucial part in Nicole Cooke\u2019s groundbreaking Olympic-Worlds road race double that same year.<\/p>\n
A pro contract with Cerv\u00e9lo soon followed, and so did the victories: the Trofeo Alfredo Binda (twice), Fl\u00e8che Wallonne, the GP Montr\u00e9al (with a staggering 110km solo raid), the Tour de l\u2019Aude, multiple British titles, and the Grande Boucle (the much-diminished descendent of the women\u2019s Tour de France).<\/p>\n
Emma Pooley wins stage six of the 2014 Giro d’Italia (credit: Giro Rosa)<\/p>\n
There were also four stage victories at the Giro d\u2019Italia, then the most prestigious of women\u2019s cycling\u2019s stage races, and two overall second places, both times to the imperious Marianne Vos. And in 2010, Pooley secured the biggest victory of her career, winning the rainbow jersey in the time trial in Geelong. Comfortable in the mountains and on her TT bike, Pooley was also capable of flitting between leadership roles and domestique duty depending on the race.<\/p>\n
But the 43-year-old\u2019s CV doesn\u2019t end there. There\u2019s also been four duathlon world titles, an Everesting record, marathon and triathlon successes, a Swiss championship in long-distance trail running, 11th at the uphill running worlds, a Brompton world championships win, and forays into bouldering, ultra-cycling, bikepacking, and cross-country skiing.<\/p>\n
Oh, and a University Challenge appearance, a PhD, and a founding role, alongside Marianne Vos, in Le Tour Entier, the ultimately successful campaign to reintroduce the Tour de France to the women\u2019s calendar. So, it\u2019s fair to say Emma Pooley is far from just a \u2018cyclist\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, I raced for a while and that was great. It was a really cool thing to get to do. And I feel super lucky for all the chances I had.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut more than that, I\u2019ve just spent a lot of my time in my life doing sport and being a bit obsessed with it. Partly for the racing, but also I just love doing it. I love training,\u201d Pooley tells the road.cc Podcast from her home outside Zurich.<\/p>\n
Now, however, she points out that most of her bike rides come courtesy of a heavy steel machine with flat pedals and panniers, which she uses to commute to work in the Swiss city, where she works as a geotechnical engineer. And she\u2019s keen to embrace new sporting challenges, even if she\u2019s, in her own words, \u201cshit\u201d at them.<\/p>\n
\u201cI made a conscious decision a few years ago about what am I going to do with my sporting side of me, which is really important. I\u2019m definitely not going to win a bike race again, and I\u2019m not going to get much faster at running,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do I carry on being happy with the sport I do? How I can I make it stay a meaningful part of my life, without just being whingy the whole time: \u2018I\u2019m getting old and I\u2019m so slow, poor me\u2019.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I do bouldering and in the winter I do ski touring and a bit of cross-country skiing. I\u2019m shit at them. I\u2019m really terrible at bouldering \u2013 and it\u2019s okay. It\u2019s fun being shit at bouldering.\u201d<\/p>\n
When she\u2019s not \u201chaving a nap on the mat\u201d while staring up at a rock wall, Pooley has also found the time to become a published author. But unlike most pro cycling memoirs (or \u2018chamoirs\u2019, as book reviewer Feargal McKay memorably dubbed them), this isn\u2019t your standard \u2018Bike Races According to Emma\u2019 fare.<\/p>\n
![\"2025](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/2025-oat-joy-emma-pooley.jpg\" "\\"2025")
2025 Oat To Joy by Emma Pooley.jpg (credit: road.cc)<\/p>\n
Instead, Oat to Joy is partly a collection of around 40 recipes for a range of snacks, based, naturally, on the humble oat and designed for people with active lifestyles and as an antidote of sorts to the typical highly processed sports \u2018fuel\u2019 on offer.<\/p>\n
But the second half of Pooley\u2019s book also sees her reflect on 17 key moments from her life and career, as well as themes surrounding gender and doping, often centred, again, on food.<\/p>\n
> Review:\u00a0Oat To Joy by Emma Pooley<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI love food,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve been wanting to write recipes and put them together in a book for over 10 years. But I thought I should put some stories with it, basically to make it more interesting to people and give it a bit of a different angle.<\/p>\n \u201cI was just going to write like short anecdotes about the time we had pizza at the end of the Giro or the crepes at the end of the Tour de Bretagne, and then I realised, wow, this is weird, I remember exactly what I ate after a bike race in 2008.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d write some stories about some of the funny stuff that I ate along the way, and then they evolved from silly anecdotes to some of them turning into almost mini-articles. And it took me ages!