After nearly two years of trying, after long periods of injury and recovery, after progress interrupted by numerous setbacks, there was a point a few weeks ago where her patience finally ran out.
Imogen Cotter had been badly injured in a training accident in January 2022. Hit by a car while training in Girona, Spain, she suffered multiple fractures. She was sidelined for a long period, underwent five operations during that year, and kept working hard to be in solid shape heading into this season.
Cotter showed good progress in April, netting 14th overall in the Gracia race in the Czech Republic, but was then left on the sidelines for two months due to the stacked roster of her Fenix Deceuninck team. After building fitness by competing in races against male competitors in Ireland, she then resumed international competition in July.
Setting new personal best power records was encouraging, but she had another big setback in the Giro Toscana in Italy in August. Cotter was wiped out in a crash on stage two. She fell hard, badly bruising the bone in her right hip, and suffered a lot of soft tissue damage.
“I’ll be honest. I thought that that might be it for cycling,” she told The Irish Times on Thursday. “I just felt really burned out. I felt like I just didn’t know where I was going with the sport. I’d worked so hard to get back my fitness, setting these new best power numbers, only to crash again.
“I know it is the nature of sport, but sometimes you just want a clear run at things. It just never seemed to happen. I thought that I might just be done, that I’d retire.”
The Clare woman was heading into the offseason anyway and decided to approach things as if she had quit the sport. She completely switched off, only for something unexpected to happen. “I started to really miss my bike,” she explains. “I signed my contract, and I’m racing for another year.”
Now 30 years of age, Cotter came into the sport relatively late. She had a background in running, swimming and triathlon, then changed to cycling in 2017. She was second in the national championships two years later, moved to the continent and competed with teams there.
Winning the national championships towards the end of 2021 led to a contract with the respected Plantur Pura squad, only for her to be hit by that car while training in January 2022. That began a long period of ups and downs, and the faltering route to where she is now.
Thankfully, things are looking up. Left without a team for the upcoming season, she had sent out CVs to multiple squads. She heard back from the up-and-coming Hess Cycling Team, a British-registered squad that has its sights firmly on the top of the sport, and came away from that conversation encouraged by what she heard.
“I had a call with one of the guys from the team. I’ll be honest, because the team was in its first year, I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know how professional it was, how it would look from the inside. As soon as I got off the phone, I was speaking to a friend and said, ‘I got a really, really good vibe off them’.
“It seems like they have a very holistic approach to cycling, which for me that’s really important. It takes the person into account as well as the athlete. The mental side of things as well as the physical. For me that just seems like a really good fit for me at the moment.”
And there’s more to the team than that. Backed by financial controller turned private equity group owner Rolf Hess, the 68-year-old Swiss national recently told the BBC that he intends increasing the team’s budget to “around five million euro” within five years.
Becoming part of cycling’s top-ranked WorldTour division is a target, and so too is competing in the women’s Tour de France by 2025.
Hess is looking for sponsors but says he is committing to putting his own money into the project as well. Looking for strong riders who are also very active on social media – something Cotter does very well – he said that there are long-term opportunities for the riders behind cycling.
“Influencing on social [media] could help our team and could help them,” he told the BBC. “We would offer them a personalised product – we have a perfume company in our group [portfolio], so a woman who is proving she is interested can be given a chance to create her own product and she will be remunerated on a permanent basis, post career.”
Cotter says that this was a factor in her decision to join. “That’s what I mean about the holistic approach. It’s not just thinking of us as we cycle, and then we’re done, left out into the wilderness. It seems like there’s a real thought process behind it.”
She laughs when describing a phone conversation she had with the team. “I said, ‘by the way, do you guys pay?’ And they laughed at me, because it’s unfathomable to them that they wouldn’t pay a rider. But as a female cyclist – and it’s definitely gotten better in recent years – there are UCI teams who actually don’t pay.”
Season break now over, Cotter will knuckle down in advance of the new season. There will be a meet and greet with the team in the coming weeks and likely a training camp in January. After that she hopes to have plenty of racing opportunities, building her form and getting back to where she would otherwise have been had she not had her big crash nearly two years ago.
How has that long period of injury and frustration changed her?
“I actually think I have more of a perspective when it comes to cycling. I think a lot of cyclists only know the bike, their only identity is them on the bike.
“I feel like I lived a life before cycling. I went to university. I worked jobs, and then I started cycling. And then cycling became my identity, and then that was stripped away from me. I had a year of being like, ‘what actually is my identity? What is Imogen the person like, not Imogen the cyclist?’
“I think that having that perspective of seeing like a world outside of a cycling and knowing that it wasn’t terrifying and boring and unfulfilling actually gave me a lot of peace. It took the pressure off.”
Offered a two-year contract by the Hess Cycling Team, Cotter opted to sign for just one. She believes that all-or-nothing approach could get the best out of her.
“I can just be like, ‘one last crack at this, like, let’s absolutely go and see where it gets me’. And I think that’s exciting. I feel like it must lead somewhere good. I mean, there has to be an up at some stage,” she laughs.
“I feel like I’m due a little boost after the last couple of years, after all of the hard work I’ve put in.
“I think there’s definitely something good coming in the next year. I feel positive about it.”
