This article was originally published in Issue 114 of Rouleur.
Over the course of eight years, Jojo Harper has become one of the most recognised and celebrated photographers in cycling. From the team bus to the finish line and everything in between, her work depicts the human side of the sport in its rawest form.
For the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, however, Harper put herself on the other side of the lens in order to portray her day-to-day life as a working mother to her daughter, Winter.
Harper has worked with WorldTour team Trek-Segafredo since 2019 and although she works with both squads, it is with the women’s team, with whom she has been involved since their inception, that she feels most at home.
“They’re comfortable with me, and they see me as part of the team,” she tells Rouleur. “I know the women’s team better. I am female. Which makes a huge difference. I can say to Ina [Teutenberg, Trek-Segafredo directeur sportif ], ‘Can I come on the bus?’ or, ‘Can I go into a team meeting?’ She’s like, ‘You’re part of the team, of course you can.’”
When she made the decision to have a baby last year, Harper knew she wanted to come back to work after giving birth. Her last race with the team, at seven months pregnant, was the inaugural Paris-Roubaix Femmes in October, won by Trek-Segafredo’s Lizzie Deignan.
“Honestly, it was the most amazing day of work I’ve ever had,” she recalls. “Partly because it was the first one ever; it was historic. And partly because the team I work for won it and I had as much access as I wanted. Then and there I was like, ‘I want to come back for Roubaix.’”
That’s exactly what she did. Winter was born in December 2021 and by April 2022 Harper was back on the cobbled roads of Northern France for the second edition of the last race she shot before be- coming a mother.
Thanks to the help of Oliver, her husband, and the support of the team, Harper was able to bring Winter along. There she captured another Trek-Segafredo win at the Roubaix velodrome, as Elisa Longo Borghini took over the mantle from a now-pregnant Deignan.
However, one of the most powerful shots to come out of that day was not of the racing, nor was it taken by Harper herself. The image in question features Harper sat in one of the iconic Roubaix shower cubicles breastfeeding her daughter.
“I’ve always been so British, in that I don’t get naked in front of people,” she explains. “But when you…