At 30, Frankie Hall has won UCI races on four continents and proven her numbers against the best. Yet she’s still without a contract — a rider trapped in cycling’s Catch-22 of age and experience.
In the interest of fairness and journalistic balance, we offered DAS-Hutchinson management a formal right of reply to the reflections made by Frankie Hall on her 2024 season. The team submitted the following statement.
DAS-Hutchinson Statement (November 1, 2025) At DAS Hutchinson we are very sad and disheartened to have seen Frankie’s words, we appreciate her honesty in sharing her experiences. During her time on the team, Frankie brought success and many great wins, which we are very proud of. At DAS Hutchinson, we understand the importance of creating an environment where athletes can thrive both personally and professionally. While she has reflected on her time with us and identified areas for growth, our focus remains on fostering a supportive, transparent, and inclusive environment where every rider can develop, enjoy racing, and achieve their full potential both on and off the bike. Over the years, we have developed and supported riders who have gone on to join WorldTour teams, won many national titles, an Olympic medal, and achieved prestigious UCI and WorldTour victories. Our commitment is to continue providing the environment and support necessary for our athletes to succeed and excel at the highest levels of the sport. We are looking forward to an exciting and successful 2026 season, where we will continue to grow and develop as a team, supporting our athletes to reach new heights. We take feedback seriously and see it as an opportunity to grow, learn, and become better as individuals and as a team. We wish Frankie and all our riders the very best in their careers and remain dedicated to helping athletes achieve their goals.
It would be nice to imagine that professional cycling is a meritocracy — a ladder where watts, willpower and racecraft translate neatly into opportunity. The reality, as British rider Frankie Hall has discovered, is something far more chaotic.
When we speak, Hall is in China, helping her boyfriend’s team at a race that she describes with weary amusement.
“If you imagine the most chaotic, disorganised race in the UK and then take a third of that organisation,” she laughs, “you’re still not at the level of China logistics. The quality of the racing and the platforms that they deliver is real high, but in terms of information getting fed down to riders and teams… it’s just non-existent.”
At 7.30pm the night before an 8.30am start, the riders were finally told where the race was, what time it started and when they’d be leaving. “So yeah,” she says, “bit chaotic.”
Everyone was coming back to me with the same response: ‘you’re physically there. Your numbers are good. But for a rider your age, you’re not very experienced
It’s an apt image for Hall’s recent career — a talented, driven rider forced to impose her own professionalism on the disarray around her. This season she has pieced together a global season on her own initiative, racing across four continents, taking two UCI stage wins and amassing UCI points — all without the backing of a formal professional contract.
Her self-made campaign is remarkable not just for the results but for what it reveals about the system she had to outwit. Hall’s journey highlights three overlapping challenges in modern women’s cycling: the WorldTour’s increasing fixation on youth, the organisational fragility of parts of the UK domestic scene, and the mental and logistical toll of sustaining a career as a self-funded privateer.
Those who read our 2023 interview with Hall, Starting from Scratch, will recognise the thread that runs through her story. Then, she was balancing her own development with supporting her boyfriend after his serious crash at the 2022 Rutland-Melton CiCLE Classic — a period that tested her resolve and reshaped her perspective. A former elite hockey player who only discovered racing competitively in her twenties, she spoke then about learning fast, loving the process, and refusing to “waste energy on things I can’t control.”
Hall at the Rapha Lincoln Grand Prix 2025. Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
Two years on, that mindset remains unchanged — but the battlefield has shifted. Back then, the challenge was recovery and belonging; now, it’s recognition and opportunity. The promise that defined her breakout rides in 2023 has evolved into something more complex: proof that talent and tenacity alone are not enough to move through a system that rewards youth, conformity and connections as much as performance.
The WorldTour Catch-22
Hall’s main obstacle is not her physiology or her record. It’s her age and experience. At 30, she sits outside the demographic most professional teams now target — and inside a paradox that has come to define modern women’s cycling.
While Hall had previously competed at a national level, her UCI racing experience only began in 2023.
“Everyone was coming back to me with the same response,” she recalls. “You’re physically there. Your numbers are good. You’ve shown you can win a bike race in different types of racing — hilly road races, flat crits, technical things — everything that we would want or need to see at a domestic level, you’ve done.”
Then comes the caveat. “But for a rider your age, you’re not very experienced,” she says. “Which is completely true — I went to DAS after a year of racing and then I got very limited race opportunities. You didn’t get a consistent block of racing; you didn’t get to go to races where you could do things, learn, and then build on it. I had an injury, got taken to Port Epic and then crashed out of that. That put me out for a month.”
I can train as hard as I can. I can produce whatever numbers they need me to produce… I cannot change my age. I can do nothing about it
It left her in a kind of limbo — too strong to be overlooked, too inexperienced to be chosen. “The issue is you’ve not got any WorldTour wins, you’ve not got WorldTour experience. At 30, we need that,” she recounts. “I can train as hard as I can. I can produce whatever numbers they need me to produce… I cannot change my age. I can do nothing about it.”
For a rider who only discovered competitive cycling in her twenties, after a serious hockey injury ended one sporting life, this reasoning borders on absurd. She describes herself as “young in cycling age”, still learning at a rate few riders manage after years in the peloton. “I’ve been told by three or four teams that I’m stronger than half their roster,” she says. “But they just see the number.”
