Uno-X Pro Cycling Team

After launching their men’s team in 2021, Norwegian outfit Uno-X added a women’s squad to their ecosystem at the start of 2022, with the team being granted WorldTour status from the off. 

Notably, Uno-X committed to parity across resources and pay for both the men’s and women’s teams, so the WWT arm started strong with some solid support. As a result, they were able to sign some big names for their first year in 2022, including Julie Leth, Hannah Barnes and big home talent Susanne Andersen. Despite hitting the ground running, the team were unable to pick up a win in their first season, though they are keen to emphasise that their project is a long-term one. 

For 2023, they’ve strengthened their roster with the arrival of former world champion Amalie Dideriksen, super domestique Anouska Koster, and all-rounder Maria Giulia Confalonieri. Without a clear GC rider - especially with Joss Lowden out on maternity leave this season - the team will be likely targeting stages and sprints over overall results, but they certainly have some riders who are ready to tally a big result.

Anniina Ahtosalo

Maria Giulia Confalonieri

Mie Bjørndal Ottestad

Anouska Koster

Susanne Andersen

Amalie Dideriksen

Marte Berg Edseth

Rebecca Koerner

Elinor Barker

Hannah Ludwig

Julie Norman Leth

Wilma Olausson

Amalie Lutro

Anne Dorthe Ysland

Joscelin Lowden

Hannah Barnes

Racing

Interviews

Special agent Barnes: A retiring rider's passion to support female athletes

Hannah Barnes put an end to her racing career in 2023

Retirement can be a tricky phase in an athlete’s career, but for 

, the transition has been almost seamless with the former rider hanging up her wheels in October and almost immediately taking up a full-time role as a rider agent at SEG Cycling.

The 30-year-old raced competitively as a professional for over a decade, winning over a dozen races and forming a reputation as one of the most hardworking, down-to-earth and respected teammates in the 

Some might view Barnes’ retirement as a loss to professional cycling but her skills and experience could arguably make her an elite agent in the years to come. That’s because there’s a perception -  in sport and not just cycling - that agents can be cold, calculating and financially driven. In truth, every trade on the planet has that demographic but Barnes, like all the best rider agents, wants to put the rider’s needs first and foremost. She wants to be a shield, a mentor and to a great extent, an ally.

“A good agent is someone who cares,” she told 

 over the phone in a recent conversation.

“They’re someone that you can trust and someone that, as a rider, you know has your back. Being a good agent is about taking time with people and looking after them. It’s great to help someone during the good times but as a former rider I know that there are going to be times when there’s struggle or hardship, and I want the riders I work with to know that there’s someone who will always be there for them.”

Pro cycling transfers - every move for the 2024 season

Barnes will head up the women’s cycling portfolio at SEG. The agency has around a dozen female cyclists on their books but the plan is to carefully grow that number over the coming years. Barnes will be integral to those business plans, using her contacts within the peloton to sit down with riders and propose how she can enhance their careers. 

At the same time, it’s not just about growth. Most of the current crop of riders at SEG have longstanding contracts that go behind 2024, and the 30-year-old wants to spend the immediate future building up relationships.

“At the moment it’s about being there if they have any questions, figuring things out if they don’t have the race calendar that they were looking for and helping them focus. I just want to be someone that they feel comfortable with and then help them through their careers,” she said.

Barnes knew that her career in the bunch was likely to end in 2023. When she signed her most recent contract with Uno-X at the start of 2022 she accepted that it could be her last and in the summer she began to seek out options for what would be the next chapter in her life.

The role of a sports director could have been an option but it didn’t feel like the most natural pathway and having dipped her toes into the coaching arena this year she knew that working with young athletes was a passion worth pursuing. 

All change: sports director transfer market in full swing

“There were some rumours around July that SEG was looking for someone, so I emailed them and explained that I was stopping with racing and that if there was an opportunity to work for the agency I’d like to talk. They were keen too, so I did my last race in Belgium and then the next day I had an interview in Amsterdam at the SEG headquarters. It all moved pretty quickly,” Barnes said.

“This year I’ve liked that mentoring role and I enjoyed the idea of working with young athletes who might need some guidance during their career. Even when riders change teams during their careers, I think it’s important to have a constant presence, and that’s what attracted me to the role at SEG.”

Of course, there’s a personal transition that comes with leaving the world of professional competition and working a more stable 9-5 career. For the last decade, Barnes has lived the life of an athlete with team support and a set schedule handed to her. These days there’s a lot more flexibility but also more responsibility. Barnes is more than content with her choice, though, and is glad she dived straight into a new role rather than taking time away.

