Things are moving quickly for Alice Towers. I’m speaking to her via FaceTime a few days before she will get on a plane to fly to Australia and compete in her first World Championships. She’ll do so as the British elite women’s national road race champion, a title she secured with a mammoth solo breakaway around the roads of Scotland a few months ago. It was a race which Towers wasn’t really expected to win, but the longer I speak to her, the longer I understand that the 19-year-old isn’t an athlete who will be held back by the expectations of others.
“I was quietly confident, I knew I was in really good shape,” Towers says of the days leading up to the National Championships. “I had done a really good block of training and I was feeling good. I wasn’t a main favourite so there wasn’t any pressure or expectation. I just went into it thinking anything can happen with an open mind. I had secret ambitions. I never like to admit it but I was hoping for something.”
Towers is modest in her answers, but when a rider attacks solo – and fully commits to the move still with over 30 kilometres of a race remaining – they need tenacity and confidence. It’s this plucky attitude that caught the attention of British rider’s current team, Le Col-Wahoo, at the end of 2020 when she was set to move up to the elite category.
Earlier that year, at only 17-years-old, Towers was riding as a stagiaire with a Spanish team and was finishing UCI races alongside some seasoned professionals, despite still being a junior herself. “Tom Varney [Le Col-Wahoo general manager] contacted me saying after those results he would be interested. I met him in a cafe and it was really nice and casual the way I started talking to the team.”
The reasons why Towers – an exciting up and coming talent with a promising future ahead of her – was a strong signing for Le Col-Wahoo (then called Drops-Le Col s/b Tempur) are clear, but Towers joining the team worked for both parties.
“When I was 15 and 16 I had looked at the girls on that team, I was inspired by them. Their race program at the time sounded really good,” explains Towers. “It was a nice step because it was a British team. The stuff I did in Spain was amazing, a really good opportunity, but I think it would have been quite a challenging place to go as a first year because everyone was Spanish. Le Col-Wahoo was a good stepping stone for me to the pro peloton, and I think as a young British…