Football and cycling sit at vastly different ends of the women’s sports spectrum. Football is the biggest sport in the world, and the women’s game has become emblematic of the women’s sport movement, boasting some of the biggest competitions and stars in the world. Female footballers are household names, and the sport is estimated to draw in half a billion Euros of revenue per year.
Cycling, on the other hand, is niche to start with, outside of a handful of Western European nations, so the women’s side of the sport is only going to be smaller. The sport is undeniably on the up, and in its best-ever shape, but it’s nowhere near the global boom of women’s football.
In many ways, women’s football and the strides it’s taken in recent years should be something women’s cycling looks up to, and plenty of stakeholders in the sport are doing that. But for one high-profile star, the admiration goes the other way.
At the start of the Tour de France Femmes in Rotterdam, footballer Tobin Heath was a surprising sight, and not always a familiar one to the very cycling-focused community around the Tour. For anyone unaware, Tobin Heath is widely considered one of the best women’s footballers in the world, and she’s a veteran of the sport. With the US national team, she’s won Olympic golds and World Cup titles, she’s won two NWSL Championships with the Portland Thorns, and she’s enjoyed stints at Manchester United, Arsenal and Paris Saint-Germain. Hopefully, that conveys to even the uninitiated the stature that we’re talking about with Tobin Heath.
Fresh off of a trip to Paris supporting her USWNT teammates at the Olympics, Heath switched to full-on fan mode at the Tour. The two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup champion rode with Canyon-SRAM, sat down with Demi Vollering, and immersed herself in the race as a special guest of Strava.
“I was amazed. When I went there, I was absolutely amazed at the experience,” Heath told Escape Collective. This is an athlete who has won gold at two Olympic Games and two World Cups, and played in or been at many of the biggest events in women’s sport in recent years – but she didn’t know quite what to expect at the women’s Tour de France.
“I was amazed at the access that I had to the athletes. I didn’t know what to expect, but then I got to do all these insane things that, when I equate it to my own sport, I’m like ‘that would just never happen’.”
Cycling may be a world away from what Heath is used to, but after starting her own riding journey and then heading to the Tour this summer, it’s safe to say she is hooked – and she must just be the star superfan that women’s cycling needs.
Where it started for Heath
So, how does one of the best footballers in the world end up in cycling? They’re not two sports that traditionally cross over much, and particularly with Heath being from the US, the general interest in cycling is even smaller.
The 36-year-old’s story starts in a familiar way: she turned to cycling after an injury. Heath is not retired, but hasn’t played football competitively since 2022, owing to a recurring knee injury.
“It kind of just happened because I’ve had a long-term injury from football – from my many years of playing football, it’s kind of par for the course of being an athlete,” she explained. “But I was doing some extensive rehab, and I couldn’t run, so I was doing a lot of cardio-based cycling in the clinic, and it was just miserable. Biking, no windows, on this Wattbike, it was so miserable.
“But I had a really good friend, James Hotson, who’s a triathlete, and I was always curious about cycling. I’ve always loved cycling as getting around, I’ve always loved being on a bike, just that sense of freedom and there’s kind of a childlike nature about it. And I was always asking him questions about it, about the cycling community, the training, like I’m obsessed with training regimens and stuff like that. So I guess the universe conspires in a lot of ways.”
Heath’s injury, her curiosity and the cycling scene in LA, where she’s based, all came together in the perfect way. One second-hand bike later – “I didn’t want to make the huge investment into cycling, it’s a really big barrier to entry” – and Heath was away.
“Next thing you know, I’m fully kitted, I have the best bike ever, and [James] is like ‘this is my friend Iz King’ who is a professional gravel rider in the area, and she gave me everything. This was when there was no looking back for me, because as soon as you put on the kit and you have all the bells and whistles, this is when I became a full-blown poser.”
Heath may have thought of herself as a poser at first – in fact, she still calls herself that when talking about being at the Tour – but her passion and enjoyment for the sport was very real.
“There was an unlock of being able to exercise in a way that I couldn’t before, in terms of getting heart rate zones that were equivalent to playing a full 90-minute match. I was like ‘oh my gosh, finally I can push myself’ in ways that my injury had limited me in a running and football perspective.