“It’s very different. I’ve got to be a lot more organised now and have a diary. I can’t just go on TrainingPeaks and see what training I have to do that day. I’ve got to be a lot more organised, and I can’t just decide that at 11 o’clock I’ll go for a ride. I like that level of regimentation. It does feel a bit strange now because it was the off-season and now everyone is starting to train again, so it’s kicking in that I’m no longer a professional. I’m really happy though.  A few people have said that I should have taken some time to adjust but I’m not that kind of person, and I like to have things to do. I like a purpose and a role,” she said.

That purpose will almost certainly incorporate long-term goals too. It’s only the start of her journey as a rider agent but Barnes is looking down the track and already has the right mindset when it comes to the definition of success, for both her and the riders she represents.

“I knew I wanted to be in cycling and in this role, I can empathise with riders if something goes wrong, or if they’ve had a crash. I know those emotions, so I think that gives me good experience. I want to work with young riders, and I want to be with them during their entire careers. Hopefully, in eight years' time, I can sit down with a rider and look back at their career and see that they’ve been really happy. The female riders deserve time and someone to look out for them. We want to build a portfolio and a great network for riders to be in.”

Any rider would be lucky to have that level of support and commitment but the immediate future for Barnes will be spent getting to know her riders and building those relationships.

“I’d like to go to a few races. I’m lucky enough to be able to watch most races on TV now but I’d like to attend a few events and let the riders know that I’m there, that I’m watching and that I’m there for them.”

Lifestyle

Fitness

Cycling through pregnancy: How Joss Lowden kept riding into the ninth month

Joss Lowden is the latest WorldTour pro to take time away from racing to have a child

, there are a whole host of physiological factors that can influence your riding or training, from a different anatomy and body composition, to hormone cycles and menstruation. 

Perhaps the biggest change that a female rider can face, though, is pregnancy. Being pregnant will change your body, affect your 

 and require adaptations in everything from your nutrition to your sleep, but as plenty of riders are proving, it doesn’t have to stop you riding or training.

Even in 2023, the research and knowledge around exercising and training whilst pregnant is still a growing field, both for professional and amateur athletes. In cycling, a growing number of riders in the women’s peloton have navigated pregnancy in recent years, shedding light on both how to train whilst pregnant, and how to balance racing and motherhood once the baby has arrived.

just three weeks before the due date of her first child, 

 had just got back from a two-and-a-half-hour ride in Andorra. Tackling 1,332m of climbing and setting 

 segment PRs isn’t what you expect most women to be doing at eight months pregnant, but it seemed to be working for the 35-year-old 

“Relatively, I’ve had it really easy,” Lowden said of the pregnancy that allowed her to ride and train right up to the final days before the birth of her son in June. 

“I didn’t really get sick at the beginning. I felt a bit queasy sometimes, but generally if I went out for a bike ride or a hike or something I felt better. And then I’ve been able to carry on riding, training, hiking, swimming and gymming, and doing what I liked the whole time.”

For many women, pregnancy is just step one of motherhood, and it’s the reality of having a newborn that looms as the really big change, overshadowing the months before. But for athletes, the nine months of being pregnant is a huge challenge in itself, with the baby’s arrival almost a welcome relief from the physical test of pregnancy.

“People keep saying ‘oh my gosh, your life is about to change’, and I’m like, I’m kind of waiting for my life to go back to normal,” Lowden explained. 

“It's been a really strange year, because your body's not your own. You're sharing it. You always have to think not just about the effect of what you're doing on yourself, but what it's doing to the little creature that you're growing as well.”

Understanding and accepting the changes to your body

Part of the reason the actual pregnancy is so challenging for athletes, Lowden said, is that suddenly, you have much less control over your body and your fitness. For modern athletes, able to track all aspects of their fitness, and carefully plan everything around their training, having to give that up can be daunting.

“Particularly as athletes, we're really used to being very, very in control of how we feel,” Lowden explained. “And so everything that we do, essentially, is geared towards performance and feeling good. You know that if you eat well, sleep well, train well, you go to bed early, you do all of these sorts of things, you will wake up the next day and more than likely feel good. 

"And if you don't do those things, if you stay out late or whatever, then you won’t feel so good, and you won't be able to train. Apart from getting ill and whatever, it's quite systematic.

“But you have to completely relinquish that when you get pregnant because you can't really control the days where you feel good. And the days where you don't, it doesn't seem to make much difference what you do.”

GCN Show: Does cycling help or hurt your long term health?

Whilst feeling good can sometimes be an intangible thing, there are also plenty of marked, physical changes that female athletes go through. Like all pregnancies, these will differ from person to person, but Lowden explained some of her experiences. As well as the expected things like gaining weight and slowing down on the bike, there were less obvious things that impacted Lowden’s fitness.