During the Provelo Super League Q Tour Women’s Stage 4 Road Race in Brisbane, Sunday, February 23, 2025. Image: Chronis/PSL
The contradiction gnaws at her. “You see riders that you think, what are they going to contribute? Is it because their agent’s good at talking? Because all I need is the opportunity to show that I can contribute.”
Her frustration isn’t born of entitlement but of simple logic. Without a team, she can’t get the race days needed to gain experience; without experience, she can’t get a team. “How are you going to provide these results and provide this evidence if you don’t have that opportunity to show?” she asks.
She recalls racing solo in Italy earlier this year, trying to prove herself in a role that demanded team support she didn’t have. “I was the only person from my team,” she says. “I was trying to contest intermediate sprints, trying to contest KOMs, trying to look after myself against full teams of six riders. And you’re on your own. How can I get an intermediate sprint to get these two, three-second bonus seconds when I’ve just done my own 6k lead-out, fighting for position through some rogue-ass Italian town, avoiding cars, nonna and 30 friends cooking on the street, and a commissaire that decides to stop in the middle of the road — and then sprint as well?”
She laughs at the chaos of it, but the frustration lingers. “Then they turn around and say, ‘How are you going to contest the GC if you can’t finish a sprint?’ I’m like, well… if I could get to that position and contest it on an equal level, I know that I can.”
My cycling age is still new. I can still learn so much if I’m given the opportunity to learn. Every race I’ve gone to this year, I’ve learned, I’ve taken it on board and delivered what I didn’t have at the last race in the next one
Hall calls it the sport’s hypocrisy of opportunity: a structure that tells riders to show results without giving them the means to do so. “It’s really hard,” she admits. “Because the top riders — they’re not slowing down. My cycling age is still new. I can still learn so much if I’m given the opportunity to learn. Every race I’ve gone to this year, I’ve learned, I’ve taken it on board and delivered what I didn’t have at the last race in the next one.”
She smiles ruefully. “Maybe it’s because of the amount of time I’ve spent in education,” she says. “I’ve learned how to learn.”
At the Tour of the Gila. Image: Kevin Keller
That curiosity and self-awareness are rare commodities in sport, and yet they’ve become the basis for her exclusion. “By the time they’re my age,” she says, “a lot of people are doing it for the sake of doing it. They’ve been racing ten, fifteen years. They’ve seen everything. I’m still hungry.”
She pauses. “It’s frustrating,” she says finally. “Because the sport says it rewards experience, but it only rewards the right kind of experience — the kind you were lucky enough to be allowed to gain.”
It’s Catch-22: no professional experience, no contract — and no contract, no experience.
A turning point: walking away to stay in love with racing
Hall’s independent path began with a difficult decision to leave the UK setup that had nurtured her first steps in the sport. In 2024, she rode for DAS-Hutchinson-Brother UK, one of Britain’s most established women’s Continental teams. On paper, it looked like a springboard; in reality, she says, it became a source of frustration and unhappiness.
“There were a lot of things that meant the environment at DAS for me wasn’t great,” she says. “I still wanted to race and I wanted to improve and do more. But if I stayed there another year, I could very much see myself hating racing — and I didn’t want to do that. I was really miserable and unhappy on pretty much every race trip.”
She pauses before recalling one weekend that crystallised her feelings.
I remember crying and thinking, I just really don’t want to be here
“Before Lancaster, I really remember sitting there. It was a bit of a disorganised trip anyway. We’d driven ourselves up there. I didn’t go for dinner with the team — went for dinner on my own — and I remember crying and thinking, I just really don’t want to be here. Thankfully, I had my boyfriend with me, so I just kept my head on and thought, right, just go out and race the way that I race.”
Hall wins the 2024 Lancaster Grand Prix. Image: Craig Zadoronyj/SWpix.com
She won the race the next day. “It was an alright weekend,” she says with a small laugh, “but I came out of it thinking, I really want to race — just not with this environment.”
When asked what made the atmosphere so hard to endure, she doesn’t hesitate.“There was a lot of favouritism and there was no clear structure, no clear strategy,” she explains. “It was ‘so-and-so’s done this so they’re getting selected’ — or ‘so-and-so is bringing this into the team, so they’re getting selected’, even though they can’t finish a race. And it’s not like, ‘you’ve done your job and you’re out the back, get in the car’ — absolutely, that’s part of racing. But if you’re not contributing to the race, not doing a job, and still being picked, while riders who are fit and capable of getting results aren’t… it’s just wrong.”
She points to the example of a teammate, Australian Darcie Richards, to illustrate the inconsistency and lack of communication. Hall says selections for Richards, and others, were often made at the “eleventh hour” due to logistical issues, meaning Richards was continuously added to the roster last-minute.
Hall felt that Richards’ situation was so inconsistent that she felt Richards was never truly selected for a race, “yet she raced almost every single one because she’d get called in last minute when people dropped out or couldn’t be bothered to race,” adding, “It was just so unorganised.”
