If it were nowadays, I would have been Pippa probably from the age of five or six,’ says Pippa York. ‘I would be one of those kids everyone is arguing about now. Would I have been a cyclist? I have no idea as I would have had a totally different life.’
Born in Glasgow in 1958, York began life as Robert Millar and went on to blaze a trail for cyclists in Britain by winning the King of the Mountains jersey in the 1984 Tour de France, becoming the first ever Brit to win a classification in cycling’s most prestigious race. And it was the Tour, York says, that first inspired her to become a pro cyclist.
‘When I was really young we used to cycle out to Glasgow airport and watch the planes take off. I wanted to go further, and at about the same time I noticed a magazine in a newsagents called International Cycle Sport and it was a Tour de France edition. World Of Sport was also on TV so I saw snippets of the Tour. It looked really interesting, and I wanted to try it so I joined a club, started racing and it grew from there.
‘My first year as a junior I got competitive; by the next year I was really competitive and could win races. Then I moved up to senior level and realised it would be a better life than working in a factory or a shoe shop. The clubs I joined encouraged me to keep progressing and by the end of my first year as a senior I thought I wanted to be a professional cyclist. In my environment that was unheard of. Nobody was a pro cyclist.’
The only real option for a Brit looking to turn pro at the end of the 1970s was to pack up and head abroad.
À la française
At the age of 20, York moved to France and became immersed in the European professional racing scene, eventually joining the renowned Peugeot team in 1980.
‘Now English is the language in the peloton, but before that it was French so I learned French,’ says York, remnants of a Scottish accent still faintly evident. ‘I ended up thinking in French and losing English words.
‘I’ve been in that situation where you’re the sole person from your country in a race, but I got used to it. It would be more annoying when a journalist from one of the British dailies would be sent to the Tour and would ask me what I did for a winter job. I had no time for those people.
‘By 1983 I had progressed quite a lot. I stepped up and focussed on my diet, training and recovery and I was the designated climber to help the team leader.’
This progression culminated the following year with York winning the polka dot jersey at the Tour and coming fourth overall in the general classification, the highest position achieved by a Brit until Bradley Wiggins finished third 25 years later (he was upgraded after Lance Armstrong was stripped of third place).
‘It wasn’t a surprise because of my results in previous races and the amount of training and improving I’d done. I thought, “Right I’ve done that, where do I go next?”’
The next target was victory at a Grand Tour, and it very nearly happened the following year at the Vuelta a España, but the Spanish had no intention of seeing their national race won by an outsider.
The ‘Stolen Vuelta’
Having taken the lead on Stage 10 of the 1985 Vuelta, York made it to the penultimate stage with a ten-second buffer, and only needed to stay with her rivals in the mountains to secure victory. After puncturing, she made it back to the bunch, but the Spanish riders failed to inform her that main rival Pedro Delgado had attacked and was eating into her time on home roads. By the time she realised what was happening it was too late. Delgado went on to win the Vuelta by 36 seconds.
It was a case of countrymen – even those on competing teams – colluding to hand one of their own the win, and the race went on to be known as the ‘Stolen Vuelta’.
‘At the time, I was pretty devastated,’ York says. ‘I know there have been reports that said I’d never go back. I never said that. I don’t know who made that up.
‘It was a bad set of circumstances that meant I lost. But you get over it quite quickly because the next race comes along and you get back into that same competition sphere, get your race head on and get on with it.
‘Nowadays I see it as one of those racing circumstances,’ she adds. ‘I never had any problem with Pedro Delgado – he was the beneficiary, not the instigator and we’ve always been friendly. In the race you have to hate your rival a little bit, and them you, but when it’s over, it’s over. You need a certain amount of rivalry with somebody to make you try harder.’
York went back later in the year and won Spain’s second biggest race, the Volta a Catalunya.
