Create a list of the most exciting, emerging riders in the women’s peloton, and Niamh Fisher-Black’s name would be right near the top. Over the past few seasons, the 24-year-old Kiwi has established herself as one of the world’s premier climbers – no mean feat given she spent those seasons racing for SD Worx-Protime, an all-conquering superteam boasting a galaxy of stars.
While Fisher-Black spent much of her four years at SD Worx-Protime racing in the shadows of world-beaters like Lotte Kopecky, Demi Vollering, and Lorena Wiebes, the Kiwi did get her own opportunities along the way. Opportunities she often seized with both hands.
Now, as the 2025 season rumbles into gear, Fisher-Black finds herself at Lidl-Trek where she should have even more opportunities to build on her significant potential.
When she catches up with Escape Collective in North Adelaide in late January, Fisher-Black has just completed the Santos Tour Down Under – her first race with Lidl-Trek. She was one of the race’s most aggressive riders, particularly on stage 2 with its two ascents of the iconic Willunga Hill. There Fisher-Black led the peloton onto (and up much of) both ascents, finishing ninth on the stage and 12th in the race overall.
It wasn’t the result she’d been hoping for but it’s one she’s trying to accept, given how early in the year it is.
“I think it’s honestly a little frustrating to look back on,” she says on the grounds of Lincoln College, the student accommodation where the women’s peloton is staying post-Tour Down Under. “It digs a little bit, but yeah, I think also in the back of our minds, and my mind also going into the race, I kind of had to prepare myself for the fact that maybe it was not gonna go the best, because it’s January, and I know it’s not a big goal. So you can’t expect everything from the body all the time.”
TDU result aside, Fisher-Black is delighted with how well she’s settled in at Lidl-Trek. She attended team camp in Spain in December to meet the bulk of her colleagues, and now, after meeting the Australian contingent at TDU, she says she’s “really happy and already quite comfortable in this environment”.
Thinking back to one particular moment atop Willunga Hill, it’s not hard to see why. Just past the finish line, after Fisher-Black and teammate Amanda Spratt had lit up the stage but come away with little to show for it, the young Kiwi stood crouched over her bars, clearly upset. Standing close to Fisher-Black, Spratt offered gentle words of support and consoled her young teammate, ultimately suggesting to the waiting media that maybe giving Fisher-Black some space would be best. It was a moment that spoke volumes of Spratt’s leadership and the environment that Fisher-Black has found herself in.
“I remember years ago, TDU being my first UCI race before I was pro, and just being in absolute awe of Amanda Spratt,” Fisher-Black says a few days later. “So it’s really funny how things have turned out and now I was racing with her on the weekend. She’s obviously an incredibly experienced rider and has a lot to share. And also she’s really open and willing to share that with me and I think that makes me have a lot of respect for her.”
That debut Tour Down Under that Fisher-Black references was the 2019 edition, when the then-18-year-old was racing for the New Zealand national team (back when the women’s TDU was a UCI 2.1 event). Spratt won the race overall that year, while Fisher-Black ended up 13th.
The following year, 2020, would be her first full season as a professional. After joining Équipe Paule Ka as a 19-year-old, Fisher-Black immediately made an impact. She won her first UCI race of the year (the Gravel and Tar one-day race in New Zealand), won the Kiwi road title, then embarked on a European campaign late in the (COVID-affected) season. On the final stage of the Giro d’Italia, an uphill finish to Motta Montecorvino, Fisher-Black finished second in a ride that showed her burgeoning talent. Sure enough, she was picked up by SD Worx for the following season.
In 2021, her first year on a WorldTour team, Fisher-Black finished top 10 and won the youth classification at the Giro. In 2022, she improved to fifth at the Giro (again winning the youth classification) and closed out the year by winning a rainbow jersey – the U23 title in the combined U23/elite women’s road race at Road Worlds in Wollongong, Australia.
In 2023, Fisher-Black took another step forward, winning her first WorldTour race on the final stage of the Tour de Suisse. After bridging across to and then dropping the breakaway with Kasia Niewiadoma, Fisher-Black won the uphill sprint against the future Tour de France Femmes winner with relative ease. Less than a month later she’d finished top 10 at the Giro again.
And then, in 2024, Fisher-Black took perhaps her biggest leap forward yet. At the Volta Femenina de la Comunitat Valenciana stage race in Spain, her first race of the year, Fisher-Black rode away from the field on the queen stage to take an emphatic victory ahead of the likes of Gaia Realini, Niewiadoma, and other top riders. Her father Jim Black would later describe the win to Escape as his daughter “doing a Remco [Evenepoel]”.
