{"id":385148,"date":"2026-01-23T00:28:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-23T00:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/385148\/"},"modified":"2026-01-23T00:28:13","modified_gmt":"2026-01-23T00:28:13","slug":"helping-others-get-better-and-faster-that-really-gave-me-a-kick-alex-dowsett-discusses-life-after-retirement-and-how-he-found-his-next-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/385148\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Helping others get better and faster, that really gave me a kick’ \u2013 Alex Dowsett discusses life after retirement and how he found his next challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s Alex Dowsett here, back with another column for Cyclingnews. In my first entry, I told you about winter training camps and the logic behind doing them (or not)<\/a>, but today I wanted to rewind a little bit.<\/p>\n

Before I dive into discussing the other topics I\u2019m hoping to write about this season, I thought I\u2019d bring you into the frame on what happens when an athlete retires and why I now understand the phrase ‘an athlete dies twice.’<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m a couple of years out of being a pro, and I\u2019ve realised how quickly you are forgotten as the years pass \u2013 working with a junior squad for two years made it even more apparent!<\/p>\n

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So I’ll quickly bring you up to speed on some background credentials. I raced for four different WorldTour teams throughout my 12 years at the highest level of the sport, my career highlights were 15 professional wins including two Giro d’Italia<\/a> stage wins, two UCI Hour Record attempts, one successful<\/a> and one less so but a prouder achievement for me personally, and being the first and \u2013 currently \u2013 only elite sports person in the world with Severe Haemophilia A, a rare blood clotting disease. I raced nearly everything and was known as a TT specialist, but I could also do a mean lead-out. I didn\u2019t have the most power in the world, but I seemed to be able to maximise what I did have.<\/p>\n

Now you know a bit more about me, onto my retirement. Former Australian track and road cyclist Annette Edmondson<\/a> gave me a piece of advice about stopping racing as she retired the year before I did. That advice was to “simply say yes to everything”.<\/p>\n

She said opportunities would come my way, and I should spend a year or two working out what I liked and what I didn’t like, so that\u2019s exactly what I\u2019ve done and to an extent, what I am still doing.<\/p>\n

I knew from my racing days that I enjoyed helping others get better and faster at cycling. My dad used to get frustrated when I’d help my teammates, and they’d subsequently beat me in time trials. Seeing their eyes light up when I’d do a TT bike fit and unlock an extra 20 to 40 watts of sustained power whilst making them more comfortable \u2013 that really gave me a kick. So if I think about it, that, in a nutshell and in different guises, is what I do now. I help bike riders and racers get better at it, and I absolutely love it.<\/p>\n

The latest race content, interviews, features, reviews and expert buying guides, direct to your inbox!<\/p>\n

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\"AYVALIK,\n<\/p>\n

You’d often find me on the front, riding for my teammates (Image credit: Getty Images)<\/p>\n

“An athlete dies twice” is a adage I heard from British triathlete Alistair Brownlee this year, and while I’d heard it before, I never fully understood it until now.<\/p>\n

I’ve gone through almost a full lifecycle (minus the death part thankfully); apprenticeship, employment, mastering my craft, having to be smart with eking another couple of years out of it and then stepping away. It did feel like the closing of a chapter, and I was very lucky in that I got to close my chapter on my terms at the time I felt it was ready to be closed.<\/p>\n

My cup has been very full since then. I have a phenomenal family made up of a wonderful wife and two beautiful daughters (who also enjoy being on the bike!), and jobs that give me a sense of fulfilment and purpose. I stay fit, and I’m super optimistic for the future as well. There are challenges, of course, but you\u2019ll find no sob stories here today. I\u2019m very lucky in that regard.<\/p>\n

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What I\u2019ll close this column out with is what you\u2019ll expect to hear more of me about in this column. That is a bit of life in the WorldTour, but on the other side of the fence, my day-to-day full-time job is with the XDS-Astana<\/a> team.<\/p>\n

The back story to how this came about was after helping my good friend Mark Cavendish in the wind tunnel, six weeks out from his monumental 35th Tour de France stage win. I\u2019m not going to sit here and tell you I was solely responsible for it, but I was responsible for a small 3-5% in aerodynamic gain. XDS-Astana enlisted me for the following season, where arguably we had a bigger challenge, and that was to catapult the team out of a dire relegation position.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be letting you know a bit about this, plus what it takes to run a WorldTour team \u2013 which for me has been the biggest surprise \u2013 and what I do to help eke out those extra few percentage markers in the riders.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a big year ahead with multiple, important team time trials on the cards, so I\u2019m nervous to say the least. As always, my inbox is open, so if you want to hear about something in particular in these columns, just say the word.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s Alex Dowsett here, back with another column for Cyclingnews. In my first entry, I told you about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385149,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-385148","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385148","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385148\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}