She describes this not as malice but as dysfunction. “Every team has its pitfalls,” she clarifies. “But there were relationships that were making it pretty toxic to be around. And I’ve been in high-level sport, not in cycling but in other sports, my entire life. It’s just not the way that I know things are done. At a level where you’re not paid, where there’s no professionalism with it, you’ve got to have an attitude where everybody’s here doing this to either progress or enjoy it. If it’s not fun, if it’s not giving you the opportunity to learn, then what’s the point?”
For Hall, leaving was an act of self-preservation — and a turning point.
“I knew I still wanted to race, but I wanted to do it properly,” she says. “I wanted to be in environments that made me better, not bitter. So when I was told by WorldTour teams, ‘you need more experience, you need to get out of the UK,’ that’s exactly what I did.”
I’ve learned so much this last year. The amount of technical and tactical improvement I’ve made has been four, five, sixfold since I started racing. The confidence you get from that just transforms how you ride
What followed was a year that would transform her both as a racer and as a person. “I’ve raced in every single continent — every UCI Tour there is,” she says. “I’ve learned so much this last year. The amount of technical and tactical improvement I’ve made has been four, five, sixfold since I started racing. The confidence you get from that just transforms how you ride.”
Professionalism doesn’t cost money
When Hall left the UK scene, she took the advice she’d been given more than once: get out of the UK. She joined the Australian team Praties at the start of 2025, spending three months racing in the domestic scene across Australia. “I was already in New Zealand over the winter,” she explains. “Praties had a strong calendar, and I wanted to see what racing there would be like. It felt like the right move — a clean start and a new environment.”
Hall at the 2025 Lloyds National Time Trial Championships. Image: Olly Hassell/SWpix.com
For a while, it worked. Hall was a key part of the team’s domestic success while also achieving results for herself. But as the year progressed, Praties began to struggle financially and scaled back its European programme. Hall was faced with a choice: sit out the year or make her own opportunities. She chose the latter. “I didn’t want to waste a year,” she says. “So I just made my own calendar.”
“The team was really supportive,” she says. “Andrew Christie-Johnson [the team manager] just said, ‘We just want you to race. Take the kit, take the equipment. Don’t do anything that’s going to jeopardise our relationship with sponsors, but get yourself race days.’ They were fully behind us doing that.”
That decision led to a breakthrough. Invited to guest for a composite UCI team coordinated by Michael Engelmann and Lauren Stephens – Aegis Cycling – Hall suddenly found herself surrounded by experienced riders like Stephens and Emma Langley, as well as talented but inexperienced newcomers.
“I’ve never been part of a more organised team,” she says. “In-race, out-of-race, the cohesion within the team, the race dynamics — we took every single jersey, every single category. We absolutely cleaned up. But the best bit was that everyone had a role, and every rider did their job. It was just so smooth.”
Budget’s obviously huge in cycling — if you don’t have it, you can’t travel, can’t race — but there’s so much you can do that doesn’t cost money. Planning, communication, clarity — it’s all free
The experience was transformative. “That month showed me what you can do off a really small budget,” she says. “Budget’s obviously huge in cycling — if you don’t have it, you can’t travel, can’t race — but there’s so much you can do that doesn’t cost money. Planning, communication, clarity — it’s all free. And yet, in Britain, everything is blamed on not having a budget. Half the problems aren’t money; they’re management.”
Her success in the U.S., which included her first UCI stage win, reframed her idea of professionalism. “It’s not about the size of the van or how much kit you’ve got,” she says. “It’s about creating an environment that lets riders perform.”
She contrasts that with the experience of many UK teams. “I’ve done races where you find out who’s riding the night before, there’s no clear plan, and people are still deciding tactics in the car park,” she says. “Then you go somewhere like that composite team and realise — this is what proper racing feels like.”
There are exceptions. Hall reserves particular respect for Handsling Alba Development RT. “They’re one of, or the most organised and professional setups in the UK,” she says. “From the outside they look professional, and they’ve done really well developing riders like Eilidh Shaw and Lauren Dickson. They’ve got a five-year plan and they actually seem to be following through with it.”
It’s not about the size of the van or how much kit you’ve got. It’s about creating an environment that lets riders perform
She even applied to join them. “It’s the only team I’d have considered coming back to the UK to race with,” she says. “I approached Bob Lyons early in the year, before they were full. So I don’t know — maybe I’ve got a massive red flag above my head that says ‘don’t sign this girl’, because I know that in that setup, I could contribute domestically. But who knows.”
For Hall, professionalism has nothing to do with money. It’s a culture — a way of doing things properly. “It’s just about having respect for the riders,” she says. “The right people can make a small budget work.”
The economics of exclusion
While philosophical about rejection, Hall is blunt about the financial absurdity of racing in the UK. “[The Witheridge Grand Prix] was going to cost me almost £450,” she says. “There’s no prize money. It’s just not feasible. I think it ended up being an 80-kilometre race or something ridiculous like that.”
For riders without team backing, British road racing is often a losing game — expensive travel, no prize pot, and ever-rising entry fees. “You’re spending more than you’ll ever make back,” she says. “So you end up asking yourself, why am I doing this here when I can race abroad for free, get proper support, and actually learn something?”