“So there was that, but the biggest unlock was getting outside and in nature and feeling that sense of freedom and discovery,” she added, recalling how football allows you to be outside and in the fresh air in a way that recovery perhaps doesn’t.
“I remember the first time I came back from a really big ride, and my partner was like ‘you’re like a changed human’. I feel like that was pretty cool, after a long time struggling with an injury and having so much frustration from a physical standpoint, to get this feeling of almost release and relief, and at the same time joy.”
As you might expect from a pro athlete, Heath soon started mixing in some performance and data aspects into her riding. Football, she pointed out, is also incredibly data-driven these days, so it was a natural carry-over, and an empowering thing to be able to see and use her own data.
“I think what was really cool is the community aspect, but also with Strava and the many hook-ups into that platform, it gives you this access to data that I feel was limited when I was a professional athlete. We kind of just were given training programmes, we worked, and then the data was passed off to all the scientists and the performance staff.
“It’s really cool and powerful to have your own data and to see it and then to be able to compare it to others. I think there’s a competitiveness with that, but I also think it’s just a really fun way to track yourself and your own progress. So I’m really enjoying that aspect of it, because when you go out and push yourself, you do see it – I’m at a point in the sport where I’m seeing significant gains. When you become elite elite, you’re talking about the tiniest percentages of gains that make you better than the person next to you, but I’m at this level where I’m seeing gains upon gains. And I’m loving it because I’ve lived in such a thin air for so long in terms of the tiny little nuances of performance, so it’s really fun to be in a place where you’re like, wow, I got significantly better today.”
Cycling in the women’s sport landscape
Through her involvement with cycling, Heath began to work with Strava, and it was via the brand that she ended up at the Tour de France Femmes.
As cycling journalists, we don’t often get to interview athletes outside of our sport, so given the time with Heath, it was hard not to ask about how she perceived the sport, particularly in comparison to her own background and the women’s sport forerunner that is football.
Most of what Heath experienced on the ground at the Tour was hugely positive, but there were a few things that surprised her about the profile of the sport.
“I was so disappointed in just the lack of information,” she said. “I remember I was going to interview Demi Vollering, and I was trying to find as much information about her as possible. This is one of the best cyclists in the world, if not the best, and I wasn’t even able to find a story of how she got into cycling, you know, one of the most basic things. I went to her Wikipedia page and there wasn’t even a personal blog on her. I was like ‘this is messed up’ because when you go and speak to her, and you learn about her craft, then you watch how good she is, you’re just like ‘oh my gosh, this is a gold mine’.”
After an immersive few days in the Netherlands, Heath also experienced the crushing reality of the limitations of women’s cycling coverage – an unfortunate rite of passage for all new fans.
“I remember it was the final day of the Tour, which was one of the longest days, and I woke up early to watch it, and they didn’t start showing it until halfway through the race. And I was like, can you imagine a World Cup final, we’re playing in the World Cup final, and they turn it on at half time? I was just like ‘this is so not cool’, I thought I had gotten the time wrong or something, because I was like ‘I know they’re racing right now’.”
Coverage is a huge issue, but one thing Heath’s presence at the Tour highlighted was just how little cross-pollination with other sports cycling has. In the US, ‘women’s sport’ is practically an entity of its own, with particularly the NWSL and NWBA existing on a similar plane with similar audiences and fans. TOGETHXR, another brand who were working with Strava at the Tour and created the famous ‘Everyone Watches Women’s Sports’ t-shirts was founded by four athletes from four different sports – Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, Simone Manuel and Sue Bird. All this means that when one sport succeeds, the others rise with the tide.
In Europe and in cycling, however, that intermixing is not quite there, and that’s something Heath picked up on too.
“When I was interviewing a lot of the riders, I thought it would be a great icebreaker question – ‘what football team do you support?’ – and I thought being in Europe and the majority of the racers being European, I thought it was going to be the best icebreaker there is. And… nothing. I swear, there was no crossover from cycling to football.
