Michael Woods, Hugo Houle and the tragic losses behind their career-defining victories

The links between Michael Woods and Hugo Houle can seem as numerous as those on a bike chain. They’re Olympians, teammates on Israel-Premier Tech and, as of this past summer, both Grand Tour stage winners. Another similarity they share—one that doesn’t catch your eye like a master link—is that they’ve faced tragic personal losses. These losses then had effects in races.

As Houle rode to his Tour de France stage win in July, you knew he was thinking of his brother Pierrik. With about 500 m to go before Hugo crossed the finish line in Foix, he seemed to be fishing out the cross he wears around his neck, only in races, to keep the memory of his brother close to him. Pierrik was killed in a hit-and-run as he was out for a jog in December 2012. Not long after that, Hugo vowed to continue to race for his brother and to one day win a stage in the race the two used to watch as young boys, rooting for daring riders trying to win out of breakaways.

Just behind Houle, Michael Woods came across the line in third. He had helped Houle get his gap ahead of the breakaway group before Mur de Péguère. Woods also had marked Matteo Jorgenson to keep the Movistar rider from catching up to Houle. When I spoke with Woods about Houle’s win this past summer, I asked the Ottawa rider about coming through tragedy as an athlete. In 2018, roughly two months before that year’s Vuelta a España, Michael Woods’s wife, Elly, gave birth to a stillborn baby boy who the couple named Hunter. “For me particularly—and I imagine this was the case with Hugo—the loss just gives you another layer of accountability and another layer of motivation,” Woods said. “When we lost Hunter, our son, I really dedicated the rest of my life to him in many ways. It’s a different situation than Hugo’s brother, but my wife and I, after we lost Hunter, we realized how lucky we were to just be alive, to get to experience life because Hunter was just about to make it there and he didn’t. We told it to ourselves that we owed it to him to do things to our best—as cheesy as it sounds: to live life to its fullest. So with that idea in my head, that’s how I tackled cycling after that. There’s a distinct line between how I started to perform after Hunter’s death and before. Before we lost Hunter, I was knocking at the door occasionally and…