Maggie Coles-Lyster (Human Powered Health) did not arrive in Australia ahead of the Santos Tour Down Under feeling invincible. In fact, it was the opposite. She stepped off the 15-hour flight from Europe in pain, her body suddenly lit up with discomfort after a pain-free December training block. She wondered if it was a pinched nerve from being folded into an aeroplane seat or just inflammation. Either way, she suffered through the three-day stage race, trying to decipher whether what she felt was ordinary aches or fallout from her iliac artery endofibrosis surgery last fall.
But instead of spiralling, the 27-year-old Canadian stayed calm and trusted herself and the people in her corner. Two days later, she won the one-day Santos Tour Down Under Women’s Classic. After everything Coles Lyster went through last year, one could easily call it a comeback — and she’s fine with that.
“That word doesn’t bother me, it actually holds a lot of power and excitement.”
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Coles-Lyster first started to notice that something was wrong just over a year ago. She started getting dropped in situations that didn’t line up with her form. Even more frustratingly, it was nothing dramatic, just a vague, stubborn power loss. Like most endurance athletes, she tried to rationalize it. Maybe she was overtraining. Maybe she needed rest. Then, her bloodwork came back clean and a bike fit didn’t change anything. An easy week didn’t reset the legs; a harder training block didn’t sharpen them. The frustrating sensations followed her into races.
“I couldn’t keep up, and it didn’t make sense,” she said. “You start blaming everything — travel, fatigue, timing in the season — because the alternative is admitting something might be wrong.”
Eventually, she raised the possibility of iliac artery endofibrosis with her coach — a diagnosis that’s notoriously difficult to pin down, especially when symptoms don’t present in textbook fashion. The testing process was exhaustive: duplex ultrasounds with her hips extended and flexed, blood-pressure cuffs strapped to her ankles during maximal efforts, an MRI with contrast. The results confirmed blood-flow limitation in both legs. Physicians recommended conservative treatment with little evidence of success — an athlete’s worst nightmare.
“I didn’t feel great about it,” Coles-Lyster said. “But I played the game because I didn’t really have another option.” What she wanted was a surgical fix, although that came with its own set of problems.
“Everyone had either known someone [for whom] it had worked really well and had a great comeback or knew someone who had to retire after the surgery,” Coles-Lyster said. “And they’d say it to my face, ‘yeah, we know someone who didn’t come back.’ And it was like, ‘I’m getting the surgery, it’s either that or my career’.”
Coles-Lyster chose a surgeon who was willing to deviate from conservative treatment and who had developed rehab protocols for high-performance athletes. Five weeks post-op, she was back on the bike. Three months later, she was racing again at WorldTour events in China, earlier than most athletes return after the procedure.
But in China, the sensations were disorienting. Without race-intensity efforts in her legs for months, it was hard to tell what the pain meant.
“It was like, ‘Is that a bad hurt or a haven’t done this in three months type of hurt?’” she said. While both things were true, Coles-Lyster ultimately just felt grateful to have a race under her belt that season — ”mentally more than anything,” she added.
While the surgery restored blood flow to her legs, it was the rehab process that truly shaped Coles-Lyster’s comeback. Even before the procedure, she reckoned with the worst-case scenario: what if she didn’t come back at all? Working with a sports psychologist, Coles-Lyster confronted the full range of outcomes.
“I was open to explore both sides of that,” she said. “What if I can’t come back? How can I start making peace with that? How can I look at whatever other things I’m interested in?”
Her psychologist encouraged her to treat rehab as a period of curiosity rather than fixation on the first big result back. The approach created emotional bandwidth and the ability to stay calm when setbacks inevitably surfaced. “It was an opportunity to hone in on balance,” Coles-Lyster said, “and I think it set me up to be in a great place.”
That mindset carried into Australia. When pain flared again after the long flight, she didn’t catastrophise. She trusted her read on her body. Then she raced. And won.
Coles-Lyster’s comeback, in that sense, wasn’t only about restoring blood flow to her legs; timing mattered, too. Over the past five years, she has gone from racing primarily in North America to finding her footing in the European peloton, eventually securing stability at the WorldTour level with Human Powered Health.
Until last year, she felt she had been racing largely on instinct and talent, with fitness still left on the table — potential she couldn’t access while something in her legs wasn’t working. The surgery coincided with a more deliberate approach to her career. She built her own performance team and took more ownership over the people guiding her development. That confidence pushed her toward surgery and now shapes how she operates day to day.
“The self-advocacy part changed how I do everything,” she said.
Her calculus around risk is also inseparable from the state of women’s cycling right now. Five years ago, Coles-Lyster never assumed the sport could be a long-term career. Her plan, like for many riders of her generation, was to race for a few Olympic cycles and then pivot to something more stable. Now, with deeper professionalisation, maternity protections and better salaries, the horizon looks different. The peloton is faster because riders no longer have to split focus between training and second jobs.
“Five years ago, I didn’t even imagine having a real career in this sport into my late twenties,” Coles Lyster said. “There weren’t many women making a living, racing for years, having families. That’s new. Now I don’t feel like I have to put a timeline on how long I race. Getting the surgery was an obvious yes, because I feel nowhere near ready to be done.”