Image: Sonoko Tanaka
The logic, for Hall, is simple: go where the racing makes sense. “It’s not about money,” she insists. “It’s about how you use what you’ve got. The right people can make a small budget work.”
Her words highlight a structural barrier that many British riders quietly acknowledge: competing at home can cost more than it rewards. For a sport that sells itself as accessible, the arithmetic tells a different story.
Becoming a freelancer
When Praties’ funding was cut back and the team scaled down its European calendar, Hall suddenly found herself without a clear plan — but she refused to sit still. What followed was a kind of rolling experiment in self-management: booking flights on instinct, messaging organisers directly, hunting down guest-ride slots and start lists that weren’t yet public. “I raced in every single continent,” she laughs. “Every UCI Tour there is.”
There was no guarantee of anything. Some races would confirm her entry just days before. “I might only know a few days before that I’d even got in,” she says. “You’re basically living out of a suitcase.”
It’s quite high pressure. It’s not like I can have a massive race block with twenty race days in two months. I just had to rock up not knowing where I was at compared to other people
Her season became a test of nerve and improvisation. She learned to build a calendar out of fragments — a Thai stage race here, an Italian event there, a guest spot in America — all while trying to maintain the form of someone on a full-time programme. “If you exclude domestic racing, I had maybe seven or eight races,” she says. “It’s quite high pressure. It’s not like I can have a massive race block with twenty race days in two months. I just had to rock up not knowing where I was at compared to other people.”
That uncertainty shaped everything, even her training. “I don’t have any girls I can train with,” she says. “I train by myself or with my boyfriend. All I can use is Strava, VAM, historic stuff. I constantly doubt my ability. I think, maybe my power meter’s over-reading or maybe the conditions are real fast… you just doubt yourself continuously.”
Hall wins the final stage of the 2025 Tour of the Gila. Image: Caddy Visual Storytelling
At the Giro Mediterraneo in Rosa, where she won on stage 1 and finished second overall, she arrived without knowing the course or even the profile. “I found a GPX or I’d made what I thought the race route would be based on last year’s race and Strava heat maps,” she laughs. “I thought, this might be my last opportunity to show what I’ve got, and after 26k I just went. And that was that.”
For Hall, that approach — equal parts bravery and desperation — became its own discipline. “You learn to treat every start line like it could be your last one of the season,” she says. “It’s exhausting, but it keeps you sharp.”
You learn to treat every start line like it could be your last one of the season. It’s exhausting, but it keeps you sharp
What kept her going was the same instinct that’s guided her since she first picked up a bike. “I love training,” she says simply. “If I’m stressed or if shit’s happening, I couldn’t think of anything more enjoyable than going out on my bike. As long as it’s warm and scenic, that’s just what I love doing.”
Perspective helped too. “A couple of years ago, with George’s accident, it gives you a new perspective on everything,” she reflects. “It sounds really corny and really cheesy, but it makes you remember it could all be over tomorrow. So I gave myself this year to be the best that I can be. I didn’t want something that was in my control to be the reason I can’t.”
That sentence — I didn’t want something in my control to be the reason I can’t — sums up the whole endeavour. A year spent living from email to email, border to border, yet still finding joy in the doing. “It’s only one year,” she says. “I’ve just got to commit.”
Racing the system
As the winter approaches, Hall finds herself once again waiting — for replies, for clarity, for a chance. “I’m still without a contract,” she says. “That American team is becoming a professional setup full-time next year, which would be great. But they’re not going to be riding the Tour de France; they’re not going to be riding the biggest WorldTour races. And that’s what I want to do.”
Her determination is undimmed. “I want an opportunity to show that I can contribute at WorldTour level. I know I can contribute at that level.”
I want an opportunity to show that I can contribute at WorldTour level. I know I can contribute at that level
Hall believes her steep learning curve should count for something. “Every race I’ve gone to, I’ve learned,” she says. “I’ve delivered what I didn’t have at the last race in the next one.”
That willingness to evolve is, to her, the essence of the sport. “A lot of people by the time they’re my age are doing it for the sake of doing it,” she says. “They’ve been racing ten, fifteen years. They’ve seen everything. I’m still hungry.”
It’s the same hunger she spoke of in our 2023 interview — the same spark that carried her from local races to the front of the National Road Championships. Then, she said: “I don’t want to waste time worrying about what I can’t control.” A year later, that mantra still holds — but the stakes are higher.
Image: Sonoko Tanaka
Looking ahead
Frankie Hall’s story is, in many ways, the story of modern women’s cycling: professional in name, precarious in reality. Her season of self-reliance is a triumph of resilience, but it shouldn’t have to be.
If a rider can win UCI races, rack up UCI points, and manage a global programme independently, what further evidence of merit is required?
Hall doesn’t claim to speak for everyone. What she offers is testimony from the sharp end of a system that often confuses youth with value and structure with bureaucracy. “It’s really difficult,” she says. “I do lose sleep over it.”
As she continues training through the off-season — preparing as if the call will come, even if it doesn’t — Hall remains pragmatic. “I’ll just approach things as I normally would,” she says. “Have an off-season, prepare myself for the season ahead — even if I don’t know who I’ll be riding with, or when my first race will be.”
