When the Alba Development Road Team launched in early 2022, I looked on with a mixture of excitement, admiration and scepticism.
It was a novel and ambitious idea.
Alba would be Scotland’s only women’s road cycling team and the team’s primary objective was to develop riders to a point where they would be able to make the step up to becoming fully professional riders.
On paper, it was an excellent idea; who wouldn’t be in favour of Scotland having a team that would support riders as they aimed for the top level of the sport.
However, the easy part was making the plan, much more difficult was actually executing this plan.
It’s unspeakably hard to set up a successful enterprise like this, even harder to ensure it continues longer-term.
On a base level, the money required to set up and then maintain a road cycling team is immense.
Literally hundreds of thousand pounds is the bare minimum required and, in this current financial climate, that’s quite an ask.
But Bob Lyons, of whom Alba Road Team was the brainchild, held an unwavering belief that he could make this idea work.
Alba Road Team’s third season has just come to a close and the progress over the past three years has been remarkable.
A successful first two seasons meant Alba earlier this year made the step up to becoming a UCI Continental team, which was ahead of Lyons’ initial schedule.
And they hit the ground running on the continent, with the list of team’s achievements lengthy. The most eye-catching, though, were recorded by 19-year-old Eilidh Shaw, with the teenager becoming British National Circuit Series champion while internationally, her standout results were her brace of podium finishes at the Tour de Feminin.
Shaw may have grabbed most of the headlines for Alba but she’s far from the only impressive rider in the 12-strong squad and that’s what’s been so admirable about the evolution of Alba; it’s done exactly what it set out to do, something that’s never easy in the cut-throat world of elite sport.
Alba Road Team, with Lyons as team manager at the helm, has, unsurprisingly, attracted many plaudits over the past three years, and this season in particular, all of which are well-deserved.
The importance of Alba’s success is far more wide-reaching than merely within the cycling bubble, however.
The phrase “you can’t be it if you can’t see it” has become something of a cliché in recent years, but for good reason.
Until the birth of Alba, it was nigh on impossible for young, female Scottish riders to envisage a path to become a world-class bike rider on the road.
There’s plenty of examples on the track but on the road, not so much.
The consequence of such a dearth of role models for young Scottish girls is that the path to becoming the next Marianne Vos or Elisa Longo Borghini seems so unnavigable.
The birth of Alba, and the team’s rapid rise to becoming a true contender on the international stage, makes the prospect of becoming an elite road rider seem eminently more achievable for any young, female Scottish rider who might be pondering if that’s a feasible career route for them to pursue.
To see the likes of Shaw, who’s an entirely normal if very talented young woman from Airdrie, sign for a UCI team as she has, immediately transforms the goal of becoming an elite-level bike rider from a fantasy into something completely achievable for a young Scottish girl.
It’s the same way that Oscar Onley’s appearance in the Tour de France this year, literally overnight, made the dream of riding the world’s greatest bike race a seemingly achievable feat for a young, Scottish kid rather than the pipe dream it would have previously seemed.
What Alba has done, believes Lyons, has ensured a talented Scottish rider now has everything else they may need to “make it” at their fingertips.
“You need to have the raw physiology and the talent but that’s not all that comes into it – you need to be nurtured,” he says.
“You need to be in the right environment and have the right support staff. And if you can get that environment right, and I think Alba has got that environment right, you can deliver big things.”
Alba’s success has, unsurprisingly, ensured the team has become an extremely attractive destination not only for Scottish riders but for riders from literally all over the world.
There’s been 148 applications for the 12 available spaces in the team next season. Those numbers say it all.
The priority will, says Lyons, remain developing Scottish riders, which is important but having this global pull is a testament to not only the success but to the clear ethos of the team.
The signs are that Alba Road Team is going only in one direction, and that’s up.
It’s hard to believe 2025 will not be anything other than yet another roaring success.
Which is great from a cycling perspective but even more pertinently, Alba Road Team has shown that with the right people and the right vision, the seemingly unachievable becomes anything but.
