FAMILY TRAITS
It’s easy to see why you could get Alice Barnes confused with her sister Hannah. There are the obvious striking physical similarities. There’s the same straight, blonde hair that they both wear in a long plait down their backs when racing, although Alice’s is now handily a few inches shorter after she cut it over the summer. They both have the same wide-eyed, toothy grin and rosy-cheeked complexion. Both ride for Canyon-Sram, after Alice joined at the start of 2018, and decked in their purple and pink patterned kit, they could easily be twins, despite the two-year age gap. Alice is even wearing her older sibling’s black team-issue Rapha t-shirt when Procycling meets her at their parents’ house in Kettering, after raiding her wardrobe like any typical younger sister, when she realised she forgot to bring any of her own cycling clothes home for the break. They both started racing as children with Team Keyne in Milton Keynes, and both ended this year winning Worlds gold medals together in the team time trial in Innsbruck. Up until five years ago, before both moved away, they even shared bunk beds in their bedroom at home.
But Alice Barnes is very much her own person and has been steadily forging her own career on the road, despite the obvious parallels to her sister. This year has been a big learning curve for the 23-year-old, who joined one of the sport’s biggest teams at the start of the year from Drops Cycling. While her primary goal may have been working for her team-mates, she still managed to add wins to her name – at the Worlds and a canny, tactical stage win at the Lotto Thüringen Ladies Tour.
“It’s been a really good year, I’ve been happy with the change and I’ve learned a lot,” Barnes tells Procycling while sat in her parents’ kitchen. “I’m really glad I made that step up. I picked up…well, actually two wins in the end. Most of it was just working for the team and seeing what I could do.”
Since winning the world title with Canyon in September, Barnes has been enjoying a few weeks off the bike, splitting her time between her home in Manchester which she shares with her boyfriend, Great Britain team track rider Ollie Wood, and visiting friends in Girona, before relaxing with her family in Northamptonshire.
According to her sister, Barnes is “crazy, cheeky and bubbly”, and it’s a fitting description. But there’s no hiding from her achievements. The family home is full of reminders of Barnes and her sister’s careers and the impact cycling has had on the whole family. Photos of the daughters racing over the years stand on the living room shelves, while their younger brother – who used to race as a junior - is photographed next to Bradley Wiggins in another. There are stacks of hand-painted prints of the daughters racing, gifted to the family by an artistic fan. Even their parents’ love of gin is tinted with cycling – a row of bottles they’ve collected, on display in the kitchen, features one picked up at this year’s nationals in Northumberland, and more recently Innsbruck, when they flew out to watch the daughters race.
“We went to Bicester Village yesterday and they’ve got a Rapha there now, and we went in for a coffee and Dad was like, ‘You should have your world champ medal here,’ and I was like, ‘Why?’ and he’s like, ‘Yeah, you should have it in your pocket.’ I’m like, ‘I don’t think you get it, Dad…’” Barnes says, with the same laugh as any ordinary daughter embarrassed by a proud parent.
Barnes wears a reminder of the Worlds win achievement on her wrist – a gold bracelet, engraved with the team’s winning time of 1:01:46.60 – a gift to each of the six riders from her sister. In the seven years of the trade team event’s existence, Canyon (and its previous iterations) has been the most successful women’s team, winning five titles. Barnes didn’t initially expect to get into the squad. But when Hannah broke her collarbone and Alena Amialiusik
broke her shoulder at the Giro Rosa, Barnes was drafted into the line-up for the TTTs at Crescent Vårgårda and the Ladies Tour of Norway, and proved her position.
“Ronny [Lauke, Canyon-Sram manager] always says I’ve surprised him every time,” she says. “I think it’s probably lucky for me that I got to do more and show that I can do them, because before this year, I’d never really done them.”
Surprising people is what Barnes seems to like to do. Her start in cycling came racing mountain bikes, after joining the British Cycling Olympic Development Programme in 2011. But only three years later, aged just 18, she made her debut in the elite women’s road race at the Worlds in Ponferrada, despite minimal road racing and her focus being elsewhere. Then, a year later, she finished
runner-up to Lizzie Deignan at the Nationals road race, and was called up to the GB squad for Richmond where she helped Deignan win the world title. In her first year for Drops in 2016 and with no mountain bike spot up for grabs at the Rio Olympics, she started to shift fully towards the road. A year later she was finishing top 10 at Gent-Wevelgem and in the Women’s Tour.
