Sarah King interview: “There’s no-one telling you you can’t”

It was a call with a group of junior series race organisers – cheerful enough, constructive, the kind of meeting that makes you feel the sport is in reasonable hands. Sarah King joined it, looked around the virtual room, and counted. Herself. One other woman. Everyone else: men.

“I shouldn’t be the only woman sat here,” she thought. “Or one of two.”

She was careful, afterwards, to say it wasn’t a hostile call. They were a lovely bunch of organisers. That’s the point. The problem King is trying to solve in 2026 isn’t hostility. It’s absence – the largely unnoticed fact of women not being in the rooms where the sport gets organised, governed, coached, and shaped. Not kept out, exactly. Just not there.

There’s no one telling you you can’t. Why the hell wouldn’t you ask, or try and find out more about it?

Founder of the London Academy, King is now in her first year as chair of the British Cycling Road Commission, and it has turned her attention decisively outward. When The British Continental spoke to her at the start of 2024, the conversation was focused inward – the culture within London Academy, the Bike Racing 101 programme, the logic of building a team around rider wellbeing rather than results. ‘Happy heads, happy legs’. That work continues. But the commission role has pushed the frame wider, toward the structure of the sport itself, and the question of who is missing from it. What she keeps finding, in every context she looks, is that the answer is the same – and so is the remedy.

The route she didn’t know existed

King didn’t know the road commission existed when she was a junior racer. This is not unusual – she suspects most junior racers don’t. The commissions operate, the roles come up for advertisement on the British Cycling website and on LinkedIn every three years, and the people who find out about them tend to be the people already embedded in the sport’s administrative layer. “We don’t know these things exist,” she says. “So then we don’t know we can be on them.”

When she eventually did find a commission vacancy, a few years ago, she didn’t apply. Her concern was specific: she imagined sitting in meetings watching things not move, raising issues and watching them get noted and then nothing happening. That perception – that these structures are slow and frustrating and probably not worth the effort – is, she thinks, one of the main reasons people stay away.

“I looked at it three years ago,” she says. “At the time I was starting the academy, and my question was: if I go and do it, will I just sit there and get frustrated? That was my perception of what it would be like. So I didn’t bother.”

It’s given me the chance to bring up things, to talk to people, and to learn so much more about the sport. And then to realise where difference can be made, even if it’s small to start with

She was appointed chair last year, and her account of what the role has actually been is more nuanced than the perception that put her off. The work in the past year has centred on a discipline plan – a document that sets objectives across the different components of road and circuit racing, at every level, and attempts to hold British Cycling accountable for meeting them. It is slow work. But she has found it genuinely instructive. “It’s given me the chance to bring up things, to talk to people, and to learn so much more about the sport. And then to realise where difference can be made, even if it’s small to start with.”

The commission currently has ten members. Three are women. King would like to see that reach 50/50. She describes this, with deliberate plainness, as “a really simple start.” The effects of that imbalance reach further than the commission room.

One of her younger riders mentioned recently that throughout her junior and youth racing she had always had male coaches. They weren’t bad coaches, the rider said. She just wanted a woman there to talk to and relate to. It is the same mechanism operating at a different level: if you don’t see someone there, you don’t think you’re able to do it either.

Regional boards, which sit below the commission level and organise local racing infrastructure, are more heavily male still. King is candid about her own history with them. “I never really bothered with it because I thought it was really boring,” she says. “My perception as a racer was: a board sounds like you’re part of a – maybe that’s because I was young.” That perception, she suspects, is widely shared. And the effects of the imbalance it produces run deeper than the numbers suggest. She has heard from people in her network who attended a regional board meeting, were shut down, and wouldn’t go back. “Can we send someone with you?” was her response. “Can you go as two? How do we make you go back?”

It’s not that we’re saying these men shouldn’t be there. It’s more that women should be there. And making people realise that that’s possible for them

“It’s not that we’re saying these men shouldn’t be there,” she says. “It’s more that the women should be there. And making people realise that that’s possible for them.”

