Paralloy RT is closing: Nikki Metcalfe on why it’s time to step away
Paralloy RT, the North East women's team that raced for eight seasons as Team Boompods, will close at the end of 2026. Manager Nikki Metcalfe explains the personal and financial cost of keeping a development team alive, and why she is stepping away before the enjoyment disappears.
At the Sunderland round of the 2021 Tour Series, Nikki Metcalfe was a rider short, or believed she was. She had four riders and thought a team had to start five, a misreading of the rules, she now says. So she put on the kit herself and lined up.
Five years later, the team she has run since 2018 will not start another season. Paralloy RT, as Boompods became this year under a new title sponsor, will close at the end of 2026.
I told the girls in June, at the end of the National Championships, that the team wouldn’t be carrying on next year
“I told the girls in June, at the end of the National Championships, that the team wouldn’t be carrying on next year, or that I wouldn’t be carrying on, and there was no one ready to take it on from me,” she says.
The closure removes one of the longer-standing women’s teams on the domestic scene: a British Cycling Elite Development Team with 16 riders on its 2026 list and a record of sending riders on to UCI level. It also ends one of the scene’s more distinctive operations, based in the North East, run largely by one woman, and sustained financially largely through Metcalfe’s own network of contacts.
Nikki Metcalfe. Image: Phil Metcalfe
“If you’re not enjoying it”
Metcalfe is clear that the decision is personal before it is financial.
“It’s down to really personal reasons: the amount of time I’m putting in, and I’m starting to not enjoy it,” she says. “If you’re not enjoying it, you’re not giving it 100 per cent, so I wanted to get out before it turned that way.”
She took the team on in 2018, with 2019 her first full season, co-managing with rider Hannah Farran until Farran stepped back about three years ago. “It’s been even harder doing it on your own,” she says. “Everyone’s a volunteer, and it basically depends on who’s on the team: the volunteers are the parents or the partners. We don’t have specific people who help out all the time.”
I’d go to the feed zone and feed eight riders on my own. I’d never fed before, and I’m throwing out bottles like God knows what
Her husband, Phil, was the constant, driving the team to races in the couple’s motorhome. Otherwise the volunteer model shaped everything, down to the feed zone.
“I’d go to the feed zone and feed eight riders on my own. I’d never fed before, and I’m throwing out bottles like God knows what,” she says. “Don’t know how they all caught them.”
The team was fitted around the rest of her life. She still works part-time, and for nearly three years has looked after her grandson two afternoons a week. “I’m up early with the dogs at six, I’m at work by eight and finish at 12,” she says. The team took the other afternoons and evenings, and eventually her own riding. “I didn’t have time to ride and manage. I managed, and then my fitness went, and it’s that knock-on effect.”
She has taken up running instead, because it fits into an hour or two. “I need me,” she says.
Asked whether she has any regrets about stopping, she answers at once. “No. I’ve slept better.” It is not that the love has gone. “I loved it,” she says. “I just need to get out before I start not enjoying it so much.”
Five grand, then fourteen
The money tells a parallel story. Boompods, the audio brand that backed the team for eight seasons, stepped back at the end of 2025, and Metcalfe does not hold it against its co-founder, David Tansley.
Team Boompods at the 2022 Tour Series Grand Final in Manchester. Image: Will Palmer/SWpix.com
“I don’t blame David. He’d put in nine or ten years himself and just supported us, and we did what we could for Boompods in the UK and Europe,” she says. “The last couple of years he was just putting the money in for the sake of the support, rather than to make a profit from it.”
That left two financial sponsors: Taylors MOT and Paralloy, a Billingham alloy casting firm that is also Metcalfe’s employer. Velo29 had withdrawn its money but stayed on the jersey, supplying nutrition.
Running a team off two financial sponsors was like going back to the very beginning
“Running a team off two financial sponsors was like going back to the very beginning,” she says. “In the beginning, we were running the team on five grand a year, where a lot of the teams were running on 30 to 50 grand, or whatever. This year we’ve run the team on probably 14 grand, if we were lucky. And there are now UCI teams looking for hundreds of thousands of pounds. So it’s a big, big difference in what you can offer a development rider.”
Her arithmetic for a single race weekend is stark. “They’re £50 a race at the moment. If you put a full team in, that’s eight riders, so £400 in entries. I never paid fuel or travel, but we always paid accommodation, and you’re talking another £400 to £600 minimum, for twin rooms and stuff,” she says. “So you needed £1,000 a race, and that’s just the National Road Series races.” The National Circuit Series came on top, as did the longer trips once the calendar spread to Devon.
