A Time For Letting Go

Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio has hit the best form of her career in 2017, with her win in Emakumeen Bira the highlight. As she explains to Procycling, it’s down to letting go and learning to relax

- Sam Dansie

A prevailing cliché of the Olympics is that it is a four-year cycle based on single-minded dedication to the end result. If you don’t prepare, prepare to fail, and all that.

When Ashleigh Moolman-Pasio’s mind was blown by London 2012, a hyperbole-defying experience in every way, the slightly-built climber orientated her life to hitting Rio in 2016 in perfect form. She became as devoted to single-minded preparation as the next Olympian. It was podium or bust. She found sponsors to pay for altitude training camps and buy equipment that wasn’t standard team issue. She tweaked her race programme and took time out her season to recce the course in June 2016. In short, she tells Procycling, she did everything in her power to be in the best position to win a medal.

Lining up beside Copacabana beach in August, Moolman-Pasio was not just in her best form of the year, it was her best ever. A climber on a climber’s course, she was a outside favourite. She knew she was on song. “I was proud of having arrived in Rio in that condition,” the Cervélo-Bigla leader says. “Physically I was in the best condition to win but I lined up with way too much responsibility on my mind. I felt the responsibility of everyone who had come on board to support it. I went into the race and lost touch with feeling and being in the moment, which is what cycling is all about. It’s an instinctive sport. I took too much responsibility. I covered too many moves; when I had a small mechanical, my mind sort of overrode it…”