Yet it was her debut pro victory in 2017, on the opening stage of the BeNe Ladies Tour in Belgium that really showed what Barnes can do, when she surprised everyone, herself included, by beating Marianne Vos in the two-up sprint. Barnes and the three-time world champion ended up alone at the head of the race when the peloton split on the cobbled sections. Vos tried to shake off Barnes, then stopped contributing in a bid to force her to tire. But rather than play into Vos’s hands, Barnes caught her off guard – swinging off the front hard under the flamme rouge, back onto her wheel and forcing the Dutch rider to lead out the sprint. Barnes won by more than a bike length and an angry Vos slammed her hand down on the bars as she crossed the line behind. “It split on the cobbled section and there were a few of us. A few attacks went and it ended up with me and Marianne. She tried to make me ride the last few ks and I managed to flick her and get on her wheel and get past her,” Barnes says, matter of factly. “I guess I’ve got quite a tactical head on me but still a lot to learn.”
Barnes’s win this July, in the Lotto Thüringen Ladies Tour, came in a similarly tactical, aggressive way. She got into the day’s key break with team-mate Elena Cecchini. A chase led by Sunweb slowly reeled them in, but before getting caught, Barnes took off on her own and survived to win the race solo. Cecchini led the bunch over the line for second. “I had this urge to attack,” she says. “I think there were a lot of attacks going, but a lot of not full ones. I thought if I’m going to attack and we save Elena for the sprint I need to do a proper one. It was so painful.”
FINDING A WAY
The Classics are the races Barnes is most drawn to. “I do like a tough race. We were doing the Giro and I much prefer the Het Nieuwsblad weather. I prefer colder rainy weather to warm.”
They suit her tactics, too. When Barnes rode the local track league, she had the same attacking instinct. “I like to race aggressively because it’s more exciting,” Barnes says. “I used to do track racing and everyone would be setting up in a scratch race with five, six laps to go and I’d attack and get caught on the line. I’ve always got bored and wanted to do something - maybe it’s not the cleverest way to do that! This year has been a bit different. I think I am better at protecting myself a bit, sitting in.”
At Canyon, Barnes has been learning a new way. At Drops, she was often the leader. Due to the British squad’s modest budget, most of the riders were young and developing, meaning Barnes was often left fending for herself. But when an offer came from WiggleHigh 5 at the end of 2016 to join a team with a bigger budget and more resources, manager Bob Varney persuaded her to stay.
“That next year with Drops I learnt so much more and I got the results and now I’m on the team that I really wanted to be on,” she says. “Because I’m quite good at looking after myself it was good for me that I did get the opportunities – I got pretty much all the opportunities I wanted.”
Barnes admits it took a little while to settle in at Canyon-Sram.
“[It’s] not that I haven’t enjoyed it with Canyon, but actually I think as we all learned, we understood each other better during the season, you became more comfortable with each other… I don’t know, different languages have different humours. I didn’t struggle, but it was a bit of
“I used to do track racing and everyone would be setting up in a scratch race with ive, six laps to go and I’d attack and get caught on the line. I’ve always got bored. Maybe it’s not the cleverest way to race!”
a change for me,” Barnes says. Finding her place on the team was important, though she insists there’s not the slightest hint of a sibling rivalry – in fact it’s the opposite.
“We encourage each other a lot, and Hannah’s probably less confident than me which is really frustrating. Sometimes it probably doesn’t help. We’ve been in crosswinds and it’s split and I’m like, ‘I hope Hannah’s made it.’ I want her to do well,” she says. “And if you’re riding for each other, you feel more committed. Also, I feel if I do something wrong she will tell me or be annoyed at me.
“In our team, if you saw us from the outside and no one knew, you wouldn’t think we were sisters, because we’re not those really close ones or anything. We’ll literally be like team-mates.” After years of coaching herself, Barnes is about to start work with former racer Dean Downing.
“If I don’t train I have the biggest guilt so I push myself hard. But I don’t really know much about power. I think Dean can push me harder,” she says. “I’ve had a good year and I think people who are always training with power forget about how to race on feel. I know myself really well and I think that will be quite a big jump.”
The Classics, Yorkshire and the Women’s Tour will be key targets, as is getting in the best form for the Yorkshire Worlds. Plenty of time for Alice Barnes to continue writing her own future. “I had some chats with Ronny and he’s told me they’ve only got half out of me, which is quite nice. He’s told that to Dean also, so, it’s going to be a tough winter!”