New backers were not forthcoming. “The emails went out, and if I got an email back, we’d have a chat. They never came back from that,” she says. “It was more or less, ‘We haven’t got that sort of fund for that sort of thing.’”
At the same time, she says, the cost of attracting riders rose. The team always supplied kit and paid entries, then had to add accommodation to compete. “To be truthful, we probably gave out more kit than a lot of teams,” she says. Comparing notes with Sarah King at London Academy, she found the same. “What we paid out was a lot more than some of these UCI teams, and maybe that’s where we’re going wrong. But you can’t get the riders in otherwise. It’s catch-22. Unless you’ve got loads of money, it ain’t going to happen.”
Mary Wilkinson wins the 2022 Lancaster Grand Prix. Image: Alex Whitehead/SWpix.com
The team car became a recurring problem. Its regular volunteer driver moved to a job running events for British Cycling, and for its last two seasons the team had no car of its own. “Without forking out from my own bank account and buying an estate car just for racing, nobody was really willing to help us with a car,” she says.
BC don’t make it easy for anyone, never mind the development teams.
The rules added to the load. In National Road Series races, only a car driven by someone holding a British Cycling team manager’s licence may join the convoy, and no convoy vehicle may be taller than 1.66 metres, a limit taken from UCI regulations. Metcalfe says the rule was applied more strictly from last year. Every new driver needed the endorsement added to their licence at £20, and a driver without a race licence had to upgrade first, taking the cost to roughly £60. “It’s money you haven’t got and are struggling for in the first place, and they just keep adding on and adding on,” she says. She found the height limit hard to square with the vehicles she saw in convoys. “BC don’t make it easy for anyone, never mind the development teams.”
The written National Road Series rules on driver licences and vehicle height are unchanged since at least 2023. What changed, Metcalfe says, was enforcement: “They were definitely being more strict with it.”
Earning the nod
Metcalfe came to racing late, in her early forties. “I was dropped from every start line, but I’m quite competitive and persistent, and I just kept going and kept going,” she says. “Eventually I did win a race or two, but I never dipped into the National Series. I was never going to be quick enough.”
Management brought its own initiation. “I do feel that at the very beginning it was hard, being new on the scene, because I didn’t know how it all worked,” she says. She credits Carole Leigh, the long-serving race official and organiser inducted into the British Cycling Hall of Fame in 2024, with steering her through. “Without Carole Leigh, I think I’d have been lost completely. She kept me right.”
Ellen McDermott of Team Boompods wins the Barking round of the 2022 Tour Series. Image: Alex Broadway/SWpix.com
The paddock took longer. “When I very first started, it just seemed cliquey, I suppose,” she says. Sunderland changed that.
“From that day forward, the respect I got from the other managers, men as well as women, all changed. The men were the hardest, when you’re coming into the sport. That’s how it felt to me, anyway,” she says. “You got the nod: ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ Before that, I never got that. I think they thought, OK, maybe she is serious if she’s putting herself on the start line.”
By results, 2022 was the team’s high point. Ellen McDermott won the Barking round of the Tour Series in May, the team’s first Tour Series win, and the squad took the team classification at the Manchester final to finish second in the series team standings. In July, Mary Wilkinson, then 41, won the first women’s Lancaster Grand Prix, the team’s first National Road Series victory, with Monica Greenwood as road captain. Boompods finished second in the National Road Series team standings that season.
“The team just gelled so well that year,” Metcalfe says.
The riders who passed through form the fuller record. Greenwood, a former British Cycling Olympic endurance coach, won the National Road Series in 2023 with DAS-Handsling. Lucy Harris, a Boompods rider in 2022, won the 2025 Women’s CiCLE Classic. Lizzie Hermolle finished second in The British Continental‘s 2024 national road race rankings in Boompods colours, then joined DAS–Hutchinson and won the British gravel title in 2025. Emma Mathews moved to the CAMS team that is now DAS–Hutchinson.
We always made sure we never put pressure on a rider. That was our main thing
Metcalfe measures success differently. “We always made sure we never put pressure on a rider. That was our main thing,” she says. “It was put out to the girls: show your intent, and we’ll pick from that.”
