The fastwomen of the Women’s WorldTour peloton are up against it at the moment, with Dutch rider Lorena Wiebes dominating the sprinting landscape and showing few signs of letting up.

At race after race, the same question comes up: ‘How to beat her?’ Fans, riders, and directeurs sportifs alike ponder it, and yet no answers present themselves. After all, she’s on a roll of sprinting results unseen in modern racing.

Irish racer Lara Gillespie is one of her fellow sprinters currently facing that question. But to get where she is today, Gillespie has overcome far more than a single opponent. If her determined climb to the top of the sport is any indication, she’ll find an answer.

After all, Gillespie’s journey from her first cycling club ride to the Paris Olympic Games spanned less than a decade. While her career included plenty of highs – including a host of Irish titles across multiple disciplines – she also faced more than her share of adversity.

Most notably, she suffered years of undiagnosed pain from OHVIRA, a rare gynaecological-renal syndrome, corrected with surgery in early 2022. But then, in the middle of that year, came a torn hamstring, while glandular fever struck in the winter. Taken together, the ailments wiped out a chunk of her 2021 season and most of 2022.

“When I was sick back in 2020 and 2021, I couldn’t even get out of bed; that’s how mentally draining it was. Sport is my life; it’s what makes me feel good, so when I’m not able to do it, it’s really, really hard on my brain, my nervou. s system, my whole body,” Gillespie told The Irish Times back in 2024.

“There was definitely a period when I really didn’t think I’d ever be racing again, so there’s not one day that goes by when I’m not grateful to be back on the bike. Everyone experiences hard times, though, but once things start going good again, you kind of forget about them.”

Since then, her progress has been lightning fast. In 2023, she joined the development programme of UAE Team L’IMAD, spending less than a year and a half there before moving up to the top-level squad.

She’s clearly a rider in a hurry and still on the rise.

‘She’s developed into one of the fastest sprinters in the world’

Gillespie’s 2024 season saw her break through with a win at the early-season Giro Mediterraneo Rosa stage race in Southern Italy. In May, there was a sprint victory at the part-gravel semi-Classic, the Antwerp Port Epic.

At the time, the win stood as her biggest accomplishment yet, though her Olympic appearances in the omnium, madison, and team pursuit came months later.

The following season brought another rapid step-up as her calendar expanded from just six Women’s WorldTour race days to 43, including debuts at Paris-Roubaix Femmes and the Tour de France Femmes.

Nevertheless, she made an immediate impact in the Classics with three podiums plus a fifth at the Classic Brugge-De Panne and sixth at Gent-Wevelgem.

This year, she’s stepped it up once again, winning Le Samyn and placing eighth at Paris-Roubaix. Wiebes has proved a tough nut, as yet uncrackable, but Gillespie is more than pleased with her progress.

“I think just having the consistency – I really had a good winter and also just having the WorldTour girls around me every time,” Gillespie told Cyclingnews about her 2026 campaign at the recent Tour of Britain Women.

“We’re always showing up with a really strong team in the way we ride. We’re protecting each other all day, and as a sprinter, that’s all you really want.”

The Tour of Britain isn’t the Tour de France Femmes, but it offered plenty of hills to tackle, with over 7,000 metres of climbing on grippy roads packed into five days.

Cherie Pridham, her directeur sportif at UAE, noted that races like this will only help her development and growing versatility.

“That’s why we’re here, you know? I think we’ve shown that Lara is very versatile. She’s not just a pure sprinter, but she can also fight on the punchy, small climbs,” she told Cyclingnews at the end of perhaps the race’s toughest day, stage 4’s hilly trek through mid Wales.

“She’s done a lot of teamwork here on the Tour of Britain for GC with Karlijn [Swinkels] and with Eleonora [Gasparrini]. And she came into this race having had some illness before, so we had to manage that.

“She was part of our development squad almost two years before she moved up to the Women’s WorldTour team. We moved her up, and she’s just progressed. We made a conscious effort to build a team around her for her Classics progress and also, of course, she’s developed into one of the fastest sprinters in the world.”

Finding success across disciplines

As Pridham pointed out, to reduce Gillespie’s talents to a simple descriptor – ‘sprinter’, for example – is to do her a disservice.

If it wasn’t clear already, she’s at home on the cobbles and on the track, where she made history as Ireland’s first women’s track world champion by winning the elimination race in Chile last October.

Gillespie’s journey to the rainbow jersey began almost by accident, even if she enjoyed a sport-filled upbringing in the Irish countryside growing up in Enniskerry, in sight of the Wicklow Mountains.

Already a keen swimmer and runner, she fell into the sport after trying triathlon for the first time. Soon after, during her Transition Year – an optional off-curriculum school programme available to teenagers in Ireland – she joined local road club Orwell Wheelers, initially thinking it was a mountain bike club. Just two years later, she won time trial silver at the European Youth Olympic Festival.

Road, track, mountain, cyclo-cross – Gillespie seems at ease on any bike and on any surface. For her, switching between disciplines is a privilege and a mental stimulus, rather than an undertaking to fret over.

“I love it. I love the switch because, well, for me, I want to get on a different bike every day. Today I want to go on a mountain bike, tomorrow I want to go on a track bike, the next day I’ll go on the cross bike, and then eventually I’ll go on the road bike,” she told Irish sports podcast Off The Ball last December.

“I also like, for example, when I got injured just before the 2025 Tour, and I thought, ‘Maybe I can’t do the Tour,’ mentally I was like, ‘Oh, but it’s OK because I have Track Worlds at the end of the season and I will be fit and healthy for that.’

