THE MAKING OF CECILIE UTTRUP LUDWIG

Tom Davidson delves deep into the backstory of one of cycling's most magnetic characters

It’s a grey afternoon in provincial Denmark, and Tommy Uttrup Jensen is picking his teenage daughter’s teeth up from the road. He gathers two – the two front ones – and holds them in his palm. Beside him, in floods of tears, his daughter Cecilie is carried into an ambulance. Her bike race is over.

A decade on, the image still feels fresh in Tommy’s mind. “She was in huge pain,” he says. “I brought the teeth with me to the hospital, where they had a dentist put them back in. Not that I’ve done it, but it’s apparently rather painful.”

Painful, perhaps, is an understatement. It would take four doctors to restrain the teenager at the hospital. So bad was the crash – in which another rider hurtled over her head – that she’d be on a liquid-only diet for two weeks. Shortly after, though, she was back on her bike, ready to race again.

“You’re always concerned about your child,” Tommy says, “and I think it [the crash] made a difference for my wife.” As for his daughter, a plucky, gummy 17-year-old, she remained undeterred. “It didn’t change anything for her,” he says. “That’s what she had chosen to do.”

A special girl

Brought up in Herlev, on the outskirts of Copenhagen, Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig stands today as one of global cycling’s star ambassadors. She’s a three-time Danish time trial champion, the current national road champion, and a Tour de France stage winner, adored for her exuberance and wit.