None of this is new as an argument. But King makes it with a particular texture, grounded in her own slow route toward these rooms. “If you don’t see someone there, you obviously don’t think that you’re able to do it either,” she says. The absence is felt before it is understood. These things also dissolve – quickly, often – the moment someone interrupts the chain. When someone tells you the commission exists, or tells you to apply, or simply says: you can do this. That is what King keeps finding herself doing. It is also, she would say, what anyone can do.

De-influencing the start line

London Academy ran a Bike Racing 101 event recently, open to women who were curious about racing but hadn’t done it. King asked them, at the end, to write their barriers on post-it notes. Fear came up repeatedly. Not being fast enough. Not having the right bike, or the right kit, or an expensive enough bike. Knowledge gaps – simply not knowing how racing works, where to start, what to expect.

That is a familiar list. What happened next was less so.

King took those post-it notes to a London Academy team weekend and showed them to her riders. They talked about them. The discussion that emerged was about de-influencing – the idea that the image of cycling circulating on social media, the polished photographs and the aspirational kit and the implication that you need to look a certain way before you’re entitled to turn up, is not an accurate picture of what road racing actually is. The gap between that image and the reality of a fourth-cat race in Cambridgeshire is wide enough to stop people getting on a start line.

The stuff that’s being put out there isn’t truly what the sport and the racing side of the sport is. We need to shout louder to tell people what it’s really like

“The stuff that’s being put out there isn’t truly what the sport and the racing side of the sport is,” King says. “We need to shout louder to tell people what it’s really like.”

The team also recognised, in the same conversation, that they can be part of the problem. “We can be intimidating on start lines because we’re in fancy kit,” King says. The response was less a campaign than a commitment: talk to people. Be the friendly face on the start line, regardless of what you’re wearing. “We recognised that as a group,” she adds.

It is in this context that a small exchange with one of the team’s younger riders lands with a particular weight. The rider – still at school – had been thinking about standing up in an assembly and talking about bike racing, trying to inspire some of her classmates to come to a race. But she’d already decided the school probably wouldn’t let her. She probably shouldn’t ask.

King told her to ask. “I asked myself exactly the same thing when I was starting the academy,” she said. “Spoiler alert – you can do it. There’s no one telling you you can’t. Why the hell wouldn’t you ask, or try and find out more about it?”

The girl who has already decided she can’t before she’s checked. The woman who nearly didn’t apply for the commission because she assumed it would be frustrating. The same habit of mind, running through the sport at every level, and the same thing required to break it. someone saying you can.

Keeping people in

The mentoring scheme King runs through London Academy has grown to 22 mentors supporting around 30 riders, roughly half within the team and half outside it. The external riders are matched through an application process. The mentors span active racers at UCI Continental level, experienced riders at lower levels, and those who have retired from the sport.

That last group matters as much as the others. Women who exit competitive racing tend to exit the sport entirely, often after difficult experiences in teams, and take their knowledge with them. King thinks about this in relation to herself. “I’m 33, and that is young compared to – we have loads of riders that are older than me in the sport,” she says. “I stopped racing three years ago, and I probably could still be racing.”

I hope that not only does it help the racers now within racing, but they will race for longer

The off-ramp out of competitive cycling is well-worn; the question the mentoring scheme is trying to answer is whether there is somewhere else to go instead. “I hope that not only does it help the racers now within racing, but they will race for longer,” she says. “And those doing the mentoring – a lot of them, it gives them something back. It makes them realise they know a lot of stuff and they should be confident in that.” At its simplest, what each mentoring relationship does is pass the message on: you belong here, there is a place for you in this sport beyond the start list.

Alongside the team programme, King has built a smaller initiative: five riders who race for local clubs rather than for London Academy, brought into some of the team’s activities and given access to its mentors. The point is explicitly not to bring them into the academy. It is to send them back to their clubs with knowledge and confidence, and through them to reach the grassroots network that formal team structures can’t easily touch. “The idea is that we connect through them with their clubs to help them engage more women into racing bikes,” King says. “Because they’ve now got the knowledge so they can spread it to someone else.”