“Within literally a few weeks of being pregnant, my resting heart rate had gone from 38 to 65 [bpm], in like two weeks. Then I’d go to get on the turbo, and I think I was doing 107 watts and my heart rate was at like 160, which is really high for like, nothing. Just going nuts.

“So that’s really difficult to get your head around because you think ‘I can’t control this, I can’t do anything about it’ but then you have to think ‘but I’m growing a human being. That’s really amazing.’”

Pregnant cyclists can still do a lot of riding

As well as experiencing all the physical changes and how that affects riding, pregnant cyclists may wonder how much riding they should or shouldn’t do. Unfortunately, there isn’t one single answer to the question of ‘how much should a pregnant cyclist ride’, and even the pros have different approaches.

For Lowden, the answer to the question of quantity is quite a lot, and probably more than most pros who have trained through pregnancy. Lowden took on mountainous riders that would scare off most amateurs, and clocked up the kilometres until right before her baby’s arrival. 

The amount of climbing, Lowden explained, was partly an unavoidable fact of living in Andorra, but it also came down to the simple fact that she was able to and wanted to keep riding so much, which is perhaps the easiest place to draw the line around possibilities and limitations.

“I think it’s about understanding your own body. There are things that I was comfortable doing that wouldn’t necessarily mean that everybody would be comfortable doing in training. You kind of get to learn how hard you can push your body, and everyone has different limits of how far they want to take it.”

So, how much should an amateur rider expect to ride? Much like the pros, the answer is that it depends - there is no prescribed distance, and it depends on a lot of things, not least what you want to do. While we don’t all have the capabilities of WorldTour professionals, the likes of Lowden and others have shown that there isn’t an upper limit on what is possible; if you’re able, comfortable and want to keep doing solid rides, pregnancy doesn’t need to stop you.

The other thing that is a big consideration for cyclists, and will change a lot in pregnancy, is nutrition. As Lowden explained, this is another element of the giving up control that riders have to do in pregnancy. In normal times, a cyclist can plan their nutrition carefully, and many are very particular about what and how much they eat, but that can be less predictable when you’re supporting a growing baby as well as yourself.

For Lowden, she explained that, because her training load went down as her energy demands from pregnancy went up, there was not a big change in the amount she ate - she fuelled like she was still training at full capacity, but rode less, and things balanced out - but there were still things to be aware of, both during and after pregnancy.

“You definitely have to be conscious of eating plenty when you’re riding,” she said. “I try to really not go for any periods where I’m hungry, but I didn’t really like to do that too much anyway. It’s just being on top of it, making sure you get all of the essential energy and nutrients that you need.

“The other thing you have to be really careful of is that if you’re breastfeeding, that’s when you need to keep having a really large number of calories coming in. Especially when you’re training, you go out and ride, and you can take in 2,000, 3,000 calories and essentially still be in a deficit, so that’s a lot of food that you need to maintain that sort of milk supply.

“So I think it’s getting into the mindset that you don’t want to just give birth and go ‘right, I’m on a diet, I’m going to lose all this weight’ - your body is still sustaining the growing life of your baby, and that’s the priority.”

With the changes in training and eating - and, of course, the fact of being pregnant - also comes a lot of changes to one’s body, and for athletes, where weight and body image can often be complicated issues, this can be another challenge to contend with.

“You start storing fat and holding onto a lot of liquid [in the early stages] so that was quite difficult because you really notice the changes to your body. And as an athlete, you’re used to being in a particular type of body, but you do stop caring after a while.”

Letting go of that control can be hard, but for Lowden, it’s just about knowing that your body is doing the right thing.

“You have to trust your body to know what to do,” she said. “If I wasn’t putting on weight and I carried on being really thin, I think that would be more disconcerting, so I’m like ‘yeah, your body knows what it’s doing here, let it do its thing’.’”

Like for most elements of cycling - training, nutrition, recovery - Lowden turned to research to try to understand what coaching professionals, physiologists and other athletes knew about riding during pregnancy. The problem was, there was very little to be found.

“We went on this journey to understand more. We listened to a lot of podcasts, we researched a lot,” she explained.

“But there is actually such a small amount of research on what you can do in terms of athletic performance and the impact it has on the baby. So there’s not a huge amount, but there is quite a lot of research, or definitely anecdotal evidence - papers that have been shared and podcasts from runners, so I did a lot of listening to runners.

“You see some of these incredible ultra-endurance that have continued racing long into their pregnancy, and returned pretty soon postpartum as well. So we did quite a lot of research there.”

