Katie Archibald reflects on the differences between sport, life and death with such moving insight that I have to look away. So much raw feeling is etched into her face, as her eyes fill with tears, that it seems intrusive to just sit and see such pain. I touch her arm lightly in attempted reassurance and then try to turn discreetly to the gleaming pine track where the GB men’s team pursuit squad race past at blurring speed.
The soft hiss of their bikes makes an eerie sound at the Manchester Velodrome as they prepare for the track world championships, which begin in Ballerup, Denmark on Wednesday. Archibald, a five-time world champion who won gold at the Rio and Tokyo Olympics, will compete in the women’s team pursuit and Madison. Even being on the track will be an incredible achievement.
In June, when she was preparing for an Olympic Games where many expected that she could win three gold medals, the 30-year-old tripped over a tile in her garden. Archibald dislocated her ankle, broke her tibia and fibula and tore two ligaments off the bone. The fall was catastrophic, in sporting terms, because it prevented her from riding at the Paris Games.
Her recovery in time for the world championships is remarkable but, as we sit high up in the empty stands, Archibald deals with a deep residual grief that has nothing to do with sport. In August 2022, her partner, Rab Wardell, suffered a cardiac arrest and died at the age of 37. Two days earlier the mountain biker had won the Scottish championship and Archibald’s profound shock was obvious when she posted a message on social media.
“Rab died yesterday morning. I still don’t understand what’s happened; if this is real; why he’d be taken now – so healthy and happy. He went into cardiac arrest while we were lying in bed. I tried and tried, and the paramedics arrived within minutes, but his heart stopped and they couldn’t bring him back. Mine stopped with it.”
If a freak accident robs an athlete of the chance to compete in the Olympics after four years of hard work, the human tendency is to lament a cruel twist of fate and feel real sadness. For Archibald there was no such reaction: “Not at all,” she says. “If anything, it was very different as the amount of people that said: ‘Oh, I’m gutted for you,’ made me realise that it really didn’t touch the sides. You know, when I think of …”
There is a long pause as Archibald’s mouth crumples. She shakes her head gently, as if trying to stem the tears rising inside her. “Just a sec,” she murmurs. “I’ll catch my breath.”
I know she is thinking about losing Rab, the love of her life, and how it cannot be compared to the fleeting disappointment of sport. “Before Rab [died],” Archibald continues, “I’d been having these issues with anxiety. I’d had this problem with panicking on the bike after I’d had a crash.”
In June 2022, six weeks before the start of the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, Archibald “flew over the bonnet of a 4x4”. She broke both ankles and hurt her leg. “I really struggled after that as it had been an accumulation of stressful things.”
Archibald felt a weight of dread inside her whenever she tried to ride her bike again. Then, two months later, Rab died. “I went out on the bike maybe three days post [his death],” Archibald says, “and I noticed that the vice wasn’t around my chest. I couldn’t imagine feeling panicked any more because I was just devastated.”
She says those last four words with such sorrow as she tries to find a path through her tears: “It was a bit similar to this. It was knowing that there is nothing that hurts as much as that.” Archibald can no longer talk and so we both look away while the bikes fly past in a rush. “I’m sorry,” she eventually says, without any need for an apology. But Archibald is courageous. “I think I just didn’t have enough coffee this morning,” she jokes as she wipes her eyes.
We began our interview with Archibald recalling how she fell for cycling as a pink-haired teenage girl with piercings in her tongue and lip as she raced against middle-aged men on grass tracks in the Highland Games. After her A-levels she worked for a while in telesales at her father’s bedding company and, shyly but with some amusement, she sings a snatch of the jingle that advertised the Archers Sleepcentre on local radio just outside Glasgow.
She arrived in Manchester as a wide-eyed 19-year-old who had been selected for the GB Academy. “There was no sense of threat. It was all opportunity,” she says. “This chance to do something for what I thought would be for a short period of trying to make it to the Glasgow Commonwealth Games [in 2014]. I felt huge excitement.
“When you’re 19 and somebody says: ‘We’ll let you train full time and target the Commonwealths and maybe even an Olympics,’ there’s never going to be another thought which says: ‘Ah, well, what are my other options?’ It was the most unbelievable opportunity and thank goodness I went for it.”
Later that same year, in 2013, she helped Laura Trott [now Kenny], Dani King [now Rowe] and Elinor Barker break the world record twice as they won the team pursuit at the European championships. Alongside her great friend Kenny, Archibald developed into a powerhouse of a rider at multiple world championships and Olympic Games.
