Homesickness, solo parenting and changed perspectives - the experience of fatherhood as a professional cyclist

Geraint Thomas, Wout Poels and Toms Skujiņš on the challenges - and positives - of being a father and a full-time WorldTour pro

12:31, Wednesday 6th December 2023

Matilda Price

Racing News Editor

Jonas Vingegaard and Geraint Thomas were joined by their children on the final podium of the 2022 Tour de France

How do you cope with being away from the baby? What’s it like to be a professional athlete and a parent? How do you balance it all?

These are all questions frequently posed to the mothers of the professional peloton, of whom there are more and more in recent years, with maternity leave provisions making life easier for those who want to take it. Whilst conversations around maternity, motherhood and children are - rightly and belatedly - becoming a norm in women’s sport, it’s a topic the many fathers in the professional peloton are rarely invited to speak about.

Of course, parenthood for female and male athletes are two very different things. As a woman, having a child more than likely means a nine-month pregnancy, post-birth recovery, and possibly several months of breastfeeding and otherwise close care of a newborn. The physical demands almost entirely fall on the mother, and therefore the sporting impact is much greater compared to a father welcoming a new child.

Outside of the obvious physical differences, though, balancing parenthood and a job that requires a lot of time away from home and a very focused lifestyle is a challenge that mothers and fathers alike must face. So what is it like for the cyclists who are fathers too?

Missing out

The biggest and most obvious challenge of being a father and an athlete is how much of your child’s life you miss out on. It’s a struggle that any parent with a job that involves a lot of travel must deal with, and that’s particularly heightened for cyclists who spend months of the year away from home, often for several weeks at a time.

“Of course you miss them, but also it’s part of the job,” Wout Poels told GCN succinctly during the Vuelta a España. And whilst it is part and parcel of being an athlete, that doesn’t mean fathers can’t find it difficult.

“It’s tough. Especially the older they get and they start to miss you, and you miss out on things that they’re doing back home,” Geraint Thomas, who has one son, told GCN, also at the Vuelta.

“The racing bit isn’t the worst, it’s just more the time away for training camps and everything."

Geraint Thomas' son visited him during the Giro d'Italia this year

It can be even harder when you’re not getting what you want out of a race, as Thomas found at the Vuelta. In the race that was meant to be a redemption for his last-minute heartbreak at the Giro d’Italia, the Welshman struggled on the climbs and suffered a handful of crashes that put an early end to his GC hopes, and made just the task of finishing the race difficult.

“Obviously if a race doesn’t go quite so well, like these three weeks, it does get even tougher because it’s kind of like ‘what was the point of all that’, missing everything for basically sod all, in this race. So it’s definitely tough but at the same time it’s the job, it’s what we do, and it won’t be too much longer anyway and I’ll be able to spend a lot more time with them.”

“It’s definitely difficult,” said Lidl-Trek’s Toms Skujiņš, who welcomed his first daughter last Spring. “The year she was born, I went to nationals five weeks after she was born, and obviously she couldn’t come, and then from nationals, I went straight to the Tour, so she was five weeks old and then I was gone for five weeks - half her life I was not there.”

Whilst levels of involvement might vary from parent to parent, family to family, it’s an almost universal truth that for most cyclists, being away from their family, partner or child and spending so much time on the road is a big part of the challenge of being a professional athlete.

A balancing act for fathers too

Perhaps the reason male cyclists are asked less about the challenge of ‘balancing’ parenthood and their career is that, even to the most progressive of minds, the assumptions we make around fathers and mothers are different. We assume working mothers are hands-on and involved, the child’s primary caregiver at all times, whilst it’s perhaps more commonly accepted that fathers can go away to train or race and that role naturally falls to the mother. There is never the cliché question of ‘who is looking after the baby?’, something often posed to working mothers.

Whilst that setup may be what works for many families, it’s not right to think therefore that fathers aren’t or don’t want to be hands-on parents. Whilst Wout Poels jokingly said it was easier racing the Vuelta than taking care of his child, Toms Skujiņš told a much more earnest story about balancing parenting and one of his biggest goals of the year.