Newcomers got their chance too, “because unless they ride, they’re never going to learn”. This year that meant Freya Johnson. “She’d never done a national. She’d never finished a road race, never finished a Circuit Series race,” Metcalfe says. “She had to experience it to learn.”
Metcalfe believes the step up is steeper than it was. “After COVID, the speeds just went up, so it’s even harder for girls nowadays than when I started,” she says. “I thought it was fast then, but the level has moved on.”
The Tour Series was central to what Boompods could offer. The city-centre criterium series was one of the few domestic events on free-to-air television, with highlights on ITV4. Its organiser, SweetSpot, cancelled the 2023 edition, citing pressure on local authority funding and the wider economy, and went into liquidation the following January. The series has not returned. Other managers felt the loss: Rick Lister, whose team now races as Smurfit Westrock, told The British Continental last year that the series had been “massive for us”, because sponsorship was sold on its TV coverage.
Metcalfe felt it in recruitment. “When they knew Boompods were always at the Tour Series, they would apply to us. Once the Tour Series went out the door, the applications didn’t come in, so you didn’t get a pick,” she says. “They all want to go UCI, and the main teams went UCI, and that pushed things forward earlier than planned for a lot of them, I think.”
A development team needs a mix. “You need some riders who know the score and can teach the others while riding. You need a road captain who knows what they’re doing,” she says. “When 18-year-old girls come into the team, they don’t know how it works if they haven’t come through the junior ranks.” When the experienced riders leave, she says, a squad of beginners is what remains. “If I’m not in the race myself, how do you teach them? It just got harder and harder.”
The sharpest example came this spring. Katie Scott, who joined for 2026 after a season with CJ O’Shea Racing, won the East Cleveland Classic in Paralloy colours on 12 April and took the National Road Series leader’s jersey. Within days she was a DAS–Hutchinson rider, and the jersey went with her.
It doesn’t help when the UCI teams take your riders. As soon as someone does well, they take them
“It doesn’t help when the UCI teams take your riders,” Metcalfe says. “As soon as someone does well, they take them. I understand that riders want to move on, but I think UCI teams have a window when they can take riders on, and at our level we should also have that.”
Her alternative is specific. “Either the jersey should stay with the team and the next rider down should wear it, or it should be scrapped and start afresh, as if it were the first race of the series,” she says. “As development teams, that’s what we rely on, and it’s taken away.” She knows the difficulty. “Easier said than done.”
There is another side. For Scott, the move opened doors a development team could not: within seven days of East Cleveland she was racing the Amstel Gold Race. Moving riders up is the point of a development team, and Metcalfe does not dispute a rider’s right to go.
Nor is the complaint new. When Matt Hallam closed Crimson Orientation Marketing RT at the end of 2021, he told The British Continental that elite teams had “zero protection” against mid-season poaching, after Saint Piran approached several of his riders before that year’s Tour of Britain. He pointed to Team PB Performance, which lost Josh Whitehead to SwiftCarbon a week after he won the Lancaster Grand Prix and never got to wear the National Road Series leader’s jersey. Hallam, too, said he had stopped enjoying running a team. Five years on, Metcalfe describes a strikingly similar frustration.
Katie Scott of Paralloy wins the 2026 East Cleveland Classic. Image: Simon Wilkinson/SWpix.com
Not an ending
Paralloy RT joins a list of recent departures: Hess Cycling Team folded in 2025, and Primera–TeamJobs and Muc-Off–SRCT–Storck closed at the end of last season. Yet the women’s scene is not simply contracting.
The Hera Project, a women-led team founded by directeur sportif and sport scientist Christine White, entered National racing this season with the stated aim of reaching UCI Continental status within three years. 360 Cycling launched an under-23 women’s programme for 2026, and VC Londres, the Herne Hill club, is recruiting for a new junior and under-23 women’s development team for 2027, promising regional, national and European racing. Its expressions of interest close on 31 October, the day Paralloy RT’s road season ends. Simpson Nouvelles and Liv CC–Halo Films have formalised a pathway from junior to under-23 racing.
Have people around you who are in the same mindset and want to do it with you voluntarily
What Metcalfe’s decision illustrates is less a lack of appetite for women’s teams than how much still rests on a few people willing to carry them. Her advice to anyone starting one is practical. “Have people around you who are in the same mindset and want to do it with you voluntarily,” she says. “If you haven’t got people with the same mindset around you who want to help the sport, it’s not going to happen.”