“That, mentally, just takes the pressure off because it’s not the only thing in my life, and it means that if this doesn’t go well, okay, at least I can focus on this.”

This year, she’s switched effortlessly between disciplines. Barely two weeks after Paris-Roubaix, she was racing at the UCI Track World Cup in Hong Kong. After that, she was back on the road for a Giro d’Italia debut and a pair of national road titles ahead of a mid-summer track meet in Pordenone, Italy.

Having returned to the road at the Tour de Pologne and the Tour of Britain, she’s now primed to get back to the track.

“Towards the end, I’m focusing more on the track. The Track World Championships are in October. I have a couple more races with the team in September in China, and it’ll be nice to go for a few sprints there,” she told Cyclingnews.

“[Switching] worked quite well last year. I get like a month on track before, and then try to speed things up.”

Looking further ahead, a return to the boards at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 figures among her long-term targets, naturally.

‘She reminds me a lot of André. They’re pure leaders’

In Gillespie’s quest to be the best, she’s already racking up wins and major results.

Her consistency has been notable, and she can look back on 16 top-five finishes this year, including seven second places. Those results include a pair of second places at the UAE Tour, and two more behind Elisa Balsamo at the Giro.

In Britain there was an early positioning misfire – “the girls kept me really safe, but I lost a lot of position in the final kilometre and had to make up a lot of ground in the wind, so I never got to show my power,” she said of the Blackpool stage.

But there was another second place too, as she punched ahead of Chiara Consonni at the line in Leamington Spa, a positive outcome given that earlier in the race she noted: “I had a very bad bout of illness in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve been on and off antibiotics, so I’m just kind of taking it day by day.”

Gillespie’s support squad is a major reason for these successes and the progress she’s made. That support includes Pridham, the experienced voice in the team car, and a certain André Greipel, also part of the backroom staff.

She could scarcely have found a better mentor than the German, who racked up 158 professional wins and stood second only to Mark Cavendish as the defining sprinter of his generation.

During the UAE Tour, Greipel praised her rapid development. Speaking to Cyclingnews, the German highlighted how quickly riders like the Irishwoman learn and absorb feedback.

“For sure, the men are longer in the sport than some women. [There are] women in the bunch who picked up cycling maybe three years ago, so every day is a teaching process, and they can learn something new,” he said.

“They are really open to listen and learn to what a sport director, a trainer or even myself has to say. Also, they are really open to get feedback. I think it is really helpful if you have someone who can tell them in certain scenarios what would be a good idea during the race, and I think this would make the difference now to make the right choices and tactics.”

Personality-wise, Gillespie and Greipel are cut from the same cloth, according to Pridham. That alignment has paid off in their work together, with Gillespie and her lead-out train already delivering a string of results to savour.

“Of course, we brought in André to help us with the sprint lead-out and the sprint coaching, and that made a huge, significant difference to the team and to Lara. And the results were there. I think we came very close to beating Lorena Wiebes at the UAE Tour,” Pridham said, referring to stage 3 in Abu Dhabi Breakwater, where she came achingly close to victory.

“She reminds me a lot of André. They’re pure leaders. She’s growing into that leadership role. She understands what energy she needs to give and the right instructions that she expects from her riders.

“So she’s quite specific and clear on that, but that takes some time. But she has a lot of trust now from the girls that support her.”

‘You can’t be in the game without believing that you can win’

Gillespie is growing on and off the bike, and she’s already achieved plenty. Each year that goes by sees another major accomplishment added to a growing list of them.

She marked her return from illness in 2022 with two wins – the first in eight years by an Irish woman – at Rás na mBan, followed by a pair of under-23 European track titles in 2023. The next year brought that Olympic debut and a nomination for Irish Female Athlete of the Year before that track world title last year. Le Samyn is her standout this year – so far.

With this progress in mind, it’s crazy to think that just six years ago, Gillespie didn’t know any of this was even possible.

“I didn’t even know you could be a professional cyclist until maybe 2020. From a very young age, I remember saying to myself, ‘I’m going to go to the Olympics’. I had a vision of becoming an Olympic champion, but I didn’t have cycling in that vision whatsoever,” she told Cyclingnews earlier this year.

So what lies ahead – a Women’s WorldTour win? Beating Wiebes?

“Obviously, she’s the most dominant right now, and you can see she’s super consistent every time, able to show up regardless of the circumstances,” Gillespie said.

“But yeah, I think you can’t be in the game without believing that you can win. Every time, you have to believe, but it’s all about executing it in the end, and you need a team to execute it.”

Gillespie harbours the ambition to be where Wiebes is right now – the dominant force in the peloton, sweeping sprint after sprint and winning major Classics like In Flanders Fields and Milan-San Remo.

As she put it to Off The Ball, “I want to be the best in the world.”

Her rainbow jersey proves she’s already reached that goal in one sense, if not on the road. However, she told the podcast, “to me [they’re] different ideas” – it’s not about a single victory, but a consistency of success, and repetition of those big wins.

For now, reaching that goal will take more work, more progress, more growth. Gillespie has come a long way in a very short period of time, and it’s far from the end of her story.

“We just haven’t had the right run now for – like every other team, you know?” Pridham said of the battles against Wiebes.

“As she is showing here at the Tour of Britain, she can survive the climbs, and then she’s almost unbeatable. You need to try to catch her to win. But we’re very, very proud of Lara’s progress, and she still has a lot more to come.”

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