'I don't want to stop riding and racing' - Joss Lowden on the tough decision to retire

All season, Joss Lowden had been looking forward to Tre Valli Varesine, her final race as a professional cyclist. In her own words, she was “desperate” to get across the finish line, and end her career. “I literally couldn’t wait until the season was over,” she said. But in the pouring rain of Lombardy, when the moment came to hang up her bike, she found herself with mixed feelings.

“I thought, ‘I don’t want it to end. I’m loving this trip so much, and I’m really enjoying being away with the girls’,” Lowden said. “There are all sorts of feelings about it, whether I actually really want to retire or whether I don’t, but I know, essentially, I do. It’s just not so black and white.”

The Uno-X rider was one of just 35 finishers at the Italian one-day event. Afterwards, aged 37, she called time on a seven-year road career, one that saw her break the world Hour Record, become national time trial champion, and represent her country at the World Championships and Commonwealth Games. Still, speaking to Cycling Weekly days later, she made clear she’s not finished on the bike.

“I’m not 100% sure I am completely ready to stop, which is why I leave it open and say it’s the end of my professional road racing career, it’s not necessarily the end of my racing,” Lowden said.

“I don’t want to stop riding and I don’t want to stop racing. I don’t feel like I hate racing, and I’ve had enough of it. I don’t feel like I don’t want to train anymore. What I don’t want anymore is the structure, and the calendar made for me, because that’s what’s difficult with being a mum and a wife to the busiest man in the world.”

In June 2023, Lowden and her husband, Olympic silver medallist Dan Bigham, welcomed a son, Theo, to their family. She returned to racing seven months after giving birth, and has ridden a full road calendar this year.

How important was it to her to get back competing? “It was really important,” she said. “It’s quite ironic, because I really wanted to show that you could have a baby, you could have a family, and you could still be a top-performing professional athlete, and I feel I didn’t necessarily do that.

“I think you need to have a huge amount of support to be able to do it. I think it is possible, and I would absolutely encourage any female to have a baby and come back and train to race, but it is really, really challenging, and you need a lot of support.

“We didn’t really help ourselves because we were living up in Andorra, which made the travel really long, and you just don’t have the family network around you that I think you need. But it was really, really important to do another year’s racing, and I’m really pleased with it.”

In a world of 18-year-olds signing WorldTour contracts, Lowden came late to cycling. She was 30 when she joined her first UCI team, and 34 when she turned professional, having previously worked as a project manager and a data analytics consultant.

“I feel like I spent such a lot of the early part of my working life, and my career, really wanting to be older, because I wanted to be taken more seriously,” she said. “When I moved into cycling, I thought, ‘Oh, suddenly I’m like the oldest. That’s really weird. I want to be younger now.’”

The reality is that, when Lowden was younger, cycling didn’t really interest her. “Nutrition just wasn’t as good back then,” she said. “It wasn’t abnormal that you’d go out on a 120km ride and just take one water bottle and a banana, and then funnily enough, you feel really, really rubbish. I just didn’t really like it, and then it just really changed.”

That moment came on a cycling holiday to Mallorca in 2016 with her then club Lewes Wanderers. It was riding around the Spanish island that she realised she had talent. “I was just good. That was it really. And I really liked being better than all the men,” she said.

“That was enough to make me think this is worth pursuing, and then I guess I was just successful really quickly. If you go and do some races and you win, and you break records, of course you’re going to get addicted, because winning is addictive. It made me love it really.”

Now, reflecting back on her career, it’s not the victories – such as her national time trial title, successful Hour Record attempt, or overall win at the Tour de Feminin in the Czech Republic – that spring to mind as her proudest moment. No, it was the bronze medal she won in the mixed relay team time trial at the 2019 World Championships, in a team with her now husband Bigham.

“That was definitely a massive high. It was so unexpected,” she said. “It was just so, so exciting. Obviously a home World Champs, and being on the podium in the hot seat for such a long time. That was really, really cool.”

As she looks beyond the pro peloton, Lowden has a few ideas of how she'd like to keep bike racing in her life. "I might go race gravel," she said, adding that Bigham is trying to convince her to take on the 4km individual pursuit world record on the track. "But I'm thinking, how much am I willing to give myself up as a guinea pig for that project?"

The 37-year-old's also got her eye on the British time trial scene. Might we see her and Bigham, who is retiring from the national squad, taking on some club 10-mile events next year? "I wouldn't be surprised it it happened," Lowden said. "Weirdly, I quite like the idea of doing a 100-mile time trial.

"You just pick little challenges for yourself. I think Dan would quite like to go and break a load of records. Of course, he loves breaking a record. It’s not a plan, but if I was to be transported a year or three years and that’s what we’ve done this year, I’d be like, ‘Yeah, OK. Sounds about right.’”