Also in 2024 came a seventh overall at the Vuelta a España – while riding in support of teammate and overall winner Demi Vollering – before another great showing at the Giro d’Italia. For the fourth year running the Kiwi climber finished inside the top 10, but this time she also won a stage. Responding to a move from Mavi Garcia with 2 km remaining in the uphill finish to stage 3, Fisher-Black dashed across to the Spanish veteran, then punched away inside the final kilometre to claim an impressive victory.
In 2025, Fisher-Black begins with both a clean slate and with a mountain of experience behind her. She leaves SD Worx-Protime after four years to begin a three-year deal with Lidl-Trek, a move that she thinks will probably come with “a lot more opportunity”.
“Also, I go in and I’m not a young, naive girl anymore,” Fisher-Black says. “I’m pretty experienced, and I’ve established myself, I think” – she says this with a chuckle – “high enough up in the sport that they also have some expectations from me. And I like that feeling of that pressure. It means also that with that expectation and pressure, I think that they give a lot of support, and I think that, in itself, opens up enough opportunities.
“And also just the fact of being in a new environment – it’s all-new motivation, new teammates, and learning. Learning a little bit to be less Young Niamh who’s in the shadows of big stars, and more ‘Niamh that’s going to grow up and maybe become a leader one day,’ and I think that’s my goal for the next three years.”
While Fisher-Black is happy to be with Lidl-Trek, she is certainly grateful for her time with the sport’s most dominant super-team.
“I will never say that those years were not valuable on SD Worx,” she says. “It was a great team. I don’t have something bad to say about those four years. I grew a lot as a rider and I think that says it itself. I grew as a rider and at the end of last year, I naturally felt that I needed to make a step and this felt like the right opportunity. Doors open at funny times so you’ve just got to take them. It’s a really nice change. And yeah, I think some things that happened last year, it was probably time that things changed.”
An obvious follow-up question, then: what were those “things that happened”? Did Fisher-Black feel like she just wasn’t given the opportunities that she wanted, being on a team of such world-class riders?
“I think it was never an opportunity thing,” she says. “On SD Worx I got a lot of opportunity – I think just the style that they raced, everyone saw that they always went in with multiple leaders and I think they gave me my chances. And at the end of the day as an athlete, it’s not about being given opportunities. You have to show you’re the strongest, and you have to make those opportunities for yourself. I also always knew that, and that was an incredibly hard environment to do it [in]. It was a nice challenge.”
SD Worx-Protime made plenty of headlines in 2024. Not just for the multitude of victories the team amassed, but also because of apparent intra-team rivalries, and because of the way Vollering often didn’t seem to get the support from her teammates she might have expected. How does Fisher-Black look back on all that, now that she’s out of that environment?
“In terms of dynamic and stuff in the team, I think it’s pretty normal when you have a lot of ego and competition in a team, it sometimes can get difficult, but normally we could work our way through it,” she says. “I think most of what happened last year was elaborated in the media. It was never so bad as what I heard it out to be. But yeah, I think it’s also a good thing that some people went their separate ways.”
She doesn’t elaborate on that point, but it’s not hard to connect the dots. Vollering’s move from SD Worx-Protime to FDJ-Suez was the transfer story of late 2024. It was also part of a swathe of team changes that now sees the SD Worx-Protime ubertalents split up in a way that we haven’t seen in some time: Vollering with FDJ-Suez, Marlen Reusser at Movistar, and Lotte Kopecky still with the Dutch powerhouse team.
This coming weekend, Fisher-Black heads to Timaru on New Zealand’s South Island for Kiwi Road Nationals – her first appearance at the event since 2020 when she won the silver fern from a small group in Cambridge. Her extended absence from the event was the result of team requirements while at SD Worx-Protime – the Dutch team never competed in the Australian summer races, instead requiring Fisher-Black to be in Europe early in the year for team camps and other commitments. As a result, being at Kiwi Nationals simply wasn’t possible.
Things are different in 2025 though. Lidl-Trek has obviously been present at the Australian races and so tacking on some more time in New Zealand post-Cadel’s Race – where Fisher-Black finished seventh in the winning group – isn’t a big deal for the Kiwi. She admits it will be weird being at Nationals after a few years away, though.
“I already went and had a look at the course that it’s on,” she says of the road race. “It’s a stark reminder that road racing in New Zealand is a tough game because it’s normally like square circuits and heavy chip seal, and windy and flat” – not the ideal terrain for the diminutive climber.