The accidental organiser

This year King is organising three races. One is the London Academy GP, for which her predecessor, Miriam Bullock, left her what she calls “a quick start guide” – a document recording exactly what was done the year before, step by step. “Having that resource is cool,” she says, in the understated register she defaults to when something has clearly made a difference.

Another is a round of the London Academy East Road Race, which incorporates a round of the Junior Women’s National Road Series. It’s her first road race, organised in collaboration with Ian Doe, a 65-year-old from the Eastern region. Doe had identified a gap: the junior women’s series needed a third round, and nobody was running it. He was also honest about the limits of what he could do. His reasoning, as King recounts it, was direct: “I’m a 65-year-old man, and I cannot promote to women. I need some help.” So he asked London Academy.

It is a model King clearly finds encouraging – not because it is a grand structural solution but because it worked, practically, and because it involved someone recognising what they couldn’t do and finding someone to do it with them. Doe, in effect, told King she could organise a road race. It hadn’t occurred to her before he asked. “As much as I’m organising the race,” she says, “he is doing a hell of a lot in terms of the stuff that I perhaps don’t know about yet.”

After the moment

The Tour de France Femmes Grand Départ arrives in Britain in 2027, and King thinks the opportunity is real. She has seen what big set-piece moments can do: the 2012 Olympics, Bradley Wiggins’s Tour win the same summer, the generation of riders who cite those months as what got them on a bike. Inspiration works, when it lands right.

When you’ve done your first race as a fourth cat, most of the time those people don’t know what to do next, because nobody’s telling them

But she has a specific concern about what comes after. “You’ve actually got to follow up from it. You can’t just have the event and it be gone.” Where do you go to try cycling if you don’t have a bike? Where is a safe environment to learn? What’s the next race you can enter? “When you’ve done your first race as a fourth cat, most of the time those people don’t know what to do next, because nobody’s telling them. There’s no email from British Cycling saying, ‘You came sixth today – what about this race next?'”

The conversion problem – the gap between the moment of inspiration and the practical next step – is where most of the legacy from these events disappears. “What’s the next practical step that you can take?” she asks. “Where’s the next event you can do? Where can you go and get on a bike that you can rent, to try what cycling is?” The 2027 Grand Départ can be transformative if the infrastructure around it closes that gap. If it doesn’t, it will be a great weekend and then nothing.

We can make a difference to something. Even if it’s a few people turning up to a Racing 101 – even getting three more women on the start line is great

That scale of ambition – not grand, not sweeping, but specific and persistent – is very King. She is direct about why she keeps doing what she does, and unsentimental about the size of the task. “I can genuinely make a difference with what we’re doing,” she says. “The scene isn’t massive. Bike racing is still pretty niche. Women’s bike racing is more niche. So we can make a difference to something. Even if it’s a few people turning up to a Racing 101 – even getting three more women on the start line is great.” And critically, she wants to build it on its own terms. “We will do it in the way that we feel is best for women’s sports, not by copying how men’s sports do it. I think that’s the most important thing.”

She sent a voice note after the conversation ended, later that afternoon, because she’d forgotten to say something. Most of The British Continental’s readership is male, she suspects. The British domestic scene – around 800 licensed women racers, a handful of Continental teams, a growing but still modest calendar – is small enough that individual acts genuinely move the needle. A lot of the people who had pushed King forward, who had told her she could do the things she went on to do, were men. Ian Doe asking London Academy to co-organise a race because he knew he couldn’t reach young women alone. The people in her network who told her she could manage a team, run a commission, organise a road race, before she’d decided to believe it herself. “If a man is reading your article,” she said, “can they help encourage a woman into that – to do something, or that sort of thing? Bearing in mind your readership, that would be cool.”

If you’re thinking about it and you’re taking some steps to figure out how, you’re already good enough. You’re already able to do it

The barriers are invisible, and they tend to dissolve the moment someone says the right thing to the right person. That person doesn’t need a title or a role. King’s message to anyone – woman or man, rider or organiser, newcomer or lapsed racer – is the same.

“If you’re thinking about it and you’re taking some steps to figure out how,” she says, “you’re already good enough. You’re already able to do it.”

Featured image: Rupert Hartley