This article is from Rouleur Issue 110, March 2022
See Kasia Niewiadoma and a host of other cycling stars, and the latest kit, at Rouleur Live on November 3-5. Buy your tickets here.
Mihi is the name for the traditional introduction amongst the indigenous Maori people of New Zealand. During a mihi, visitors introduce themselves not only by naming their iwi, or tribal group, but by naming the river and the mountain closest to where they live, or with which they most strongly identify. It’s a simple and wonderful way of expressing one’s proximity to nature. The hills and the rivers define who we are just as much as our genes. Some things go deeper than our most recent achievements or our latest Instagram handles. Some things are more important.
Within a few minutes of talking with Kasia Niewiadoma, this is what we’re discussing. Not racing, not training camps, but deep feelings about identity and our connection to the natural world.
“I get reminded of what my grandfather would always say,” she says. “In Poland, especially where I grew up, a lot of people would own part of the forest or part of the land in the mountains. When they talked about their land, it was like they were talking about their kids: ‘It needs to be preserved, it needs to be taken care of, we need to clean it up.’
“They had this completely different approach to mother nature compared to what we have now. Unfortunately, I feel like over the years we have completely lost this deep appreciation for the mountains, for mother nature, right?”
Niewiadoma spent her most recent winter in the mountains surrounding Boulder, Colorado, with her boyfriend Taylor Phinney and his parents, former bike racers Davis Phinney and Connie Carpenter. It’s just one of the multiple worlds that she inhabits, along with her seasonal base in Girona, a new place in Andorra, her home in Poland and whatever cheap hotel she occupies on any given day as a racer on the Women’s WorldTour with Canyon-SRAM.
Last winter, the usual Rocky Mountain snows were replaced by spring-like sunshine – undoubtedly a knock-on effect of our collective failure to preserve our cosmic neck of the woods, so to speak – but the uncanny good weather gave her a profound sense of contentment that forms the basis of her complex answer to a cycling journalist’s lazy opening gambit: how’s the off-season been?
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“I grew up in the mountains. I feel…