\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNobody asked Froome\u2019s rivals if they thought he was making them look fat\u201d<\/p>\n The publication of Oat to Joy and Pooley\u2019s food-centric tales earlier this summer coincided with the eruption of the so-called \u2018weight debate\u2019 in women\u2019s cycling, following Tour de France Femmes winner Pauline Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot\u2019s admission that her weight loss prior to the race, which saw her become the Tour\u2019s first home champion for over three decades, was \u201cnot 100 per cent healthy\u201d.<\/p>\n >\u00a0\u201cI just hope young girls now don\u2019t think they need to be super skinny\u201d: Weight debate ignites at Tour de France Femmes after Pauline Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot admits she \u201ccan\u2019t stay like this forever\u201d and Demi Vollering says \u201chealth is most important\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n Those comments sparked weeks of debate on social media, criticism from her rivals<\/a> (Marlen Reusser claimed that Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot\u2019s weight loss \u201cputs pressure on all of us\u201d), and countless think pieces in the cycling presses. And, Pooley says, blown entirely out of proportion, a reflection she believes of cycling\u2019s archaic approach to both gender and weight.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it\u2019s interesting that it came up in the women\u2019s sport in a critical way, the angle taken by the reporting was very much, \u2018oh look, she\u2019s lost weight, let\u2019s get the other riders to criticise her for it\u2019,\u201d Pooley points out.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I\u2019ve never heard that happen in men\u2019s cycling. I don\u2019t remember when Froome won the Tour, reporters going up to his rivals and asking, \u2018oh, do you think he\u2019s making you look fat?\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s worth bearing in mind that it was handled differently than it would have been in the men\u2019s sport. And I am wary of thing being handled differently. After all, weight is a performance factor.\u201d<\/p>\n However, while she is critical of the media response to the Tour de France Femmes\u2019 weight debate, she acknowledges that the peloton \u2013 and cycling in general \u2013 is still struggling to shake off its unhealthy relationship with diet, in a world where riders weighed their chicken, went around pinching rivals\u2019 waists at the start of the season, and where \u2018skinny\u2019 is all too often equated with \u2018fast\u2019.<\/p>\n And it\u2019s something she admits she struggled with herself, both during her career and after leaving cycling.<\/p>\n \u201cI ride a lot with clubs, and there are always these throwaway comments like, \u2018I should lose weight\u2019 or \u2018I\u2019ve earned a pizza\u2019. And I\u2019m thinking you don\u2019t have to earn a pizza!\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cThat equating of having to do a certain amount to earn a treat, and that treat being the food you wouldn\u2019t let yourself have otherwise, or \u2018yesterday I ate too many calories so I have to ride an extra hour\u2019 \u2013 that\u2019s the kind of thing I used to do. So I recognise it, and it\u2019s not a healthy relationship with food.<\/p>\n \u201cThe environment when I was racing was pretty unhealthy when it came to assuming skinny was better. And I was predisposed to have worries about it, having come from running. I would say I was pretty healthy, but I did worry about it. Especially because I was a climber and I always thought I\u2019d be even better if I was thinner. But now I think, no way. If I was skinnier I\u2019d have lost power, and in the years when I was thinner I got sick a lot.<\/p>\n \u201cI had a bit of a problem with it for a while, and at some point I realised, during a big training block in Australia when I was staying with family and riding a lot, I realised the more I ate the faster I was, and I was getting stronger every week.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I went, \u2018ah, maybe this whole starving yourself this is not good!\u2019 After that, my mindset changed \u2013 not always successfully, though. It is hard in that environment. I was being compared to climbers and racing against people who had really obvious eating and dietary problems, and I always felt really fat.<\/p>\n \u201cBut mostly I was like, no, I\u2019m going to eat what I felt was right. It\u2019s not difficult to work it out, and I was going to eat as much as possible. But eating disorders never fully leave you.\u201d<\/p>\n Pooley\u2019s very personal approach to food and healthiness didn\u2019t always endear her to some of cycling\u2019s more old-school figures, howver. There was the time, recounted in Oat to Joy, when a sports director scolded her after the GP Montr\u00e9al, in front of all her teammates, for drinking a hot chocolate.