Natalie Quinn was sobbing on top of Mont Ventoux Friday at the Tour de France Femmes. Crying her heart out as her soigneur<\/em> rubbed her back and consoled her.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t because the part-time cycling coach had lost an important client either.<\/p>\n She had fought with everything she had, crossing the line 126th and second-last, just over 40 minutes down on winner Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney.<\/p>\n The main thing was, she finished inside the time cut, and could continue in the sport\u2019s most prestigious race.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cI had to switch bikes, which is not ideal,\u201d she told Velo <\/i>Saturday morning at the start of stage 8. \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Ouch.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was just too much,\u201d she said. \u201cI felt pretty defeated.\u201d<\/p>\n As if making the time cut while racing for French squad Mayenne Monbana My Pie, one of the smallest teams at the race, wasn\u2019t hard enough, she has to keep up with the demands of her online coaching business.<\/p>\n \u201cThe team does pay me a salary, but it is helpful to supplement it with some side gigs,\u201d Quinn says. \u201cThe majority of my money right now does come from the team but I have a few athletes so it just helps.\u201d<\/p>\n Her other peloton peers probably don\u2019t have an out of office email that may well read: \u201cSorry for my lack of response this week, I\u2019m racing the Tour.\u201d<\/p>\n Happily, she isn\u2019t getting any angry clients. \u201cLuckily, I don\u2019t have too many athletes right now and they are all pretty understanding of being in the Tour right now.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBesides a few texts here and there and me being like, \u2018yep, just go and do that\u2019, it hasn\u2019t been too much work.\u201d<\/p>\n It has been a fight for Quinn just to get to the Tour de France Femmes.<\/p>\n After the former U23 US champion turned pro with EF Education-Oatly in 2024, she joined Hess in 2025 and things got \u201ca little dicey\u201d.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Then she joined U.S. outfit Cynisca, although the team did not have money in its budget to pay her and went \u201con hiatus\u201d at the end of the year.<\/p>\n \u201cI was emailing every team I could get an address for with my resume, and then Mayenne was interested,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n After phone calls around last year\u2019s Maryland Cycling Classic, where she finished sixth, they signed up Quinn.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re pretty stoked in general. After yesterday, there was a little disappointment just in how hard the race has been,\u201d Quinn said of the team\u2019s mood.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s going okay. Stage six and seven were pretty hard for me. I think the heat is just a big factor,\u201d Quinn reflected about her race. \u201cAnd one of the things with being on a smaller team is we don\u2019t have as many people to be on the feed zones. So we don\u2019t have as much access to cold water.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cLike yesterday [stage 6], I was in a group and luckily [Liv-Alula] Jayco was willing to share all their water with me,\u201d she says, laughing.<\/p>\n Quinn was pleased with her stage four TT to Dijon, where she finished 28th.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cYou can be surviving and also be enjoying it. I think that\u2019s kind of what I tried to do this whole Tour,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n She currently lives in Toulouse, a city in the south-west of France. The language spoken by most of her teammates is coming along \u201cun petit peu<\/em>\u201d \u2013 a little bit \u2013 she says.<\/p>\n \u201cHalf the time, I\u2019m like, \u2018if something really important happens, one of my teammates will be like, \u2018Natalie, do you understand?\u2019 And I\u2019ll be like, \u2018no.\u2019<\/p>\n Quinn has one more day of intensive French speaking and suffering in Nice until she can call herself a Tour de France Femmes finisher.<\/p>\n She will be able to celebrate by the Mediterranean with her mother, who has been following the race.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/velo.outsideonline.com\/road\/road-racing\/tour-de-france-femmes\/the-american-underdog-coaching-cyclists-while-racing-tour-de-france-femmes\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/velo-cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Tour-0801-324-Copiar.jpg”] Andy McGrath Updated August 9, 2026 05:17AM 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\u2019t because the part-time cycling coach had lost an important client either. She had fought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[226,71],"class_list":["post-2085480","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-crawlmanager","tag-velo-outsideonline-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085480","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2085480"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2085480\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2085480"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2085480"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2085480"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Forced to race Ventoux on a 40-tooth chainring<\/h2>\n
Out of office: Sorry, am racing the Tour\u00a0<\/b><\/h2>\n
![\"Natalie](\"https:\/\/velo-cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Tour-0802-600-Copiar-720x480.jpg?width=1920&auto=webp&quality=75&fit=cover\")
On one of the Tour\u2019s smallest teams<\/b><\/h2>\n
![\"Natalie](\"https:\/\/velo-cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/Tour-0731-Photoshoot-98-720x480.jpg?width=1920&auto=webp&quality=75&fit=cover\")
Emailing teams to find a lifeline<\/h2>\n
No water but Jayco saves the day<\/b><\/h2>\n
![](\"https:\/\/velo-cdn.outsideonline.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/GettyImages-2289039809-720x480.jpg?width=1920&auto=webp&quality=75&fit=cover\")
Going native<\/h2>\n