Hall’s future, like that of many riders in her position, remains uncertain. But her approach is matter-of-fact, not sentimental. She keeps training, keeps planning, keeps going. In a sport that too often relies on individual resolve to paper over structural gaps, her persistence feels less like defiance than necessity.
Featured image: SWpix.com
Editor’s Note
Published 2 November, 2025.
Factual Corrections and Clarifications
1. Experience Timeline: The narrative text has been updated to clarify that while Frankie Hall began racing at a national level in 2021, her quote referencing “a year of racing” specifically referred to her entry and focus on UCI-level racing in 2023. 2. Darcie Richards’ selection: Ms. Hall’s quote stating Darcie Richards was “never selected” was intended to illustrate the lack of clear selection policy and consistency within the team’s operations, rather than a literal denial of all selections. Ms. Hall confirms selections were often made at the “eleventh hour,” affecting Darcie’s training and logistics. We have updated the article to reflect this.
We appreciate the engagement from our readers and the team. Our commitment to transparent, honest, and balanced coverage of the domestic scene remains absolute.
In the interest of fairness and journalistic balance, we offered DAS-Hutchinson management a formal right of reply to the reflections made by Frankie Hall on her 2024 season. The team submitted the following statement.
DAS-Hutchinson Statement (November 1, 2025)
At DAS Hutchinson we are very sad and disheartened to have seen Frankie’s words, we appreciate her honesty in sharing her experiences. During her time on the team, Frankie brought success and many great wins, which we are very proud of. At DAS Hutchinson, we understand the importance of creating an environment where athletes can thrive both personally and professionally. While she has reflected on her time with us and identified areas for growth, our focus remains on fostering a supportive, transparent, and inclusive environment where every rider can develop, enjoy racing, and achieve their full potential both on and off the bike.
Over the years, we have developed and supported riders who have gone on to join WorldTour teams, won many national titles, an Olympic medal, and achieved prestigious UCI and WorldTour victories. Our commitment is to continue providing the environment and support necessary for our athletes to succeed and excel at the highest levels of the sport.
We are looking forward to an exciting and successful 2026 season, where we will continue to grow and develop as a team, supporting our athletes to reach new heights. We take feedback seriously and see it as an opportunity to grow, learn, and become better as individuals and as a team. We wish Frankie and all our riders the very best in their careers and remain dedicated to helping athletes achieve their goals.
It would be nice to imagine that professional cycling is a meritocracy — a ladder where watts, willpower and racecraft translate neatly into opportunity. The reality, as British rider Frankie Hall has discovered, is something far more chaotic.
When we speak, Hall is in China, helping her boyfriend’s team at a race that she describes with weary amusement.
“If you imagine the most chaotic, disorganised race in the UK and then take a third of that organisation,” she laughs, “you’re still not at the level of China logistics. The quality of the racing and the platforms that they deliver is real high, but in terms of information getting fed down to riders and teams… it’s just non-existent.”
At 7.30pm the night before an 8.30am start, the riders were finally told where the race was, what time it started and when they’d be leaving. “So yeah,” she says, “bit chaotic.”
It’s an apt image for Hall’s recent career — a talented, driven rider forced to impose her own professionalism on the disarray around her. This season she has pieced together a global season on her own initiative, racing across four continents, taking two UCI stage wins and amassing UCI points — all without the backing of a formal professional contract.
Her self-made campaign is remarkable not just for the results but for what it reveals about the system she had to outwit. Hall’s journey highlights three overlapping challenges in modern women’s cycling: the WorldTour’s increasing fixation on youth, the organisational fragility of parts of the UK domestic scene, and the mental and logistical toll of sustaining a career as a self-funded privateer.
Those who read our 2023 interview with Hall, Starting from Scratch, will recognise the thread that runs through her story. Then, she was balancing her own development with supporting her boyfriend after his serious crash at the 2022 Rutland-Melton CiCLE Classic — a period that tested her resolve and reshaped her perspective. A former elite hockey player who only discovered racing competitively in her twenties, she spoke then about learning fast, loving the process, and refusing to “waste energy on things I can’t control.”
Two years on, that mindset remains unchanged — but the battlefield has shifted. Back then, the challenge was recovery and belonging; now, it’s recognition and opportunity. The promise that defined her breakout rides in 2023 has evolved into something more complex: proof that talent and tenacity alone are not enough to move through a system that rewards youth, conformity and connections as much as performance.
The WorldTour Catch-22
Hall’s main obstacle is not her physiology or her record. It’s her age and experience. At 30, she sits outside the demographic most professional teams now target — and inside a paradox that has come to define modern women’s cycling.
While Hall had previously competed at a national level, her UCI racing experience only began in 2023.
“Everyone was coming back to me with the same response,” she recalls. “You’re physically there. Your numbers are good. You’ve shown you can win a bike race in different types of racing — hilly road races, flat crits, technical things — everything that we would want or need to see at a domestic level, you’ve done.”
Then comes the caveat. “But for a rider your age, you’re not very experienced,” she says. “Which is completely true — I went to DAS after a year of racing and then I got very limited race opportunities. You didn’t get a consistent block of racing; you didn’t get to go to races where you could do things, learn, and then build on it. I had an injury, got taken to Port Epic and then crashed out of that. That put me out for a month.”