<\/p>\n \u2018It sets a bad example to the girls who are trying to lose weight,\u2019 he shouted. Pooley had just won the race with a 110km solo attack.<\/p>\n \u201cI was like, I probably burned 5,000 calories today. I could eat whatever the fuck I like. And hot chocolate\u2019s not bad for you. Just because it tastes of chocolate doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s bad for you. He told you to put extra olive oil on your pasta, but you shouldn\u2019t have anything that tastes of chocolate.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was an idiot. So I had a bit of a fight with him. He wasn\u2019t the only idiot, there were plenty of other idiots \u2013 and there were some very good people too.<\/p>\n \u201cBut it was quite fun taking a stand against some of the idiots in the sport, I had some DSs who were just fuckwits about food.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt was everything I ever dreamed of\u201d<\/p>\n Pooley\u2019s predisposition to challenging her sport\u2019s \u2018idiots\u2019, she acknowledges, earned her a reputation, alongside GB teammates Nicole Cooke and the late Sharon Laws, for being \u2018difficult\u2019. A troublemaker.<\/p>\n That \u2018difficult\u2019 reputation was solidified during her battle to redress cycling\u2019s gender imbalance. In 2013, Pooley became one of the co-founders, alongside fellow riders Marianne Vos, Kathryn Bertine, and triathlete and four-time Ironman world champion Chrissie Wellington, of Le Tour Entier.<\/p>\n The campaign group was set up to support the growth of women\u2019s cycling and help establish a proper women\u2019s Tour de France, a goal partially achieved at first through the one-day La Course race (its inaugural editions held on the not very Pooley-friendly cobbles of the Champs-\u00c9lys\u00e9es) and then fully in 2022, when ASO resurrected the Tour de France Femmes.<\/p>\n \u201cAt some point I realised that your job as an athlete isn\u2019t actually winning races, it\u2019s \u2013 and this will sound corny \u2013 to inspire people to ride bikes or run, depending on what your sport is,\u201d says Pooley, a past winner of the Grande Boucle, by definition a descendent of the women\u2019s Tour of the 1980s, but which by 2009 had long lost its lustre, prestige, and all-important name recognition.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause I remember when I was a kid watching Paula Radcliffe in the marathon or Kelly Holmes winning double gold on the track and crying with like emotion and being so inspired to go out and run.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I realised that if there\u2019s anything useful I could do in the sport, it would be to have that kind of effect on young people. And it doesn\u2019t have to be that women inspire girls and men inspire boys and they\u2019re totally separate \u2013 but there is a bit of, \u2018you have to see it to be it\u2019. And where the fuck was women\u2019s racing on TV when I was a kid?\u201d<\/p>\n While Pooley humbly stresses that her own role in progressing women\u2019s cycling is relatively minor, she is happy that the sport is currently on the \u201cright track\u201d, thanks in part to the ongoing work of The Cyclists\u2019 Alliance, led by her old teammate Iris Slappendel.<\/p>\n \u201cI see way more women riding and I hear lots of stories about how much they love watching the racing and the fact the women racing now are heroes,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to gradually raise the level of conditions for riders, which feeds back into the quality of the racing and the quality of the teams and the environments that we race in. And just it being a less miserable experience \u2013 because it was pretty miserable for a lot of people when I was racing.\u201d<\/p>\n The success of the Tour de France Femmes even inspired Pooley this summer to venture to the Col de Joux Plane, the first time she\u2019d ever watched any iteration of cycling\u2019s biggest race from the roadside.<\/p>\n \u201cI was like, wow, there\u2019s really a lot of people,\u201d she says. \u201cIt was amazing. I was really emotional in a weird way. I shed a tear, it was beautiful to watch. And the highlight was watching Marianne ride by. It was everything I ever dreamed of.\u201d<\/p>\n But over a decade ago, when she was in the trenches with Vos fighting for a women\u2019s Tour de France, the crowds and spectacle of the Joux Plane seemed lightyears away.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was so exhausting and it was so much work,\u201d Pooley says of her time with Le Tour Entier. \u201cAnd it felt largely, not even thankless, it felt like I really got people\u2019s backs up and I felt really criticised a lot of the time.<\/p>\n \u201cThen I was on the UCI committee for a year and that was also just really frustrating. So I was like, fuck sports politics, I\u2019m getting out.