The American Underdog Coaching Cyclists While Racing Tour de France Femmes

Natalie Quinn was sobbing on top of Mont Ventoux Friday at the Tour de France Femmes. Crying her heart out as her soigneur rubbed her back and consoled her.

It wasn’t because the part-time cycling coach had lost an important client either.

She had fought with everything she had, crossing the line 126th and second-last, just over 40 minutes down on winner Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney.

The main thing was, she finished inside the time cut, and could continue in the sport’s most prestigious race.

Forced to race Ventoux on a 40-tooth chainring

The 24-year-old from Utah suffered a mechanical problem at the bottom of the third-category climb preceding Ventoux as the race was speeding up.

“I had to switch bikes, which is not ideal,” she told Velo Saturday morning at the start of stage 8. “And then once we got to the bottom of the Ventoux, I realized the smallest front chainring I had on the spare bike was a 40. So I did Ventoux on a 40.”

Ouch.

“It was just too much,” she said. “I felt pretty defeated.”

Out of office: Sorry, am racing the Tour 

As if making the time cut while racing for French squad Mayenne Monbana My Pie, one of the smallest teams at the race, wasn’t hard enough, she has to keep up with the demands of her online coaching business.

“The team does pay me a salary, but it is helpful to supplement it with some side gigs,” Quinn says. “The majority of my money right now does come from the team but I have a few athletes so it just helps.”

Her other peloton peers probably don’t have an out of office email that may well read: “Sorry for my lack of response this week, I’m racing the Tour.”

Happily, she isn’t getting any angry clients. “Luckily, I don’t have too many athletes right now and they are all pretty understanding of being in the Tour right now.”

“Besides a few texts here and there and me being like, ‘yep, just go and do that’, it hasn’t been too much work.”

On one of the Tour’s smallest teams

It has been a fight for Quinn just to get to the Tour de France Femmes.

After the former U23 US champion turned pro with EF Education-Oatly in 2024, she joined Hess in 2025 and things got “a little dicey”.

That is putting it kindly. Translation: the team had funding and UCI registration problems and failed to pay riders before collapsing mid-season. The team collapsed months later.

Then she joined U.S. outfit Cynisca, although the team did not have money in its budget to pay her and went “on hiatus” at the end of the year.

Emailing teams to find a lifeline

“I was emailing every team I could get an address for with my resume, and then Mayenne was interested,” she says.

After phone calls around last year’s Maryland Cycling Classic, where she finished sixth, they signed up Quinn.

Who are the sponsors of this pleasingly alliterative team? Mayenne is a north-western French county, Monbana a chocolatier and My Pie (rather self-explanatorily) provides hot baked goods.

They are low-budget underdogs up against WorldTour giants. A decent analogy is visible every morning in the Tour de France Femmes start zone, their campervan dwarfed by the team buses of bigger teams.

“We’re pretty stoked in general. After yesterday, there was a little disappointment just in how hard the race has been,” Quinn said of the team’s mood.

No water but Jayco saves the day

“It’s going okay. Stage six and seven were pretty hard for me. I think the heat is just a big factor,” Quinn reflected about her race. “And one of the things with being on a smaller team is we don’t have as many people to be on the feed zones. So we don’t have as much access to cold water.”

“Like yesterday [stage 6], I was in a group and luckily [Liv-Alula] Jayco was willing to share all their water with me,” she says, laughing.

Quinn was pleased with her stage four TT to Dijon, where she finished 28th.

She has also had days in the front group, as well as a few enduring bad luck with crashes and mechanical issues sending her backwards.

“You can be surviving and also be enjoying it. I think that’s kind of what I tried to do this whole Tour,” she says.

Going native

She currently lives in Toulouse, a city in the south-west of France. The language spoken by most of her teammates is coming along “un petit peu” – a little bit – she says.

“Half the time, I’m like, ‘if something really important happens, one of my teammates will be like, ‘Natalie, do you understand?’ And I’ll be like, ‘no.’

Quinn has one more day of intensive French speaking and suffering in Nice until she can call herself a Tour de France Femmes finisher.

She will be able to celebrate by the Mediterranean with her mother, who has been following the race.