The other lesson is about where the money comes from. “A lot of the time, for sponsors, it’s not what you know but who you know. Our main sponsor, Paralloy, is my employer,” she says. Taylors MOT was where she took her cars; she had ridden Velo29’s sportives for years. “That’s how the sponsors have come about.”
The team’s season ends on 31 October, when its social media goes quiet, though some riders will race cyclo-cross in its kit until the end of the year. Metcalfe is not leaving the sport altogether.
“We’ll still be coming to the races, because Phil wants to do his photography, but at least he won’t have to pick out certain riders now,” she says. “He can photograph all of them, and I can actually enjoy a race rather than sitting in the feed zone.”
There is one limit. “Maybe we won’t travel the six hours down to Devon, though.”
At the Sunderland round of the 2021 Tour Series, Nikki Metcalfe was a rider short, or believed she was. She had four riders and thought a team had to start five, a misreading of the rules, she now says. So she put on the kit herself and lined up.
Five years later, the team she has run since 2018 will not start another season. Paralloy RT, as Boompods became this year under a new title sponsor, will close at the end of 2026.
“I told the girls in June, at the end of the National Championships, that the team wouldn’t be carrying on next year, or that I wouldn’t be carrying on, and there was no one ready to take it on from me,” she says.
The closure removes one of the longer-standing women’s teams on the domestic scene: a British Cycling Elite Development Team with 16 riders on its 2026 list and a record of sending riders on to UCI level. It also ends one of the scene’s more distinctive operations, based in the North East, run largely by one woman, and sustained financially largely through Metcalfe’s own network of contacts.
“If you’re not enjoying it”
Metcalfe is clear that the decision is personal before it is financial.
“It’s down to really personal reasons: the amount of time I’m putting in, and I’m starting to not enjoy it,” she says. “If you’re not enjoying it, you’re not giving it 100 per cent, so I wanted to get out before it turned that way.”
She took the team on in 2018, with 2019 her first full season, co-managing with rider Hannah Farran until Farran stepped back about three years ago. “It’s been even harder doing it on your own,” she says. “Everyone’s a volunteer, and it basically depends on who’s on the team: the volunteers are the parents or the partners. We don’t have specific people who help out all the time.”
Her husband, Phil, was the constant, driving the team to races in the couple’s motorhome. Otherwise the volunteer model shaped everything, down to the feed zone.
“I’d go to the feed zone and feed eight riders on my own. I’d never fed before, and I’m throwing out bottles like God knows what,” she says. “Don’t know how they all caught them.”
The team was fitted around the rest of her life. She still works part-time, and for nearly three years has looked after her grandson two afternoons a week. “I’m up early with the dogs at six, I’m at work by eight and finish at 12,” she says. The team took the other afternoons and evenings, and eventually her own riding. “I didn’t have time to ride and manage. I managed, and then my fitness went, and it’s that knock-on effect.”
She has taken up running instead, because it fits into an hour or two. “I need me,” she says.
Asked whether she has any regrets about stopping, she answers at once. “No. I’ve slept better.” It is not that the love has gone. “I loved it,” she says. “I just need to get out before I start not enjoying it so much.”
Five grand, then fourteen
The money tells a parallel story. Boompods, the audio brand that backed the team for eight seasons, stepped back at the end of 2025, and Metcalfe does not hold it against its co-founder, David Tansley.
“I don’t blame David. He’d put in nine or ten years himself and just supported us, and we did what we could for Boompods in the UK and Europe,” she says. “The last couple of years he was just putting the money in for the sake of the support, rather than to make a profit from it.”
That left two financial sponsors: Taylors MOT and Paralloy, a Billingham alloy casting firm that is also Metcalfe’s employer. Velo29 had withdrawn its money but stayed on the jersey, supplying nutrition.
“Running a team off two financial sponsors was like going back to the very beginning,” she says. “In the beginning, we were running the team on five grand a year, where a lot of the teams were running on 30 to 50 grand, or whatever. This year we’ve run the team on probably 14 grand, if we were lucky. And there are now UCI teams looking for hundreds of thousands of pounds. So it’s a big, big difference in what you can offer a development rider.”
Her arithmetic for a single race weekend is stark. “They’re £50 a race at the moment. If you put a full team in, that’s eight riders, so £400 in entries. I never paid fuel or travel, but we always paid accommodation, and you’re talking another £400 to £600 minimum, for twin rooms and stuff,” she says. “So you needed £1,000 a race, and that’s just the National Road Series races.” The National Circuit Series came on top, as did the longer trips once the calendar spread to Devon.