‘I channelled all my anger at the Vuelta result into La Volta. I think people thought I was going to turn up meek and downtrodden, but I wasn’t. I thought, “I’m going to eat you guys now.” I had to learn how to take that anger of being done over, of being put in a bad situation, and turn it around to my advantage but not let it get out of hand.’
Over the next few years, the results continued to come in, including second again at the Vuelta in 1986, second and the mountains classification jersey at the Giro d’Italia in 1987, and first at the Criterium du Dauphiné in 1990.
In 1995, York joined the French team Le Groupement but they swiftly folded, prompting her retirement. ‘Our team went bust the week before the Tour de France. It was quite brutal. I had just won the National Championships and I really wanted to do a Tour de France as a national champion, even though nobody would have known what the British National Championship jersey was then.
‘As you get towards the end of your career you can feel it coming. I wanted to do a few more years because I still felt competitive, but I wasn’t training with the same willingness as I used to. I still liked racing but I was getting beaten more often than I was beating other people. I didn’t see the team going bust coming, but I was getting prepared for it to end.’
A new chapter
While it was the end of the road as a racer, it opened a new door for York as she transitioned from male to female. It was something she had been waiting to do since childhood.
‘I learned things from books and TV programmes, and when I saw a trans person in real life I realised that was what I was. Then I had to make a decision: is it acceptable for me to transition as a pro cyclist in the environment as it was and with the profile that I have? No it wasn’t. It was the 1980s with rampant homophobia, fear of AIDS and the time of Thatcher’s Section 28 legislation, which banned education in schools of any kind of different lifestyle.
‘I quickly realised being different in my environment wasn’t acceptable. Everyone who was different got beaten up. So I decided to deal with my gender issues once my cycling career was finished, and I would have options of what I could do. But even then, it’s such a massive thing to deal with that it takes a number of years before you end up in a bad enough place that the only way out is to transition or something drastic is going to happen.’
When York first moved to France at the beginning of the 1980s, she met and married a French woman and had a child. After separating in the 1990s, York later married again and had another child. Neither of them were fully aware of the internal struggle that she was going through when she decided to transition.
‘Transition is a bombshell for everyone,’ says York. ‘It affects everybody around you – your children, your friends, your partners – and you don’t know how they’re going to react. As soon as you make those very first decisions you become aware that you might lose certain people and relationships.
‘Probably the most challenging thing was telling my children alongside telling my partner. It changes the social dynamic of your relationship; you might go from a straight couple to a same-sex couple. Is your partner comfortable with that? When you tell people you’re trans, quite often you can see them trying to work out how it works, not in terms of bodily functions but in terms of relationships.’
Transitioning meant York went through a whole host of changes that affected her cycling performance.
‘Once you start medical treatment, you gain weight, lose muscles and lose the motivations you had before. For example, I didn’t want to be muscley anymore. I didn’t want to have under 10% body fat. It wasn’t who I wanted to be.
‘As a pro bike rider, when you come to a hill, you look at it and think, “Will I change gear or stand up?” Nowadays and when I started to transition, I would think I have to change gear and I can’t stand up. I had a weakness but I was OK with it. I actually enjoyed feeling that weakness because I knew that I was moving from where I had been to where I wanted to go. Now cycling hurts in the same way it used to, but at a much slower speed.’
Trans women in cycling
Current UCI rules dictate trans women can compete in women’s competitions if their testosterone levels have been below 2.5 nanomoles per litre for at least 24 months. Meanwhile, British Cycling recently announced that transgender women would be banned altogether from competing in its female category of races.
‘People make assumptions that because you’ve been an athlete, when you transition you will keep all those attributes, but you don’t,’ York explains. ‘You lose muscle, gain weight, and because your testosterone is so drastically reduced you don’t have the same motivations and aggression, all within the first six months. Nobody ever asks a transitioned athlete what happens – they just assume that you exist at the same level of strength, recovery and ability to sustain a certain workload, but that’s not the reality of it.