It left her in a kind of limbo — too strong to be overlooked, too inexperienced to be chosen. “The issue is you’ve not got any WorldTour wins, you’ve not got WorldTour experience. At 30, we need that,” she recounts. “I can train as hard as I can. I can produce whatever numbers they need me to produce… I cannot change my age. I can do nothing about it.”
For a rider who only discovered competitive cycling in her twenties, after a serious hockey injury ended one sporting life, this reasoning borders on absurd. She describes herself as “young in cycling age”, still learning at a rate few riders manage after years in the peloton. “I’ve been told by three or four teams that I’m stronger than half their roster,” she says. “But they just see the number.”
The contradiction gnaws at her. “You see riders that you think, what are they going to contribute? Is it because their agent’s good at talking? Because all I need is the opportunity to show that I can contribute.”
Her frustration isn’t born of entitlement but of simple logic. Without a team, she can’t get the race days needed to gain experience; without experience, she can’t get a team. “How are you going to provide these results and provide this evidence if you don’t have that opportunity to show?” she asks.
She recalls racing solo in Italy earlier this year, trying to prove herself in a role that demanded team support she didn’t have. “I was the only person from my team,” she says. “I was trying to contest intermediate sprints, trying to contest KOMs, trying to look after myself against full teams of six riders. And you’re on your own. How can I get an intermediate sprint to get these two, three-second bonus seconds when I’ve just done my own 6k lead-out, fighting for position through some rogue-ass Italian town, avoiding cars, nonna and 30 friends cooking on the street, and a commissaire that decides to stop in the middle of the road — and then sprint as well?”
She laughs at the chaos of it, but the frustration lingers. “Then they turn around and say, ‘How are you going to contest the GC if you can’t finish a sprint?’ I’m like, well… if I could get to that position and contest it on an equal level, I know that I can.”
Hall calls it the sport’s hypocrisy of opportunity: a structure that tells riders to show results without giving them the means to do so. “It’s really hard,” she admits. “Because the top riders — they’re not slowing down. My cycling age is still new. I can still learn so much if I’m given the opportunity to learn. Every race I’ve gone to this year, I’ve learned, I’ve taken it on board and delivered what I didn’t have at the last race in the next one.”
She smiles ruefully. “Maybe it’s because of the amount of time I’ve spent in education,” she says. “I’ve learned how to learn.”
That curiosity and self-awareness are rare commodities in sport, and yet they’ve become the basis for her exclusion. “By the time they’re my age,” she says, “a lot of people are doing it for the sake of doing it. They’ve been racing ten, fifteen years. They’ve seen everything. I’m still hungry.”
She pauses. “It’s frustrating,” she says finally. “Because the sport says it rewards experience, but it only rewards the right kind of experience — the kind you were lucky enough to be allowed to gain.”
It’s Catch-22: no professional experience, no contract — and no contract, no experience.
A turning point: walking away to stay in love with racing
Hall’s independent path began with a difficult decision to leave the UK setup that had nurtured her first steps in the sport. In 2024, she rode for DAS-Hutchinson-Brother UK, one of Britain’s most established women’s Continental teams. On paper, it looked like a springboard; in reality, she says, it became a source of frustration and unhappiness.
“There were a lot of things that meant the environment at DAS for me wasn’t great,” she says. “I still wanted to race and I wanted to improve and do more. But if I stayed there another year, I could very much see myself hating racing — and I didn’t want to do that. I was really miserable and unhappy on pretty much every race trip.”
She pauses before recalling one weekend that crystallised her feelings.
“Before Lancaster, I really remember sitting there. It was a bit of a disorganised trip anyway. We’d driven ourselves up there. I didn’t go for dinner with the team — went for dinner on my own — and I remember crying and thinking, I just really don’t want to be here. Thankfully, I had my boyfriend with me, so I just kept my head on and thought, right, just go out and race the way that I race.”
She won the race the next day. “It was an alright weekend,” she says with a small laugh, “but I came out of it thinking, I really want to race — just not with this environment.”
When asked what made the atmosphere so hard to endure, she doesn’t hesitate.“There was a lot of favouritism and there was no clear structure, no clear strategy,” she explains. “It was ‘so-and-so’s done this so they’re getting selected’ — or ‘so-and-so is bringing this into the team, so they’re getting selected’, even though they can’t finish a race. And it’s not like, ‘you’ve done your job and you’re out the back, get in the car’ — absolutely, that’s part of racing. But if you’re not contributing to the race, not doing a job, and still being picked, while riders who are fit and capable of getting results aren’t… it’s just wrong.”
She points to the example of a teammate, Australian Darcie Richards, to illustrate the inconsistency and lack of communication. Hall says selections for Richards, and others, were often made at the “eleventh hour” due to logistical issues, meaning Richards was continuously added to the roster last-minute.
Hall felt that Richards’ situation was so inconsistent that she felt Richards was never truly selected for a race, “yet she raced almost every single one because she’d get called in last minute when people dropped out or couldn’t be bothered to race,” adding, “It was just so unorganised.”
