Pavé levels
WORDS: Kit Nicholson
IMAGES: HONOR ELLIOTT
There’s an expectation that every athlete who makes it to the professional peloton must have nodded to their hero’s image on their bedroom wall before a big ride, that they might seek to re-create or emulate the life and career of someone they’ve always looked up to, someone whose story they know inside out, from the first pedal revolutions to the last win.
For Flora Perkins, it’s much simpler. The 18-year-old is motivated not by a single role model, nor a particular race that she dreams of winning. Rather, the pursuit of pro cycling was borne out of family, community and a yearning for experience.
“We always cycled as a family, especially on holidays. We’d do bike rides, go off on adventures, explore whatever city we were visiting by bike. Every now and then I’d cycle to school, but it was all very casual, just like going for a walk with your family.”
Living in south London, the Perkins family found themselves just 10-15 minutes from Herne Hill Velodrome, an institution of cycling culture in the south of England.
“I went along to one of their holiday clubs with my brothers and really enjoyed it so I kept going. Then I was asked along to their weekly Friday night sessions and I did that for a year and a bit. I think when you go and you make friends, you just keep going, and I wasn’t necessarily going for the cycling.
“You don’t really realise it’s happening until it does. You just get more immersed in the world of cycling and the more people you meet, the more news you read, the more races you watch. Then I started racing myself and I loved that. Bit by bit it gets bigger and bigger, and then, ‘here I am’. It happened without me realising.”
One of Flora’s coaches early on was Alasdair Mangham, who first met her when she was 13.
“At that age, it’s very difficult to pick out who is going to really progress to the level Flora’s at. She was quite small for her age then. What you’re always trying to do at that age is get them to enjoy riding their bike, to enjoy racing. Flora wasn’t just about winning.”
Herne Hill was where a ‘bike ride’ took on a new meaning for Flora, she says.
“It changed from a thing I did casually to a more competitive thing. Once I got to the track, doing the sessions and racing, I really took to the competitive side. The bike became a means to race and win, so it took on a different edge. I got slightly obsessed, wanting to be the best, clean my bike, go to every session. You might not know very much about what you’re doing but you’re fully in.”
“It’s really weird to hear you call me a pro! I would not say I’m a pro yet. Maybe because I’m still at school...”
Though her family had always been sporty and bike rides were a regular activity, neither of Flora’s parents had raced bikes, and they found themselves taking on a new sport with their daughter. But as Flora progressed at Herne Hill and with Velo Club Londres (VCL), and subsequently got involved with British Cycling’s performance pathway – on what is known as an Olympic Development Apprenticeship (ODA) – the whole family got immersed into a strong and far-reaching community. Her father now races vets league at the track.
“The whole setup has got more structured as I’ve got older, especially for girls, and the team have roles now with special names. They had those roles before, but they maybe weren’t as clearly defined. It’s the parents as well. When dad and I got into it we didn’t know what we were doing, we were a bit in the dark, but we could ask the other parents a whole load of questions. There are so many people involved, to a small or large extent.”
“With VCL, it’s not my club, it’s our club. [My parents] probably have more friends at VCL than I do… I haven’t counted! But they’d go to socials without me, they’d go to the track when I’m not there. They’re part of the community as well and will continue to be when I’m not at home anymore.”
Thea Smith is the cycling development manager at Herne Hill Velodrome and she too has seen the women’s and girls’ provision improve over time.
“Part of the reason that the girls’ session is now so popular is because I and my fellow coaches have put in the work and the time to build relationships with the girls, the families, the parents that come along. We help them understand what track riding’s about, why it’s cool, why it’s exciting, what the next steps might be.”
Trailblazer
Flora is not the first product of the Herne Hill and VCL combo to turn pro. Fred Wright, who recently achieved a career-best seventh at the Tour of Flanders, and Ethan Hayter, Olympic medalist on the track and a proven winner on the road are both thriving in their third years on the WorldTour.
Flora is the first girl to make the step, but she won’t be the last who develops through the same open and friendly system she enjoyed.
“I don’t know if the success has been deliberate, it’s just come as a result of building a community and good development of bike riders. It’s a great community of people who really enjoy what they’re doing, and you can race just to race or you can not race at all.”
Perhaps it’s a result of the passion that Herne Hill cultivates, and the simplicity of bike riding, that Flora is almost a little surprised to find herself where she is.
“Can I just say, it’s really weird to hear you call me a pro! I would not say I’m a pro yet. Maybe because I’m still at school, and though you get paid a bit it’s not like a normal job. Maybe next year I’ll feel pro, but I don’t feel pro yet.”
It only took her to be reminded of the events she’s raced in recent weeks – including two Monuments – to concede, “That’s true, that’s true. Good argument!”
Flora will sit her A Levels later this month, and while many of her school peers have endured weeks and weeks of wall-to-wall revision, Flora spent her Easter holidays racing with her Le Col - Wahoo teammates. Often the team’s general manager Tom Varney would rise early (or so he though), go downstairs and find Flora already at the table in the team house in Belgium hunched over a text book.
Flora’s racing with the team started small with the low-pressure Volta Limburg, gradually learning the ropes, and built up to a week of WorldTour events with Paris-Roubaix, La Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
“It was a bit of a mixed bag. I had some crashes, sometimes I couldn’t do my job as well as I wanted to, but I got a very rich experience, and I came away knowing better how to handle different situations. Le Col - Wahoo are really good at walking you through that. We’ll have meetings and informal chats about how the day went, and we fill out evaluations so you can process each race after it happens. I’m surrounded by people who really know what they’re talking about, and other riders who’ve been there and done that, so you get the rider aspect too.”
While Alasdair Mangham is very keen to play down his own part in Flora’s journey, always emphasising the “collective effort” of VCL, he says it was a race last year that actually represented the fulfilment of Flora’s potential.
“I felt very proud of her, watching her at Worlds [2021, junior race]. It was the realisation of all the potential that we knew that she had. A lot of people were surprised by the maturity with which she rode, but I and the other coaches at VCL certainly weren’t. The way she was able to do the job for the team, was exemplary – she showed some real team captain qualities.”
While there hasn’t been one individual or one nugget of advice that is driving her development, the learning doesn’t stop for Flora.
“It’s so clichéd but a lot of this year is about experience and being in the situations that you’ve created in your head or you’ve watched on TV. You might think you know what do in that situation, but when you get there, it’s different, or it’s exactly the same, but just experiencing it deepens that understanding.”
Thea Smith summarises just what it means and will mean for young women riders coming through to see Flora in races like Paris-Roubaix.
“When Flora was younger she maybe didn’t have the role models to look up to, whereas now Flora is a role model.”
She may not have had a poster of a bike racer on her wall growing up, but there’s a chance a young rider somewhere in South London might one day grow up with Flora Perkins as their own personal hero.