‘But people don’t want to hear about things like androgen deprivation, which is the loss of all your testosterone and your ability to produce it, and how it affects your protein intake and how that protein synthesis affects your workload and your recovery. If you lose 5% of your muscle mass as an elite athlete, you are no longer competitive at whatever level you are at.
‘Now I weigh ten kilos more than I used to with 15 to 20% less athletic ability. I’m as crappy as a normal person and I have to use the gears on my bike.’
Hostility towards trans women in cycling and society is not uncommon, as York is all too aware.
‘The level of an anger and distrust people have towards you is really disappointing,’ she says. ‘Research has found that roughly one in six people don’t want to have a gay neighbour, and if you are trans it’s one in four. Where I live there are nine houses, so straightaway I think two of those houses don’t like me. It’s quite depressing.
‘It can be difficult, and either you can let it really eat you, or you get on with your life. I think I rely a lot on my psychological profiling training that I had during competition days to deal with it and to process the negative energy into something useful.
‘It all comes down to changing rooms and toilets,’ she adds. ‘I’ve been into women’s changing rooms for more than two decades and I’ve never seen another trans person in there and I don’t expect to see anybody else who’s trans in there. I also think it’s quite important to understand that the whole gay rights thing is more of a human rights issue. It’s about letting people be happy and live as they want to, and a happier society is going to be less stressful for everybody.
‘Before I transitioned, I would say I was happy 5% of the time. Now 5% is what I’m unhappy about, like having wrinkles and my legs not being long enough.’
To hear the full interview with Pippa York, seek out the Cyclist Magazine Podcast in the usual podcasting places
Joining the polka dots
The cycling life of Pippa York
1983: After signing to the Peugeot team in 1980, gets first taste of the Tour de France, winning Stage 10 on the Circle of Death in the Pyrenees and coming 14th overall.
1984: Wins polka dot jersey at the Tour and comes fourth overall, leading to a starring role on Kellogg’s Start cereal packets.
1985: Second at the ‘stolen’ Vuelta a España, followed by victory at the Volta a Catalunya. Just outside the top ten at the Tour de France.
1986: Second again at the Vuelta, with one stage victory. Second at the Tour de Suisse.
1987: KoM at the Giro d’Italia and second on GC, losing to Ireland’s Stephen Roche.
1990: Wins the Critérium du Dauphiné, her only victory at a major European stage race. Second places at the Tour de Suisse, the Tour de Romandie and the Tour of Britain.
1995: Becomes British Road Race National Champion before the collapse of the Le Groupement team, prompting her retirement from professional racing.
2017: Confirms gender transition after a long period out of the public eye, and returns to cycling as a commentator and pundit.
York on…
…Mark Cavendish
‘I found it quite scandalous that he wasn’t taken on by a team with a better pedigree than Astana. I hope he goes to the Tour but it’s getting more difficult for him. Astana is not a sprinter’s team so he won’t have the lead-out he enjoyed before. If he has the lead-out, and he begins the sprint, it isn’t a done deal that the others will come past, but I don’t think he’s the guy that’s coming in past them anymore. But he is capable of winning another stage and he is easily the best British cyclist of all time.’
…who will win this year’s Tour de France
‘I think the women’s race is easier to predict because it’s going to come down to Annemiek van Vleuten. She’s so strong and she wants to win it again. In the men’s I think Pogačar is going to win again. He looks like he’s got that intent back, with no hesitation to leave the others behind. It’s not done in a way to humiliate them, but he just thinks he can leave them behind. His powers of recovery are quite remarkable too.’
…racing in the 1980s compared to now
‘Back then we didn’t have nutritionists or psychologists so you had to learn it yourself or from people around you. I read books about diet and nutrition. Now you have psychological profiling, but I had to do that myself. I learned in what situations I would make the wrong mental judgments, found out in what situations I reacted badly and how to use the negative outside forces to my advantage.’