In the latest addition in our #TokyoThursdays series, previewing Scottish riders selected for the Tokyo Olympics, we sat down with Rio Olympic gold medallist Katie Archibald MBE to discuss her knobbly pathway into the sport, her advice to young women considering cycling, as well as her aspirations for the Tokyo games.

After winning gold in Rio, it is clear Archibald is targeting further success in Japan this summer:

“My mindset going into these Games is that I want to win a gold medal in the Team Pursuit and the Madison. It sounds very simple when you squeeze it into a two second soundbite, but it’s a big deal. That’s our target, but its also the target of a lot of others as well, but we’re preparing as best we can to put both hands on it.”

Despite the lack of elite competition due to the coronavirus pandemic, Archibald is not stressed about form for the blue-ribband event coming into these Olympics, as she explains:

“For the Team Pursuit, the expertise we have here in Manchester are second to none and the preparations we’re doing for that are making me feel comfortable.”

However, Archibald admits that it’s been tough to train for the Madison without competition due to frantic nature of the event, but still remains buoyant:

“For the Madison it’s a different challenge, as we do need the race experience, but there have not been many races. I guess the good news is that every other nation is in the exact same situation, but we’ve had to be smart with the workarounds for our training sessions here in Manchester. That’s where the strength of the British team has really shown.”

Going right back to the start of her journey, was has seen her go from pure grassroots to global glory, Archibald has fond memories of her early days in the sport.

“I started at Meadowbank, and I met Alasdair Watson. He let me borrow a track bike, he let me use the track time, he told me how to pedal and I just remember feeling rough - like you would having come off a ferry!”, Archibald joked about her first experience of track cycling.

Although Meadowbank was her introduction into cycling, it was the knobbly tyres of the Highland Games that gave the three-time World Champion her first foray into racing:

“I started racing at the Highland Games because my dad was a runner and he said ‘give it a go’. It was handicapped on the grass track, and I won the second race that I did because I had such a big handicap! That doesn’t happen to many people, you don’t get to win your early races - you usually get your head kicked in for years, but that is the beauty of handicap racing. I did go back to getting my head kicked in for years, but I had that taste so early in my cycling career of what it is like to win a race and what it is like to be in the fight, so I spent that summer racing around various Highland Games.”

The sporting genes obviously run in the family as Katie’s brother, John, is also a professional cyclist with a Commonwealth Games silver medal on his palmares, as well as being the current Scottish National Road Race Champion.

Whilst Katie is now one of Scotland’s most successful ever cyclists with 14 European titles, she was relatively cautious in her own ability before her first big success in 2012 British Track Championships:

“I was at my first Junior British Champs, and I didn’t think I was very good, and it turned out I was, as I had never been racing against juniors before – I’d usually been racing against Men or Senior Women – I won a junior national title, and everything got serious from there.” The 27-year-old explained: “I started working with Scottish Cycling’s programme, then run by Graeme Herd, and a couple of years later with British Cycling.”

Whilst expressing an amount of sadness about the former Meadowbank track, Archibald was very buoyant on the effect the world-class venue in Glasgow has had on producing elite Scottish riders.

“I started at the Meadowbank Velodrome, sadly now demolished, and spring boarded off the opening of the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome at the Emirates Arena. You can see the effect the Emirates has had with the strong Scottish contingent we have for Tokyo in myself, Jack [Carlin], Neah [Evans] and even Anna Shackley who is on the road, but has taken a lot from the programme based at the Emirates.”

Like her Team Pursuit teammate Neah Evans, Archibald’s first sport wasn’t cycling and was instead swimming, although her interest in all things two wheels came from a slightly different place.

“I dropped out of swimming at about 14 – when a lot of girls tend to drop out of sport – as I realised, I wasn’t that good at it. However, cycling wasn’t like that for me - whilst I was quite good, I wasn’t basing my enjoyment off that, as I wasn’t winning races.”

Archibald’s explained that her enjoyment came from the social aspect of racing:

“Going away with friends that I really liked being with, and thought were cool, made me want to be part of this scene. I wanted to impress them by attacking in races and being a feisty rider; it didn’t always mean that I was going to win, quite the opposite more often than not! I think that was quite a big strength of it, it wasn’t about how good I was, it was about whether I was enjoying myself.”

With a mindset like that, it is absolutely no surprise that Katie has enjoyed a long a successful career in the sport, with plenty more to come.