New backers were not forthcoming. “The emails went out, and if I got an email back, we’d have a chat. They never came back from that,” she says. “It was more or less, ‘We haven’t got that sort of fund for that sort of thing.’”
At the same time, she says, the cost of attracting riders rose. The team always supplied kit and paid entries, then had to add accommodation to compete. “To be truthful, we probably gave out more kit than a lot of teams,” she says. Comparing notes with Sarah King at London Academy, she found the same. “What we paid out was a lot more than some of these UCI teams, and maybe that’s where we’re going wrong. But you can’t get the riders in otherwise. It’s catch-22. Unless you’ve got loads of money, it ain’t going to happen.”
The team car became a recurring problem. Its regular volunteer driver moved to a job running events for British Cycling, and for its last two seasons the team had no car of its own. “Without forking out from my own bank account and buying an estate car just for racing, nobody was really willing to help us with a car,” she says.
The rules added to the load. In National Road Series races, only a car driven by someone holding a British Cycling team manager’s licence may join the convoy, and no convoy vehicle may be taller than 1.66 metres, a limit taken from UCI regulations. Metcalfe says the rule was applied more strictly from last year. Every new driver needed the endorsement added to their licence at £20, and a driver without a race licence had to upgrade first, taking the cost to roughly £60. “It’s money you haven’t got and are struggling for in the first place, and they just keep adding on and adding on,” she says. She found the height limit hard to square with the vehicles she saw in convoys. “BC don’t make it easy for anyone, never mind the development teams.”
The written National Road Series rules on driver licences and vehicle height are unchanged since at least 2023. What changed, Metcalfe says, was enforcement: “They were definitely being more strict with it.”
Earning the nod
Metcalfe came to racing late, in her early forties. “I was dropped from every start line, but I’m quite competitive and persistent, and I just kept going and kept going,” she says. “Eventually I did win a race or two, but I never dipped into the National Series. I was never going to be quick enough.”
Management brought its own initiation. “I do feel that at the very beginning it was hard, being new on the scene, because I didn’t know how it all worked,” she says. She credits Carole Leigh, the long-serving race official and organiser inducted into the British Cycling Hall of Fame in 2024, with steering her through. “Without Carole Leigh, I think I’d have been lost completely. She kept me right.”
The paddock took longer. “When I very first started, it just seemed cliquey, I suppose,” she says. Sunderland changed that.
“From that day forward, the respect I got from the other managers, men as well as women, all changed. The men were the hardest, when you’re coming into the sport. That’s how it felt to me, anyway,” she says. “You got the nod: ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ Before that, I never got that. I think they thought, OK, maybe she is serious if she’s putting herself on the start line.”
By results, 2022 was the team’s high point. Ellen McDermott won the Barking round of the Tour Series in May, the team’s first Tour Series win, and the squad took the team classification at the Manchester final to finish second in the series team standings. In July, Mary Wilkinson, then 41, won the first women’s Lancaster Grand Prix, the team’s first National Road Series victory, with Monica Greenwood as road captain. Boompods finished second in the National Road Series team standings that season.
“The team just gelled so well that year,” Metcalfe says.
The riders who passed through form the fuller record. Greenwood, a former British Cycling Olympic endurance coach, won the National Road Series in 2023 with DAS-Handsling. Lucy Harris, a Boompods rider in 2022, won the 2025 Women’s CiCLE Classic. Lizzie Hermolle finished second in The British Continental‘s 2024 national road race rankings in Boompods colours, then joined DAS–Hutchinson and won the British gravel title in 2025. Emma Mathews moved to the CAMS team that is now DAS–Hutchinson.
Metcalfe measures success differently. “We always made sure we never put pressure on a rider. That was our main thing,” she says. “It was put out to the girls: show your intent, and we’ll pick from that.”
Newcomers got their chance too, “because unless they ride, they’re never going to learn”. This year that meant Freya Johnson. “She’d never done a national. She’d never finished a road race, never finished a Circuit Series race,” Metcalfe says. “She had to experience it to learn.”
Metcalfe believes the step up is steeper than it was. “After COVID, the speeds just went up, so it’s even harder for girls nowadays than when I started,” she says. “I thought it was fast then, but the level has moved on.”