She describes this not as malice but as dysfunction. “Every team has its pitfalls,” she clarifies. “But there were relationships that were making it pretty toxic to be around. And I’ve been in high-level sport, not in cycling but in other sports, my entire life. It’s just not the way that I know things are done. At a level where you’re not paid, where there’s no professionalism with it, you’ve got to have an attitude where everybody’s here doing this to either progress or enjoy it. If it’s not fun, if it’s not giving you the opportunity to learn, then what’s the point?”
For Hall, leaving was an act of self-preservation — and a turning point.
“I knew I still wanted to race, but I wanted to do it properly,” she says. “I wanted to be in environments that made me better, not bitter. So when I was told by WorldTour teams, ‘you need more experience, you need to get out of the UK,’ that’s exactly what I did.”
What followed was a year that would transform her both as a racer and as a person. “I’ve raced in every single continent — every UCI Tour there is,” she says. “I’ve learned so much this last year. The amount of technical and tactical improvement I’ve made has been four, five, sixfold since I started racing. The confidence you get from that just transforms how you ride.”
Professionalism doesn’t cost money
When Hall left the UK scene, she took the advice she’d been given more than once: get out of the UK. She joined the Australian team Praties at the start of 2025, spending three months racing in the domestic scene across Australia. “I was already in New Zealand over the winter,” she explains. “Praties had a strong calendar, and I wanted to see what racing there would be like. It felt like the right move — a clean start and a new environment.”
For a while, it worked. Hall was a key part of the team’s domestic success while also achieving results for herself. But as the year progressed, Praties began to struggle financially and scaled back its European programme. Hall was faced with a choice: sit out the year or make her own opportunities. She chose the latter. “I didn’t want to waste a year,” she says. “So I just made my own calendar.”
“The team was really supportive,” she says. “Andrew Christie-Johnson [the team manager] just said, ‘We just want you to race. Take the kit, take the equipment. Don’t do anything that’s going to jeopardise our relationship with sponsors, but get yourself race days.’ They were fully behind us doing that.”
That decision led to a breakthrough. Invited to guest for a composite UCI team coordinated by Michael Engelmann and Lauren Stephens – Aegis Cycling – Hall suddenly found herself surrounded by experienced riders like Stephens and Emma Langley, as well as talented but inexperienced newcomers.
“I’ve never been part of a more organised team,” she says. “In-race, out-of-race, the cohesion within the team, the race dynamics — we took every single jersey, every single category. We absolutely cleaned up. But the best bit was that everyone had a role, and every rider did their job. It was just so smooth.”
The experience was transformative. “That month showed me what you can do off a really small budget,” she says. “Budget’s obviously huge in cycling — if you don’t have it, you can’t travel, can’t race — but there’s so much you can do that doesn’t cost money. Planning, communication, clarity — it’s all free. And yet, in Britain, everything is blamed on not having a budget. Half the problems aren’t money; they’re management.”
Her success in the U.S., which included her first UCI stage win, reframed her idea of professionalism. “It’s not about the size of the van or how much kit you’ve got,” she says. “It’s about creating an environment that lets riders perform.”
She contrasts that with the experience of many UK teams. “I’ve done races where you find out who’s riding the night before, there’s no clear plan, and people are still deciding tactics in the car park,” she says. “Then you go somewhere like that composite team and realise — this is what proper racing feels like.”
There are exceptions. Hall reserves particular respect for Handsling Alba Development RT. “They’re one of, or the most organised and professional setups in the UK,” she says. “From the outside they look professional, and they’ve done really well developing riders like Eilidh Shaw and Lauren Dickson. They’ve got a five-year plan and they actually seem to be following through with it.”
She even applied to join them. “It’s the only team I’d have considered coming back to the UK to race with,” she says. “I approached Bob Lyons early in the year, before they were full. So I don’t know — maybe I’ve got a massive red flag above my head that says ‘don’t sign this girl’, because I know that in that setup, I could contribute domestically. But who knows.”
For Hall, professionalism has nothing to do with money. It’s a culture — a way of doing things properly. “It’s just about having respect for the riders,” she says. “The right people can make a small budget work.”
The economics of exclusion
While philosophical about rejection, Hall is blunt about the financial absurdity of racing in the UK. “[The Witheridge Grand Prix] was going to cost me almost £450,” she says. “There’s no prize money. It’s just not feasible. I think it ended up being an 80-kilometre race or something ridiculous like that.”
For riders without team backing, British road racing is often a losing game — expensive travel, no prize pot, and ever-rising entry fees. “You’re spending more than you’ll ever make back,” she says. “So you end up asking yourself, why am I doing this here when I can race abroad for free, get proper support, and actually learn something?”
The logic, for Hall, is simple: go where the racing makes sense. “It’s not about money,” she insists. “It’s about how you use what you’ve got. The right people can make a small budget work.”
Her words highlight a structural barrier that many British riders quietly acknowledge: competing at home can cost more than it rewards. For a sport that sells itself as accessible, the arithmetic tells a different story.
Becoming a freelancer
When Praties’ funding was cut back and the team scaled down its European calendar, Hall suddenly found herself without a clear plan — but she refused to sit still. What followed was a kind of rolling experiment in self-management: booking flights on instinct, messaging organisers directly, hunting down guest-ride slots and start lists that weren’t yet public. “I raced in every single continent,” she laughs. “Every UCI Tour there is.”
