Claire Steels: From personal trainer to the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift

This time last year, former duathlete Claire Steels was racing for a Spanish Continental team, balancing a full-time job as a personal trainer with her blossoming cycling career. Fast forward to this July, she’s about to start her first Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift after becoming one of the most exciting riders in the Women’s WorldTour in 2023.

Since signing for Israel-Premier Tech Roland at the start of the year, Steels has proved to be one of the team’s most valuable riders, bringing home some big results and becoming their second-highest UCI points scorer. As a result, she earned a call-up to the biggest race on the calendar in only her first year as a full-time professional.

“I’m really excited,” Steels told GCN before the Tour. “That’s always my overwhelming feeling when it comes to any of these races. Because I entered the sport relatively late, and this is also so new to me, it means I’m just so grateful for the opportunity. I’m excited about challenging myself and being there with the team. We have such a great relationship as riders and staff that it’s going to be a wonderful experience. Definitely hard, and no doubt emotional, but I’m really, really pumped and really excited about all of it.”

Despite the excitement about just getting a start at the race, make no mistake, Steels is not just there for the ride. Coming off of sixth overall at the Tour de Suisse, an important Tour warm-up race, and having taken a win at the hilly reVolta race in April, Steels will be Israel-Premier Tech Roland’s protected GC rider in France as the team target success throughout the week.

“I’d imagine we will go into the start with overall GC ambitions, and then see how things pan out in terms of myself,” she said. “And then the other riders that we have there may be looking more towards stage success. But anything can happen, and if I lose a lot of time on a certain stage, then maybe we might look towards the stage win on one of the more mountainous courses. There are many different options, because of the varied nature of the stages.”

The journey to being a pro cyclist

Though you wouldn’t guess it from the fact she is leading a WorldTour team at the Tour de France Femmes this July, Steels was a latecomer to cycling as a career and has only this year stopped balancing it around another job.

Formerly a duathlete in her 20s, Steels has run a personal training company for the last few years, and it was an almost accidental transition to becoming a competitive cyclist after a move to Mallorca at the start of her 30s.

“I went out to Europe predominantly for a bit of a lifestyle change, to be honest,” Steels explained. “Becoming a professional cyclist wasn’t the driving factor, it wasn’t really the goal. It was sort of a byproduct of living in Mallorca where the climate, the roads, the training conditions, everything is so much easier than in the UK.”

Already a cyclist from her duathlon days, Steels started riding and training more in Mallorca, leading to her picking up a spot on the Continental team Sopela, based in the Basque Country and a regular feature of the Spanish Cup racing calendar.

© Velo Collection (TDW) / Getty Images

Claire Steels representing Sopela in 2021

“It was quite a daunting experience, even though I was 32 when I started riding for Sopela," she said. “I could speak a little bit of Spanish but not a lot, and going into a team where I was surrounded by riders in their early twenties who knew so much more about cycling than I did. And I couldn’t really communicate, so I did have a couple of ‘oh god, what am I doing?’ moments, but I don’t like to shy away from a challenge, so I persevered.”

Steels spent three seasons with Sopela, picking up some good results in races in Spain and France, enough to suggest that, despite her relatively late arrival to the sport, she could have a future in professional cycling. The only question, though, was how to make that a practical reality.

“Halfway through last year I was thinking, I either need to go to a WorldTour team or I need to stop because this is getting so hard, I’m exhausted, I can’t juggle full time working and training,” she said. “Even on a Continental team, if you want to be doing well you still need to be putting in a lot of training hours, but juggling that and running a business, I was just running out of energy quite quickly.”

The mission then, was to find a spot on a WorldTour team for 2023, something Steels’ team manager helped her a lot with, she explained - contacting people within the sport, sending her to races where they knew WorldTour teams would be watching. And they clearly were, as Israel-Premier Tech Roland spotted the Brit and signed her for 2023.

“It does feel like a natural progression,” she said of her move to the WorldTour this year.

“It’s not the traditional British path, but it’s one that I’m glad I’ve taken. I'm glad I’ve gone for this route rather than maybe the more traditional structures.”

The step-up to WorldTour

Many riders will talk about the challenge of stepping up to the WorldTour, the very top tier of women’s cycling, but for Steels, the chance to race for a fully professional team has transformed her experience as a cyclist. It may be a significant step in terms of level, but it’s a move that has also allowed Steels’ performance to flourish.

The race craft, Steels explained, had been less of a learning curve as, unlike riders who may step up to the WorldTour very young, she had already had the chance to ride in a professional peloton, learning how to race and honing her skills. The more important aspect, then, was a practical one.

“For me, the biggest thing about being on a WorldTour team is having the financial stability and the financial support to allow me to focus fully on not just training, but also resting and recovering. The rest and recovery and sleep is the biggest difference for me this year, and that’s the thing that’s made the biggest improvement in my performance - I’m not juggling it around running a business and working so much. I’m not teaching fitness classes first thing in the morning straight after training, I can really allow my body and my mind the time to recover that it needs.”

© Velo Collection (TDW) / Getty Images

Steels impressed in the block of Spanish races in May

It may seem easy to overstate how these small changes can influence performance, but Steels’ success in the WorldTour this season is proof of what a difference it can make. It’s something Israel-Premier Tech Roland have clearly noticed, too, sending Steels to her first Tour de France this summer.

“I’m really grateful for the team on the whole,” she said. “They’ve given me the opportunity to live and ride as a WorldTour rider, and that has changed so much for me in terms of time I can commit to training, time I can commit to recovering and becoming a better cyclist. Then to have the confidence in me and give me the opportunity to go to the Tour, it’s a big responsibility but it’s a really nice opportunity, and definitely one that I’m really excited about.”

An underrated Tour de France team

A new WorldTour team in 2022, Israel-Premier Tech Roland have flown somewhat under the radar over the last 18 months, but are hoping to change that at this year’s Tour de France Femmes. Tamara Dronova, the team’s most successful rider, rode an impressive race in 2022, but with Claire Steels in the mix this year, the team should have double the chances to leave their mark.

Though they’re not the biggest names in the peloton, Steels was full of praise for her Israel-Premier Tech teammates, from Dronova - “she’s just an absolute monster” to Lizzie Stannard - “she’s fantastic” - and pointing to the shared experience and expertise from riders like Lara Vieceli and Caroline Baur.

With Steels, Dronova, Vieceli and Stannard all heading to the Tour, joined by Nathalie Eklund, Elena Hartmann and Fien Delbaere, it’s clear from the Brit that they have confidence in themselves ahead of the next week in France.

“I felt like at the start of the year, we were still quite an unknown team with a few unknown riders,” Steels said. “And slowly we are chipping away at that reputation. People are starting to take notice, and realise that there are some strong riders there, and that we can produce some really, really great results.”