\u201d<\/p>\n Pooley\u2019s foray into cycling politics also had ramifications on the sporting side of things. In Oat to Joy, she claims that one female team manager, trying to encourage Pooley to sign for her team, told her that, if a deal was done, they would contractually ban her from publicly commenting on women\u2019s cycling. Bad publicity, apparently.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd that was a female DS,\u201d Pooley says now. \u201cA female DS who subsequently worked in media, commentating on the likes of La Course.<\/p>\n \u201cSo she basically made a living off the work of people like me kind of campaigning, improving the profile of the sport.<\/p>\n \u201cAnyway, that pissed me off.\u201d<\/p>\n Pooley\u2019s cycling career may have been punctuated by different kinds of conflict \u2013 whether it was in the press, UCI conference rooms, or in the dining rooms of post-race hotels \u2013 but a decade on, it\u2019s clear that she\u2019s now at peace with her role in the sport, and how others view her.<\/p>\n \u201cA person who is not accredited enough is Nicole Cooke, because she had to fight so hard for everything she won before 2008,\u201d Pooley says.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd because she was also before the era of it being on TV very much and because she stood up for herself, British Cycling didn\u2019t love her. They also didn\u2019t love me, interestingly.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I was writing the book and I was struggling with the chapter about the Tour de France, and basically like fighting people like Dave Brailsford and stuff, someone told me that enemies are a sign of a life well lived, that they\u2019re a compliment.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd I\u2019m proud of the fact that Dave Brailsford doesn\u2019t like me.\u201d<\/p>\n For the moment, anyway, Pooley\u2019s \u2018enemies\u2019 are confined to the terrible drivers she encounters on her commute to work in Zurich, as well as the MAMILs on their expensive road bikes desperately struggling to drop her on the hill home.<\/p>\n \u201cNormally I get overtaken by people on very, very nice bikes with fancy kit \u2013 so I would like to rain more just I could try to keep with them and give them a total crisis of masculinity,\u201d she laughs.<\/p>\n \u201cMy bike is steel, it\u2019s got massive panniers on because I sometimes have to take my building site helmet and my orange suit and stuff, so I need lots of space and I might pack a lunch.<\/p>\n \u201cSo if I can keep with them for just five minutes, these poor guys, they\u2019re just going to go home and cry and Google \u2018performance enhancing drugs for the commute\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n The lesson there? Never try to pigeonhole Emma Pooley.<\/p>\n The\u00a0road.cc\u00a0Podcast is available on\u00a0Apple Podcasts<\/a>,\u00a0Spotify<\/a>, and\u00a0Amazon Music<\/a>, and if you have an Alexa you can just tell it to play the\u00a0road.cc\u00a0Podcast. It\u2019s also embedded further up the page, so you can just press play.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI hate being called a cyclist. Because in my head I was never a cyclist. I was a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319192,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[569],"tags":[64,63,784,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-319191","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-cycling","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319191"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319191\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Pauline](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/20250803tdffaz2095.jpg\" "\\"Pauline")
Pauline Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot wins stage nine of the 2025 Tour de France Femmes (credit: ASO\/Thomas Maheux)<\/p>\n![\"Emma](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/sw06womens-road-race.jpg\" "\\"Emma")
Emma Pooley, road race, 2016 Olympics, Rio (credit: Alex Whitehead\/SWpix.com)<\/p>\n![\"Emma](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/sw11208.jpg\" "\\"Emma")
Emma Pooley, 2016 British national time trial championship, Stockton-upon-Tees (credit: Simon Wilkinson\/SWpix.com)<\/p>\n![\"Emma](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/ab40821.jpg\" "\\"Emma")
Emma Pooley, 2014 Women\u2019s Tour (credit: Alex Broadway\/SWpix.com)<\/p>\n![\"Pauline](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/20250803tdffaz1087.JPG\" "\\"Pauline")
Pauline Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot wins stage nine of the 2025 Tour de France Femmes (credit: A.S.O.\/Pauline Ballet)<\/p>\n![\"Emma](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/ga4r5946.jpg\" "\\"Emma")
Emma Pooley, time trial, 2016 Olympics, Rio (credit: Alex Whitehead\/SWpix.com)<\/p>\n![\"Nicole](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/nicole-cooke-and-emma-pooley-show-their-medals-2008-olympics-beijing.jpg\" "\\"Nicole")
Nicole Cooke and Emma Pooley show off their medals from the 2008 Olympics in Beijing (credit: Getty)<\/p>\n