There was no guarantee of anything. Some races would confirm her entry just days before. “I might only know a few days before that I’d even got in,” she says. “You’re basically living out of a suitcase.”
Her season became a test of nerve and improvisation. She learned to build a calendar out of fragments — a Thai stage race here, an Italian event there, a guest spot in America — all while trying to maintain the form of someone on a full-time programme. “If you exclude domestic racing, I had maybe seven or eight races,” she says. “It’s quite high pressure. It’s not like I can have a massive race block with twenty race days in two months. I just had to rock up not knowing where I was at compared to other people.”
That uncertainty shaped everything, even her training. “I don’t have any girls I can train with,” she says. “I train by myself or with my boyfriend. All I can use is Strava, VAM, historic stuff. I constantly doubt my ability. I think, maybe my power meter’s over-reading or maybe the conditions are real fast… you just doubt yourself continuously.”
At the Giro Mediterraneo in Rosa, where she won on stage 1 and finished second overall, she arrived without knowing the course or even the profile. “I found a GPX or I’d made what I thought the race route would be based on last year’s race and Strava heat maps,” she laughs. “I thought, this might be my last opportunity to show what I’ve got, and after 26k I just went. And that was that.”
For Hall, that approach — equal parts bravery and desperation — became its own discipline. “You learn to treat every start line like it could be your last one of the season,” she says. “It’s exhausting, but it keeps you sharp.”
What kept her going was the same instinct that’s guided her since she first picked up a bike. “I love training,” she says simply. “If I’m stressed or if shit’s happening, I couldn’t think of anything more enjoyable than going out on my bike. As long as it’s warm and scenic, that’s just what I love doing.”
Perspective helped too. “A couple of years ago, with George’s accident, it gives you a new perspective on everything,” she reflects. “It sounds really corny and really cheesy, but it makes you remember it could all be over tomorrow. So I gave myself this year to be the best that I can be. I didn’t want something that was in my control to be the reason I can’t.”
That sentence — I didn’t want something in my control to be the reason I can’t — sums up the whole endeavour. A year spent living from email to email, border to border, yet still finding joy in the doing. “It’s only one year,” she says. “I’ve just got to commit.”
Racing the system
As the winter approaches, Hall finds herself once again waiting — for replies, for clarity, for a chance. “I’m still without a contract,” she says. “That American team is becoming a professional setup full-time next year, which would be great. But they’re not going to be riding the Tour de France; they’re not going to be riding the biggest WorldTour races. And that’s what I want to do.”
Her determination is undimmed. “I want an opportunity to show that I can contribute at WorldTour level. I know I can contribute at that level.”
Hall believes her steep learning curve should count for something. “Every race I’ve gone to, I’ve learned,” she says. “I’ve delivered what I didn’t have at the last race in the next one.”
That willingness to evolve is, to her, the essence of the sport. “A lot of people by the time they’re my age are doing it for the sake of doing it,” she says. “They’ve been racing ten, fifteen years. They’ve seen everything. I’m still hungry.”
It’s the same hunger she spoke of in our 2023 interview — the same spark that carried her from local races to the front of the National Road Championships. Then, she said: “I don’t want to waste time worrying about what I can’t control.” A year later, that mantra still holds — but the stakes are higher.
Looking ahead
Frankie Hall’s story is, in many ways, the story of modern women’s cycling: professional in name, precarious in reality. Her season of self-reliance is a triumph of resilience, but it shouldn’t have to be.
If a rider can win UCI races, rack up UCI points, and manage a global programme independently, what further evidence of merit is required?
Hall doesn’t claim to speak for everyone. What she offers is testimony from the sharp end of a system that often confuses youth with value and structure with bureaucracy. “It’s really difficult,” she says. “I do lose sleep over it.”
As she continues training through the off-season — preparing as if the call will come, even if it doesn’t — Hall remains pragmatic. “I’ll just approach things as I normally would,” she says. “Have an off-season, prepare myself for the season ahead — even if I don’t know who I’ll be riding with, or when my first race will be.”
Hall’s future, like that of many riders in her position, remains uncertain. But her approach is matter-of-fact, not sentimental. She keeps training, keeps planning, keeps going. In a sport that too often relies on individual resolve to paper over structural gaps, her persistence feels less like defiance than necessity.
Featured image: SWpix.com
Published 2 November, 2025.
Factual Corrections and Clarifications
1. Experience Timeline: The narrative text has been updated to clarify that while Frankie Hall began racing at a national level in 2021, her quote referencing “a year of racing” specifically referred to her entry and focus on UCI-level racing in 2023.
2. Darcie Richards’ selection: Ms. Hall’s quote stating Darcie Richards was “never selected” was intended to illustrate the lack of clear selection policy and consistency within the team’s operations, rather than a literal denial of all selections. Ms. Hall confirms selections were often made at the “eleventh hour,” affecting Darcie’s training and logistics. We have updated the article to reflect this.
We appreciate the engagement from our readers and the team. Our commitment to transparent, honest, and balanced coverage of the domestic scene remains absolute.
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