Her hopes of winning gold in the team pursuit, Madison and omnium in Paris this summer were as realistic as they were serious. When she fell in her garden Archibald cried out loud. “It’s funny but, lying on the ground, the words: ‘Oh, I think it’s bad’ came out of my mouth like someone else was saying them,” she says. “I opened my eyes and my foot wasn’t where it felt like it should be. I stopped looking because it made me feel more sick.
“When I got to A&E our team physio was there. They’re trying to keep you calm but by the time [her dislocated ankle] was back in she said she’d stopped sweating. If you don’t get there fast enough, and say there’s a five-hour wait, the blood flow cuts off and there’s a chance you’d lose your foot. They wouldn’t have let that happen, obviously, but there were a few little crossroads where I could have been in trouble.”
Archibald slips off her shoes and says: “It’s three months on and I’m still limping a bit. I’m not very comfortable walking. But I’m very comfortable I can do a standing start [on her bike] and I’m ready to race. There’s pain but it’s all managed. And it won’t be for ever.”
How many times has she been out on the track since her injury? “We’ve had five team pursuit sessions and five bunched Madison sessions. We had our team pursuit dress rehearsals yesterday. It went really well. I left with a massive smile on my face.”
Before losing Rab, Archibald says, “I really had everything in place. I felt so secure in how I could make this team better. I felt secure in knowing how to love, like I had my sense of self and what I cared about in the world. I suppose I still know those things, I just don’t have those things”.
We discuss how we both feel, on a sliding scale where 10 signifies an enduring happiness and zero is desolation. “Right now, my job satisfaction is a 10 for sure,” Archibald says before smiling. “Not to treat this as a therapy session, but the rest of my life is definitely not a 10.”
It will take time, considering everything she has been through, but Archibald sounds strong and hopeful. She is determined to ride all the way to the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 and that conviction makes her curious about new ventures. “When it comes specifically to cycling, I’ve had my back against the wall the last two years and I’ve been quite stubborn and domineering of my programme and how I want things run,” she says. “I felt like it had to be perfect. Now, I know that the only way I can reach something special in LA is if I try new things. I’ve got three years to explore.
“I want to work with a new coach and hand over so much more of my riding career to other people so that I can learn from them. I’ve spent the last two years micromanaging and now I just want to be managed, with my eyes and ears open. When it comes to year four [of the Olympic cycle] I can go back to being overbearing.”
Archibald laughs. “I’m going to chill out a bit on the bike and start challenging myself more off it. I’m doing something called an Access course, run by Glasgow University, to help you apply to uni. I’m interested in a nursing degree and want to find out more.”
She reveals how Emma Finucane helped her embrace a less pressurised perspective. The 21-year-old sprint sensation won three medals in Paris, one of them gold, and Archibald says: “Emma’s been a big influence on me. When we were prepping for the Olympics we both had this three-event target. She’s very young and very wise. She convinced me of how good it feels to focus on the opportunity and not the threat. Maybe it’s easier for her because she’s just starting out but to see somebody still connected to that feeling reminded me that: ‘Yeah, that’s what it was like when I was 19.’ There’s something to gain here, not something to lose.”
Does she still feel this way before the worlds? “Oh, way more so, because there is no pressure on me to win. It’s funny that my first selection to a world championships was in 2014 and this selection in 2024 has probably been as big a struggle and with as much uncertainty. It’s just that now I can appreciate and celebrate it appropriately.”
We talk more about Rab and the films he made and the sense of fun he instilled into her life. “It’s funny when thinking about relationships,” she says. “Rab and I once had an argument about hoovering. You look at somebody and say: ‘I love you so much. I love how you make me feel as soon as you’re here. But when you’re not here I look at all this fucking mess!’ It’s that difference between getting annoyed at somebody because they’ve done something stupid and never, ever getting annoyed about how they make you feel. That was Rab and me.”
There is a sudden lightness around Archibald as if she knows, beyond the lingering heartache, she is extraordinary both on and off the bike. Once the worlds are over, and remaining in Denmark, she will attend the wedding of her old teammate Elinor Barker, with whom she has won so many races. Archibald smiles again: “I said a few months ago that goal No 1 is world championship selection. Goal No 2 is the ability to dance at Elinor’s wedding. Well, there’ll be no stopping me on that dancefloor.”
