HEIDI FRANZ
RALLY UHC CYCLING
Here is Heidi Franz: cyclist and photographer. Or is it the other way around? The Rally UHC Cycling rider sees parallels in the two, which linked her time at Seattle University. “I love the travelling aspect of cycling, and all the different things I get to see and cultures I get to experience. And every time I take a photograph, or print one, or go through a series of photographs I want to be able to tell a story. Those two things – travel and stories – connect cycling and photography. There are so many amazing stories in the sport,” she tells Procycling.
Franz was midway through her photography degree when she started dabbling in cyclocross, then road racing, moving up the collegiate ranks in the States. By her senior year she’d started guest riding for nationallevel teams, and 13th place in the Redlands Classic in 2017 with the Amy D. Foundation brought her to the notice of Rally. The management had been combing through the results of physiological tests done at US development camps and found Franz’s numbers, which were there or thereabouts compared to the regular riders on the team, despite her relative inexperience. They invited her to ride as a guest in the Cascade Classic, and by 2018 she’d become a full member.
Franz jokes that while many young riders have to weigh up the sacrifices involved in becoming a pro, especially on the women’s side, in terms of salary and career, for her it was much easier. “Racing was hard, obviously, but the choice to take that path came pretty easily for me. I was on a route in the field of photography that wasn’t necessarily going to be lucrative – I like street photography and the fine art vein of photography and less so the commercial kind of vein. It didn’t occur to me that I was making a sacrifice because I was going to struggle either way, but it seemed worth it.”
Home for Franz is Bainbridge Island, across the Puget Sound from Seattle in Washington, USA. Bainbridge is a quiet, forested place, about the same size as Manhattan but with 23,000 inhabitants. It functions as a halfway house between the urban sprawl of Seattle and the wilderness of the Olympic National Park to the west.
“It’s small. You know pretty much every single person, but it doesn’t feel claustrophobic,” she says. The mix of urban and rural seems like a perfect place for her. “I love being around people, telling stories and sharing experiences,” she says. “But I have to spend time alone to regain my energy. That is what the bike is for me. It’s an opportunity to spend time with myself and my thoughts.”
On the road, her best race results so far have come in North America. Franz won a stage of the Tour of the Gila in 2019. But she is looking further afield to Europe, where she has also spent substantial periods racing for Rally in the last two seasons.
“The big goal is that I really want to go and race the Worlds in Flanders in 2021,” she says. “I want to race in Europe more. I love the style of racing and the aggression suits me. My first race in Europe was the BeNe Tour, which is a chaotic race, not an easy race to start with. We had Ina Teutenberg as our DS and she gave me confidence in my situational awareness. I ended up dealing with the chaos and positioning and that was a big confidence booster. Other than that, my goal is to keep searching for a limit. I keep getting better, but I’m still so new to the sport. I forget that I haven’t been doing it long.”
“I love the travelling aspect of cycling, and all the different things I get to see and cultures I get to experience... There are so many stories in the sport”