“I told Demi, I was like ‘oh my gosh, you’re like cycling’s version of Viv Miedema’ [decorated Dutch footballer, currently at Manchester City] and I was like ‘oh are you good friends with her?’ because I thought, small nation, sporting nation, all this stuff, there’s only a couple of elite women athletes there, this is a no brainer, these are best friends waiting to happen. And she was just kind of like ‘yeah yeah, no no’. Those are the missed opportunities, right?”
Coming from the NWSL – arguably the most successful women’s sports league in the world – Heath knows a thing or two about where those opportunities for growth lie, and how to harness them. One foundation of the NWSL in particular is independence – most of the teams in the top-flight are women’s-only teams, not associated with men’s teams.
“That’s where I’m really passionate is about independent ownership around women’s sports, because I believe that the women’s sports landscape looks very different to the men’s sports landscape, and you’re diminishing all the value that’s found in women’s sports if you try to copy and paste what men’s and women’s sports are like,” she said.
It’s a debate we regularly have about the women’s calendar and teams in cycling, and we’re not closer to an answer as the sport seems to be at a crossroads between forging its own path, and following the men’s sport’s model. For Heath, it’s about not placing any more constraints on women’s sports.
“I believe that the things that are being built by and for and looking at women’s sports as a completely new landscape are going to be the most powerful, the most successful ways to build, [rather] than to just try to be like ‘let’s make it exactly like men’s sports’. As long as that’s going to be the case, if that’s how people are looking at women’s sports, it’s always going to remain smaller than men’s sports. Yes, it will continue to grow, but it will always be smaller.”
Bringing cycling to a new audience
Like all women’s sports, what women’s cycling needs to grow is more attention and more investment. As someone who came to cycling via the women’s Tour de France, rather than the men’s sport, Heath also knows that, alongside the arguments for independence, there are arguments for using the well-known touchpoints in the sport as springboards.
“It actually reminds me of the men’s and women’s World Cups,” she said. “The Women’s World Cup, it’s kind of that similar feel, where it has this global brand to it, it has this global reach, there’s a lot of history. So even for folks that don’t know the history of the Tour, and they don’t know that it just started for the women, so if they’re just coming to the sport they’ll just assume it has the same history as the men’s Tour. So I think that’s a lot to leverage in that moment. And it is a global event, it’s something that brings folks together, and I think the global nature of the sport is what makes it so special,” she said.
As someone who’s been playing at a senior level since 2004, Heath has seen both league football and the international tournaments grow almost exponentially into global brands and events, and when it comes to investment in women’s sports, she knows one thing to be true: it’s going to be worth it.
“I think [growth] happening. I think it’s all about investment. But with so much of women’s sports, it always feels like we kind of have to show the numbers before we get the investment, and that’s not really how investment works. When people argue about it, they’re saying ‘oh the revenue’s not there’, but you invest to get revenue, it’s a simple business model. But in women’s sports, we haven’t been able to get to that point. I think we’re on the basement level of women’s sports. When you look at if you were to invest in men’s sports, we’re talking about big numbers, especially from a footballing perspective, but when you invest in women’s sports, you’re also talking about big numbers. If you invest now, it’s going to take ten, twenty years, but you’re going to make so much money.”
In posting about cycling to her 750,000-strong Instagram following, and talking about the Tour de France Femmes on her popular RE-CAP podcast, Heath is doing some of the work in bringing the sport to a whole new audience, and importantly, an audience who are already passionate about women’s sport. Rather than go after cycling fans and men’s sports fans, women’s cycling should look to attract the wider female sport audience.
“I think there’s something in actually just building the community around women’s sports and creating more pathways to get from one sport to another in women’s sports, because I think there’s a lot of crossover between the things that I’m invested in and care about as a global women’s football fan that are easily translatable into women’s cycling.”
That conversion has definitely worked on Heath. She’s already hoping to come back for the full Tour next year, and is passionate about getting the word out about women’s cycling.
“I had already gotten hooked on cycling, but then I went to the Tour and when I was learning about all these incredible athletes, I just became really obsessed and really passionate about bringing more attention to the sport and learning more, becoming a fan, and just getting involved and active in it, because I just feel like there’s so much there to appreciate and love.”
We certainly think so too, and with a star as high-profile as Tobin Heath fighting its corner, women’s cycling has found a very exciting new supporter.
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