It was a busy summer for all, but Toms Skujiņš' also factored in taking care of his young daughter

“This year Abby [Mickey, Skujiņš’ partner and a cycling journalist] went to the women’s Tour, which is obviously a week after the men’s Tour de France and the week going into San Sebastián,” he explained. “It’s always a race I want to do well at, it’s a super nice race in a cool area, and the whole experience is always quite fun. But Abby was gone, and I was solo parenting.

“There were days where I would get ready with our daughter at seven in the morning, drop her off at daycare at eight, get changed in the parking lot, go ride, get changed in the parking lot to pick her up again and come back home. And it would just be the two of us, I wouldn’t shower until she went to bed, I’d try to feed the both of us, and the whole day was just trying to get long training in, and still make sure at the same time I’m there for my daughter. I don’t think many pros prep for a race like that.”

After a week of balancing solo parenting and training for one of the biggest one-day races on the calendar, Skujins went into the race with an open mind, knowing it wouldn’t be the end of the world if he had a bad day, but also wanting to see how well he could do after balancing both. In the end, he finished sixth - his best-ever San Sebastián result.

“At the end of the day, it worked.”

Accommodations from teams

One of the many differences between female and male cyclists when it comes to parenthood is that, as far as UCI regulations are concerned, fathers don’t have any right to paternity leave when a child is born. Maternity clauses for women are only a recent addition, ensuring certain levels of pay and protections, but for the men, any discussions around leave are all at the teams’ discretion. And with paternity leave offerings still fairly small, even in wider society, it’s perhaps not surprising that cycling more or less shuns the idea.

You hear stories of riders having to leave for a race or team camp the day after the birth, or perhaps not even be there at all if the due date clashes with an important race. Cyclists’ careers are short, and form is fleeting, so it can be hard for a rider to give up an important goal to be there for an important day. That may seem strange to a typical parent, but for an athlete, a victory on the biggest stage is as much of a once-in-a-lifetime experience as the birth of your child.

What’s more, cycling is a precarious sport in terms of job security, and arguably with a child in the picture, it’s even more important that riders perform well enough to secure another contract. With this in mind, it can be difficult for riders to ask for anything more than the minimum when it comes to accommodations for the birth or parental leave.

“That’s the difficult thing in professional sport. If you don’t perform, you’re out,” Poels said.

“If you sign a three-year contract and a baby is coming and you want to stay five weeks at home without racing… I don’t know.”

Even then, there’s the fact that even if there were clear guidelines around paternity leave, not everyone would take the time - some cyclists would just prefer to be racing.

“I think even if I had the option to stay at home, I think I wouldn’t have done it, because I like to race and have my career, so it’s personal for everyone,” Poels added.

For others, though, taking that time is very important, and some teams can be much more flexible. Lidl-Trek became one of the first teams to really implement - and go beyond - the UCI maternity leave policies when Lizzie Deignan had her first child in 2018, and again with Ellen van Dijk, and Deignan’s second child, and it seems some of that attitude extends to the men’s team too.

The relatively new maternity clauses helped Lizzie Deignan to take time away from racing to have her two children

“I can only speak for our team, and there’s lots of things the team tries to help you out with in regards to the calendar,” Skujins, who has ridden for Trek since 2018, explained.

“Of course for the big milestones in life, like having a kid, they were very happy to let me have, I think, over four weeks [of time off around the birth]. From Romandie to the Dauphiné I didn’t race at all, it was all the time at home, I didn’t have to go to any training camps, nothing.”

However, Skujins is also keen to point out that it is personal, and different for different families. Whilst he wanted to have that time away from racing, he also recalled racing the Tour de France with Richie Porte in 2020, the year his wife gave birth and Porte stayed at the race, going on to finish third overall, his first Grand Tour podium finish. For Porte, that was what he felt was best for his situation at the time, and potentially his career as a whole.

