When Rory Townsend, 30, never before a winner of a WorldTour race, never even part of a WorldTour squad, won the ADAC Cyclassics (formerly known as the Hamburg Classic) last weekend, there was a reason why he was gobsmacked and in utter disbelief, his hands on his head. And it wasn’t just limited to how he did it, impossibly denying A-list sprinters to win from the breakaway by a bike length. It was because his backstory never suggested that it would lead to this moment, a winner of a top-level race, the first Q36.5 rider to win a WorldTour event, before even Tom Pidcock had done so for the Swiss team.
Townsend, in retrospect harsh on himself, describes himself as forever having imposter syndrome, not quite believing he was good enough. Twelve years of racing, more than a decade of ploughing away at low-level races “where there’s only one man and his dog”, attests to that. “I never thought I’d be riding here, with the journey I’ve had, and never anticipated such a situation,” he tells Rouleur in the days after his biggest ever victory. But now he can finally believe he does belong. “Now it’s adjusting that mindset to not looking up to other riders, but going toe to toe with them,” he smiles.
To rewind the clock, Townsend started racing aged 11. He was competitive enough, but “I wasn’t particularly good,” he says. In his second year as a junior, he contracted Epstein-Barr virus and suffered from chronic fatigue. “I couldn’t race so I went travelling and in a weird way it was a real gift to me,” he reflects. “You see all these buzzwords and Instagram psychology shit of not comparing yourself to anyone else and just focusing on yourself, and I was almost given that lesson because of illness. There was no point looking at anyone else, as long as I got better than the week before. It forged that inner motivation within me. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was even doing with cycling, but I just knew I wanted to be as good as I possibly could be, to find out what I was capable of; it was a journey of self discovery rather than a journey of trying to achieve any external success.”
And so set in nine years of operating in the third-tier, representing various guises of the British team first known as Pedal Heaven in 2014 and eventually as WiV SunGod in 2022. “Pedal Heaven really took a punt on me but I got sick while riding for them,” he says. “They could have got rid of me but they kept me…