Given the research and guidance around sport and exercise through pregnancy is still a nascent field, one thing that has helped a lot of the pregnant riders in the peloton is the shared knowledge from other parents. For Lowden in particular, she had the benefit of not only the women in the peloton who had experienced this already, but a teammate in the form of Elinor Barker.

“I think having Elinor on my team and having access to her TrainingPeaks [was useful], and her coach was really helpful and he chatted with my coach,” Lowden said.

Barker had her first child in 2022, and came back to racing for Uno-X - who had signed her whilst she was pregnant - that year, and has since developed into perhaps the best road form of her career in 2023. Though there are other mothers in the peloton, like Lizzie Deignan and Marta Bastianelli, having Barker as a teammate gave Lowden and her team a better understanding of the journey.

Some of this has been in the form of specific advice - Lowden mentioned various things Barker had told her about training, coming back to riding, breastfeeding and more - but there’s also just the sense of a shared experience, and knowing others have done it before.

“There’s so much more information now and people are really sharing more. Within my team, we’re gathering good data on training, training through pregnancy, and the return to racing as well. It’s really, really useful. Everybody is different, everybody’s response is different, but just knowing what’s been experienced before, what to expect and how to prepare yourself is really helpful.”

Joss Lowden’s expert advice for pregnant cyclists

With everything from the physical changes and demands of pregnancy to the mental challenges of how you approach all that, there is a lot for pregnant women to contend with. We may not all be professional athletes, but there are things that every cyclist, of any level, can learn from the women who have done it at the very top level of the sport. Here are Lowden’s key bits of advice for cyclists who are pregnant.

The first thing Lowden is keen to point out before she offers any kind of advice is that she knows that her experience is different to most.

“It’s tricky because I know some people get extremely tired and can feel really ill, and you can say ‘oh but you’ll feel better if you ride your bike’ and it’s like well I did, most of the time, but I didn’t always. And the other thing is that I have all day, I’m paid to ride my bike, I have all day to fit in a ride and the gym and things like that - it’s not the same as fitting it into a busy work schedule.”

Even if comparing yourself to the pros isn’t useful, there is some advice that all pregnant cyclists - or any woman who exercises - can heed from Lowden.

“I do think if you can continue throughout maintaining some form of riding, training, activity or gym work, if you keep doing it, that’s why I can still do it at eight and a half months pregnant, because I’ve done it the whole time. It’s not like I stopped and then picked it up again. So some level of maintaining what you were doing before is good.”

The benefits are mental as well as physical

Exercise is often heavily linked with the physical, but as Lowden explains, keeping active through pregnancy can be just as important for your mental wellbeing, even as your physical performance changes.

“Mentally, because it’s the stuff you enjoy doing, it makes you feel good. There were days where I’d just be like ‘I’m so tired, I don’t want to do anything’ and then I’d get on the turbo  and just do 

Sometimes it feels like you’re barely doing anything, but then afterwards the feeling that you’ve done it is so good, it is worth it.”

Lowden's final, but perhaps most important piece of advice? "Don't stop just because you're pregnant."

Highlights

Watch: Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift stage 2 highlights

With over 2,600m of climbing on the menu, stage 2 of the 

 looked like it could be a day for the GC riders if they wanted to make it hard, but it turned out to be another chance for the puncheurs.

After a series of crashes marred the first part of the stage, there were nerves in the peloton and the bunch seemed happy to let riders go up the road. 

) were away in the middle part of the stage, before the trio of 

In the final hour of racing, the rain started to fall and the cold temperatures and slick roads somewhat neutralised the racing, with a heavy crash for Van Agt putting an early end to the breakaway, and the peloton taking it easier to stay safe. 

Coming towards the finish in Mauriac, all was together in a big group that included a mix of GC riders and puncheurs, though the pure sprinters had been dropped over the hilly course. A perfect lead-out from Demi Vollering (SD Worx) looked like a good set-up for yellow jersey Lotte Kopecky, but it was a long, brave sprint from Liane Lippert (Movistar) that won the stage, whilst Kopecky finished second with a flat tyre. 

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Name	Age	UCI Career Wins	UCI Points
Anniina Ahtosalo	20	5	993
Maria Giulia Confalonieri	31	1	522
Mie Bjørndal Ottestad	26	4	380
Anouska Koster	30	7	245
Susanne Andersen	25	1	218

Uno-X Pro Cycling Team

Uno-X Pro Cycling Team

The Team

Top Uno-X Pro Cycling Team Stories

Special agent Barnes: A retiring rider's passion to support female athletes

Cycling through pregnancy: How Joss Lowden kept riding into the ninth month

Watch: Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift stage 2 highlights

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