Others may choose differently, as Wout van Aert did this summer, dropping out of the Tour early for the birth of his child, but there is no single way fathers and teams approach balancing the demands of racing, goals and family.

Changing perspective

Having a child is perhaps one of the biggest life changes a person can go through, and it’s no different for professional cyclists. There are many ways in which being an athlete can impact upon your role as a parent, but also ways that being a parent changes you as a cyclist.

“Training changed, my perspective on training changed, my perspective on racing and camps changed, but all in the best of ways,” Skujiņš explained.

“Some decisions are just simpler to make - not necessarily easier, but simpler. For example, when I was training after she was born, I was training by myself most of the time in May in Girona. When you’re training for the Tour, you’re pushing quite hard, you’re pushing to breaking point, and thus some sessions will not be as good as others.

“That used to be something that would stay on my mind for the rest of the day, trying to figure out ‘why did it go badly? Was it the fueling, were the efforts too hard, am I just not fit enough?’ but when she was born, it was quite easy, I just came home and I didn’t care so much about how training went - I cared, but it wasn’t on my mind all the time, I wasn’t worried about it as much. There were more important things than that.”

In other sports, particularly high-risk sports like motorsports or downhill mountain biking, there is anecdotal evidence of riders becoming more risk-averse after becoming a parent. Some of this is age - scientifically, younger brains perceive risk differently - but the fact of having more than just yourself to worry about surely also plays into it.

Cycling is nowhere near as high-risk, but safety is still a big concern in the professional peloton, so does that change when you know you have a child waiting for you at home? Perhaps not so much.

“I think that just comes naturally with age anyway once you’ve been around a while and you’ve had a few mishaps,” Thomas said.

“You can definitely see that the peloton is generally younger and a bit more chaotic and crazy, but having a son doesn’t really change that so much. I think if it did you wouldn’t really be able to race properly.”

For Wout Poels, it was a similar story: it’s not something you can necessarily let get in your head.

“On the bike, I don’t really think about it, because I think if you start to think about safety and everything then you’re not going to perform,” he said about his perspective since the birth of his first child. “But you’re always looking forward to going home again.”

Wout Poels won stages in the Tour and the Vuelta in 2023, the pay-off for the demands of the cycling lifestyle

Making the best of your career before retirement

As Thomas alluded to when he highlighted how much harder it is to be away when you’re not even getting anything out of the race, the challenges of being an athlete and a parent can also be motivation to make the very best of your time away.

For Skujiņš, one of the riders who clearly finds his time at home with his family very important, the flipside of that is that he wants to make the very most of this time when he has to balance family life and a demanding career.

“All the time that I spend away, I have to maximise, because if I’m away I might as well do the best I can in the thing that I’m doing. That goes for training camps and racing. In racing, I definitely have a mindset where I’m giving absolutely everything without regrets.

“It’s such a short period of my life, and eventually it’s going to be over, so I’m trying to make the best of it already, and with the family coming into play now, I think it’s even more important that when I am away, I make the most of it.”

When it comes to stopping, family also plays a very important role. Of course, performance and contracts are often what dictate when a rider will decide to retire, but for those who do get to choose the time themselves, many cite wanting to have more time at home as a reason.

“That would be the main reason for stopping really, my family and being home more,” added Thomas, who is a rider who is still performing well but very much thinking about when this chapter will end.

“Because I’m still enjoying riding my bike and racing my bike - this race [the Vuelta] wasn’t too enjoyable - but in general I still love doing it. But yeah, the main thing about stopping would be spending more time at home.”

The whole challenge of being a father and an athlete is perhaps made easier by the fact that it is just one chapter, not forever, and so whilst it is hard, it’s a trade-off cyclists can make.

“It’s a luxury to be doing cycling,” Skujiņš said. “But doing this luxury and being away from the family, I’m also giving up something important, so I’m just trying to make sure that I’m making the most of it.”