“So it’s gonna be interesting,” she continues. “And the bunch is not big. So it’s not like any race we do in Europe, but it will be fun to give it a crack.”
Fisher-Black will do both the Nationals time trial (Thursday) and the road race (Friday), the former being a “nice opportunity to get on TT bike and do a time trial, and that’s something I know I have to work on.” A hint there, perhaps, of the sorts of races she might be targeting in future.
Fisher-Black doesn’t go to Nationals with a specific goal, per se; rather it’s just about doing the best she can. But as with Tour Down Under, that’s no easy thing – for her or any other pros from Australia and New Zealand. While there’s always a desire to do well in races close to home, that’s not always possible when the most important parts of the season are much further down the road.
“It’s also something we have to deal with mentally a little bit, because physically, it’s not possible to be on your best in January and also be on your best at Strade Bianche, or, I don’t know, the Ardennes,” she says. “And also, if I want to make a step up this year, it’s also about really using the [European] winter and this period to build a good engine.
“So yeah, I think for the high expectations I have on myself, it’s really hard to go into a race and know that you might not perform. But yeah, that’s just something you have to prepare yourself for, in the head, and just say ‘It’s OK, move on. It’s all part of the step by step.’ I just have to remind myself there’s other races I want more.”
Fisher-Black says “those other races” will start with some one-days in the first half of the season.
“The Ardennes I really like, and I always target these,” she says. “And then later in the season [I’ll] target some of the Grand Tours. I think maybe we keep it pretty open on opportunities of stages and also GC. It’s also understanding what I can do first, I think. That’s something I’ve never had the opportunity for, that’s for sure. So it will be about understanding if I can deal with that pressure and if I can back up day to day. I’m pretty optimistic and excited to see what I can do with this team.”
Despite four-straight top-10 finishes at the Giro d’Italia Fisher-Black still sees herself as something of a rookie when it comes to riding for GC at Grand Tours. It’s a challenge she says she’s ready for.
“It’s super exciting,” she says. “I mean, any sort of challenge – I don’t shy away from the pressure. I quite like it. It’s a love-hate thing, I think, for everyone. And especially the level of cycling these days and the distribution of the stars, I think this year, it’s exciting. And I look forward to that game.
“And also, we have other nice GC contenders on Lidl-Trek. So it’s also going to be about playing with them, with Riejanne [Markus – also new to Lidl-Trek] and Gaia [Realini – a pure climber much like Fisher-Black], who I’m really excited to work with.”
Fisher-Black doesn’t yet have a sense of how the team will juggle her, Markus, and Realini in the GC stakes this year, but she’s not too concerned about that.
“I think actually, that’s above my head,” she says with a chuckle. “That’s something that the coaches and the staff of Lidl-Trek are going through and looking to see what they think we can do. And where it suits, because obviously I think Gaia and I are similar riders. So yeah, it’s about balancing that all out.”
Fisher-Black is now into her sixth season as a professional and her fifth in the WorldTour. She’s grown a lot as a rider in that time and, by her reckoning, she’s also grown as a person as well.
In an interview with Escape last year, Fisher-Black’s father, Jim Black, spoke about the sort of pressure and expectation that Niamh regularly puts on herself. She believes that’s changing; that while she’s “just as driven” as she’s always been, she’s getting “better at weighing things up and being more realistic about things”.
“I look back at my first couple of years, and as my dad would say it, and also as I see it in my brother [Finn Fisher-Black], we put so much pressure on ourselves,” she says. “And if I look back to the first few years I cannot believe what I expected from myself – it was unattainable. I mean, I wasn’t just trying to be a professional cyclist, I was learning to live on my own, to grow up, to become a young woman, and you can never tell that person how much energy that takes. To try and be one of the best cyclists in the world at the same time, you cannot do that.
“I think I had a really nice environment that … sometimes I had to be told in a hard way, ‘this is how it is’, and you’ve just got to absorb it all and learn. And it wasn’t the easiest to accept sometimes, but for sure, it’s what has made me who I am today. But that expectancy and pressure – I think it’s also what makes me and also my brother, the athletes that we are.”
In Niamh Fisher-Black’s case, that athlete is one of the most exciting young climbers in the sport. A rider who’s spent the past four years learning at the best team in the world, who took the opportunities presented to her, and posted some impressive results along the way. Now in a new team, with even more opportunities surely coming her way, the future looks very promising.
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