Josie Millard’s cycling career began with a broken ankle.
She was, at this point, a professional skateboarder with Nike, the first female European Skateboarder of the Year, a sports model and motorcyclist, now temporarily out of action with one of her sport’s most common injuries.
“It’s a standard procedure for skateboarders, ligament reconstruction surgery,” Millard explains to Cycling Weekly. An ankle break doesn’t usually spell the end of a skateboarding career, she says, but for Millard, time away from the board had unearthed a new desire.
It had been a quiet voice that had been gnawing away at the 27-year-old. As she focused her rehab in the gym and on the bike, the voice got louder. It was the first time in a long time that she’d allowed herself to try other sports.
“That was a turning point for me in my career,” Millard says. “I had my eyes opened to this whole new world.”
“I never went bike packing in the end because as soon as I bought the bike I became obsessed with riding for riding’s sake,” she says.
Within a year of riding, Millard had turned up to race 111km offroad at UCI Gralloch, kitted out in crop top and baggy shorts, with chalk bags hanging off her handlebars and a numberplate tied on askew.
“On the start line the commentator was calling out names of Olympians, and I was just like what the hell am I doing here!” Millard laughs. “But I loved it so much; I just thought ok I’m just going to race and enjoy it.”
By the end of the following summer, Millard had completed her first set of races, and by the next, her first complete season. She finished fifth in the Gravel World Championships in 2025 and came third in Nationals, alongside her future Ribble Outliers teammates, Sophie Wright in second, and Abi Smith in first.
“Unbeknownst to us, we would become teammates,” she grins, genuinely passionate about the sport that has gripped her life. “That’s a main goal of mine – that the three of us can share a podium again.”
Josie Millard with her Ribble Outliers teammates, Abi Smith, Ben Thomas, Harry Tanfield, Jenson Young, Metheven Bond and Sophie Wright.
(Image credit: Ribble Outliers)
Millard tells me that her ability to change sports and excel completely at them is a fact of her athletic upbringing. Maybe she’s right, but her steely determination – and total belief in her own capabilities – was honed in the skatepark, too.
“In skating you fall again and again and again and again and it teaches you to persist, and to just sit in the pain,” she explains. “And I think that is just exactly the same on the bike. You have those hard training days and you have to just go again and again and again. It’s similar. Both require a mental fortitude.”
Millard draws other similarities between the two sports that have shaped her career, chief amongst them a team spirit honed in hours on team buses, in Nike vans, skateparks and competitions.
“Obviously it’s a totally different sport and requires a totally different demand,” she concedes, “but it’s similar in that way. I do think that I’m doing the same thing, just with a different…I don’t know…vessel! I just dropped two wheels and here we are.”
There’s a video in one dusty corner of the internet of a young Millard exploring an abandoned industrial site with her dad. They shimmy under fences and drop down through blown-out windows and tip-toe up rickety stairs. This is maybe where she gets her adventurous spirit from, from the same man who would get up at the crack of dawn to drive his daughter to Belgium for races, only to drive back a day later.
Because Millard stresses that she wouldn’t have been able to progress this fast through her sport if it not were external help, most especially from her coach, Paul Delani.
“I literally came to him having never trained on a bicycle in any capacity whatsoever and said I want to get to the World Championships and literally he’s done that and now I’ve signed with a professional gravel team and I’m doing it full time,” Millard says, as close to disbelief as I see the self-assured Brit allow herself to be.
Back in the clip of Millard kicking up dust at the abandoned industrial site, she says that she’d like a life of many careers. I ask her if that’s still true.
“I have had many mini careers,” she says. “Skateboarding was my longest one, then it was carpentry and bespoke furniture making, […] and now it’s the bike. This is what I want to do now, for as long as I can. I look at people like Tiffany Cromwell and I think, ok that’s me in 10/15 years. And people like Marianne Vos…she gives me hope that I can have a long career.
“But I know that even after that, that something fun and exciting and new will take my attention. But for now I know it will be a long and happy time, I think.”
