The biggest day of Cat Ferguson’s career so far began with an ungodly helping of rice.
It was 5am when the 18-year-old’s alarm sounded in Zurich, Switzerland, two hours before the sun was set to rise. At 10am, she would start the junior road race at the UCI World Championships. It was the event Ferguson had thought about every day in the 13 months since she finished runner-up in Glasgow. First, though, under a blanket of darkness, she had to get through her breakfast of champions: a bowl of rice, measured out to six times the recommended portion size.
“It’s hard when you’ve got to wake up and then chow down 400g of rice,” she says, laughing at the memory. “That’s the hardest bit.”
A month on, Ferguson’s sitting on a plastic chair opposite me remembering the day from inside London’s Lee Valley Velodrome. The road race in Zurich lasted fewer than two hours, and by midday, the teenager was crowned world champion. She’s dressed in her spoils from that morning – a rainbow jersey, which she chose to keep on after the photoshoot. The kit’s so new, she says, that it’s “still got the tags on”.
Ferguson’s road world title was her fourth in what she looks back on as a “perfect season” in 2024. It came two days after she won the time trial, securing a momentous double, and a month after she won two gold medals on the track. So supremely consistent was the Yorkshire-born teenager’s year that she didn’t finish off the podium in a race until September, earning two national titles and her first professional victories.
Her agent, Jamie Barlow, has dubbed her a “generational talent” – “the phase gets passed around too much, but Cat really is one,” he said. Elsewhere, The Times called Ferguson “British cycling’s next star”. When I repeat these accolades to her, she turns bashful. “It’s a little bit surreal,” Ferguson says. “To me, I’m just a bike rider. It’s lovely that they’re saying those things about me, but I almost don’t believe it myself.”
(Image credit: Simon Wilkinson/SWpix.com)
After a standout first junior season last year, winning at 16 years old on her GB debut, Ferguson began 2024 with the aim of collecting her first rainbow jersey. She almost had one as early as February, when five seconds separated her from gold at the Cyclocross World Championships.
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Her next opportunity would be the Track World Championships, and by the time it came around in August, Ferguson was on a hot streak. She had won one-day and stage races at will, finding time to sit her A-Level exams in the spring. Then came the trip to the velodrome in Louyang, China, where she had two brushes with disaster.
The first came in the team pursuit, when she accidentally unclipped her foot in qualifying and crashed, hoping for a restart. “They didn’t give us one. I just sat there at the side of the track,” she chuckles at the memory. Twenty-four hours later, all was forgotten when she and her teammates rode to gold, her first world title, in a world-record time. “It was everything that us four could have dreamed of,” she says.
Ferguson’s second close call came in the Omnium. It’s a day she has since described as “one of the most mentally challenging” of her career. She crashed hard in the penultimate event, the elimination race, and partially dislocated her shoulder. Recounting the story, she lifts her hand to the joint. “I just sort of slipped it back in,” she smiles, leaving out the detail that she then got back on her bike and won.
“I didn’t even have time to go put on a new skin suit,” she says. “I was racing the points race with holes everywhere.” Bloody kneed, she banked her second world title, and raised her arms skywards.
(Image credit: Alex Whitehead/SWpix.com)
Ferguson’s whole season, in reality, was geared towards two days in Zurich. Never before had she felt expectation like she did going into the Road World Championships, most of it from herself. She recalls the time trial last year, when her nerves grew so intense she threw up mid-race – “I was physically sick onto my arms” – eventually finishing 10th.
This year was a different story. In training, the Brit rode simulation after simulation of the route along Lake Zurich, and turned up on the day alongside teammate Imogen Wolff, who helped calm her down. “We were just pretending that we weren’t where we were, that we were somewhere else on holiday,” Ferguson laughs. The happy thoughts worked, and she scored her third rainbow jersey with a comfortable 35-second buffer.
“I didn’t just win, but I won quite well,” she says modestly. There was no time for celebration, though. Two sleeps later, she was back on the start line, this time in the event she wanted most.
Given her form, Ferguson was always the clear favourite for the road race. “It was almost a good thing I came second in Glasgow,” she says. “It made me incredibly hungry for Zurich, and I told myself, as long as I didn’t let it affect me to the point where I got so nervous that I couldn’t think about it, then it was good motivation, if that makes sense?”
Rain lashed down onto the course that morning. The conditions suited Ferguson, a gritty cyclocross rider with a Yorkshire upbringing and a bellyful of rice. Into the finale, she was followed by two riders, who forced her to lead the sprint from the front. “I just remember crossing the finish line and putting my arms up in the air,” she says.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Before the teenager could reach her parents beyond the gantry, she was already in tears. “I think that memory will stay with me forever,” she says. “It’s special to win a World Champs, but to win one and then see my mum and dad, who have been there with me from the start of my cycling career…” the emotion is evident in her voice. “I’m incredibly grateful to them.”
Ferguson was six years old when her parents bought her her first road bike. The gift didn’t come easily. “I think they made me do 25 bike rides on some not-very-good bike I had before, and then write a book, like a 10-page book,” she says. “That was my first and last book.”
Her author days behind her, Ferguson next turned to slalom skiing. She trained on dry slopes near her home in Yorkshire, and on the snow on Alpe d’Huez, where her family had a chalet, eventually competing at the Junior European Championships at the age of 12.
Deep down, though, a passion for cycling was already brewing. Spurred on by her parents, she had pedalled up most of the Alpe’s 21 hairpins when she was just eight years old. Now, as she prepares to turn professional next season, it’s her turn to lead the encouragement. “My dad’s just bought an e-bike so he can come out and train with me,” she smiles.
(Image credit: Zac Williams/SWpix.com)
When junior riders sign for a professional team, it’s common for them to race as a stagiaire, or intern, ahead of the season starting. Winning in those first trial events is unprecedented, but when Ferguson made her Movistar debut in September, and finished second, she looked destined to defy the odds. Almost a fortnight later, that breakthrough came at the AG Tour de la Semois. “I was never the plan. It sort of just happened,” she says with a shrug.
The teenager was dropped four times on stage one of the Belgian race. “Somehow I was still there at the end,” she says, “so they did a lead-out for me”. It was a similar story 11 days on, when, the youngest rider on the 143-strong start list, she won Binche Chimay Binche. There, the victory felt even more impressive, prevailing in a cobbled sprint ahead of dsm-firmenich PostNL’s Charlotte Kool, who won two stages of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in the summer.
“I’m still questioning how I managed to be the first over the line,” Ferguson says, and begins making excuses for her opponents. “Charlotte had a bit of an issue in the race. She almost crashed and unclipped her foot in the sprint.”
The victory made it two wins from four in her first pro race days, a feat that left her standing with her hands on her head by the finish line. “This is totally not what I expected,” she said at the time. “I’m here just to learn, I’m still a junior.”
Ferguson still echoes that feeling today, as she prepares to move to Girona at the start of her first full season as a pro. The biggest race on her calendar next year is Liège-Bastogne-Liège, she reveals, with the team clear to give her time to develop. “I don’t want to rush anything,” the teenager says, an adamant timbre to her voice.
“After the road worlds, I was watching the junior men’s race, and I was stood with a woman from America, the first winner of the Olympics road race.” What was Connie Carpenter’s advice to her? “The first thing she said to me was to not rush it, to take it really slow, and that definitely has stuck with me, and I think it will.
“I think it’s really important to remember that I’m only 18. I’ve won a professional race, even if it was a smaller one, but I think as a priority, I want to have success as an elite, not just when I’m a junior. I want to take it slow and do everything right in order to make that happen.”
This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 5th December 2024. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.