A shop window that keeps emptying
The Tour Series was central to what Boompods could offer. The city-centre criterium series was one of the few domestic events on free-to-air television, with highlights on ITV4. Its organiser, SweetSpot, cancelled the 2023 edition, citing pressure on local authority funding and the wider economy, and went into liquidation the following January. The series has not returned. Other managers felt the loss: Rick Lister, whose team now races as Smurfit Westrock, told The British Continental last year that the series had been “massive for us”, because sponsorship was sold on its TV coverage.
Metcalfe felt it in recruitment. “When they knew Boompods were always at the Tour Series, they would apply to us. Once the Tour Series went out the door, the applications didn’t come in, so you didn’t get a pick,” she says. “They all want to go UCI, and the main teams went UCI, and that pushed things forward earlier than planned for a lot of them, I think.”
A development team needs a mix. “You need some riders who know the score and can teach the others while riding. You need a road captain who knows what they’re doing,” she says. “When 18-year-old girls come into the team, they don’t know how it works if they haven’t come through the junior ranks.” When the experienced riders leave, she says, a squad of beginners is what remains. “If I’m not in the race myself, how do you teach them? It just got harder and harder.”
The sharpest example came this spring. Katie Scott, who joined for 2026 after a season with CJ O’Shea Racing, won the East Cleveland Classic in Paralloy colours on 12 April and took the National Road Series leader’s jersey. Within days she was a DAS–Hutchinson rider, and the jersey went with her.
“It doesn’t help when the UCI teams take your riders,” Metcalfe says. “As soon as someone does well, they take them. I understand that riders want to move on, but I think UCI teams have a window when they can take riders on, and at our level we should also have that.”
Her alternative is specific. “Either the jersey should stay with the team and the next rider down should wear it, or it should be scrapped and start afresh, as if it were the first race of the series,” she says. “As development teams, that’s what we rely on, and it’s taken away.” She knows the difficulty. “Easier said than done.”
There is another side. For Scott, the move opened doors a development team could not: within seven days of East Cleveland she was racing the Amstel Gold Race. Moving riders up is the point of a development team, and Metcalfe does not dispute a rider’s right to go.
Nor is the complaint new. When Matt Hallam closed Crimson Orientation Marketing RT at the end of 2021, he told The British Continental that elite teams had “zero protection” against mid-season poaching, after Saint Piran approached several of his riders before that year’s Tour of Britain. He pointed to Team PB Performance, which lost Josh Whitehead to SwiftCarbon a week after he won the Lancaster Grand Prix and never got to wear the National Road Series leader’s jersey. Hallam, too, said he had stopped enjoying running a team. Five years on, Metcalfe describes a strikingly similar frustration.
Not an ending
Paralloy RT joins a list of recent departures: Hess Cycling Team folded in 2025, and Primera–TeamJobs and Muc-Off–SRCT–Storck closed at the end of last season. Yet the women’s scene is not simply contracting.
The Hera Project, a women-led team founded by directeur sportif and sport scientist Christine White, entered National racing this season with the stated aim of reaching UCI Continental status within three years. 360 Cycling launched an under-23 women’s programme for 2026, and VC Londres, the Herne Hill club, is recruiting for a new junior and under-23 women’s development team for 2027, promising regional, national and European racing. Its expressions of interest close on 31 October, the day Paralloy RT’s road season ends. Simpson Nouvelles and Liv CC–Halo Films have formalised a pathway from junior to under-23 racing.
What Metcalfe’s decision illustrates is less a lack of appetite for women’s teams than how much still rests on a few people willing to carry them. Her advice to anyone starting one is practical. “Have people around you who are in the same mindset and want to do it with you voluntarily,” she says. “If you haven’t got people with the same mindset around you who want to help the sport, it’s not going to happen.”
The other lesson is about where the money comes from. “A lot of the time, for sponsors, it’s not what you know but who you know. Our main sponsor, Paralloy, is my employer,” she says. Taylors MOT was where she took her cars; she had ridden Velo29’s sportives for years. “That’s how the sponsors have come about.”
The team’s season ends on 31 October, when its social media goes quiet, though some riders will race cyclo-cross in its kit until the end of the year. Metcalfe is not leaving the sport altogether.
“We’ll still be coming to the races, because Phil wants to do his photography, but at least he won’t have to pick out certain riders now,” she says. “He can photograph all of them, and I can actually enjoy a race rather than sitting in the feed zone.”
There is one limit. “Maybe we won’t travel the six hours down to Devon, though.”
Featured image: SWpix.com
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