BRODIE CHAPMAN

FDJ NOUVELLE-AQUITAINE FUTUROSCOPE

To break through as a professional cyclist, the theory goes, you need to have been racing at a high level from when you are a teenager. By age 22, most young riders have long been signed up to a top team. There are, of course, those few who prove that another way is possible. One is Brodie Chapman, the Australian who didn’t even start riding a road bike until she was working in a bike shop aged 20.

Brodie’s development was rapid in the four years after; first winning races across Queensland, then making her way through Australia’s National Series before getting picked up by the American Team Tibco-SVB in 2018. Now the 29-year-old is beginning her second year with FDJ Nouvelle Aquitaine Futuroscope for 2021.

“I still feel so much like I’m learning. I know everyone is - it’s lifelong learning - but I feel like even just talking to some of my team-mates who are younger than me and their stories from way back when in this race, I was not even close to thinking about road cycling as a career and here you are talking about what happened in the race,” Brodie tells Procycling.

“Sometimes I get reminded of how new I am to the scene, in that sense. Even the routine of having your season and your off-season, and going to the next one, that’s still not settled in. It’s changed drastically every year so far. It’s exciting though, because you don’t feel stuck in where you are. Sometimes it feels like two steps forward, one step back and managing your body, managing the load, managing your health and your lifestyle. But yeah, I like it.”

Like everyone, Brodie found last year stressful, with the covid-19 pandemic and mid-season pause, and she went home to Australia in the spring. But the season still brought a major milestone in terms of Brodie’s first pro victory at Race Torquay in Australia, in January, after a late attack.

“My team likes to say that I can win any race, in the sense that I can do anything,” Brodie says. “I’m not a pure climber but I can get over the climbs pretty well, I’m certainly not a sprinter but I can make something of a flat race - I can do a good leadout. It’s not been discovered yet, but I think my strength would lie in time trialling.”

Race wise, she’ll mostly be working for as a domestique for leader Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig this year, but Brodie isn’t shy about her own ambitions. Representing Australia at the Tokyo Olympics, if it goes ahead, is a target. Long term, she’s got her eye on races such as Strade Bianche, which she took to her heart after riding last summer; Liège, “I haven’t had a good run,” she says; and Paris-Roubaix.

After all, there aren’t many male riders who can say they ride Roubaix and the Giro in one season, as Brodie is hoping to do.

Over the last three years Brodie has been making a home for herself in Girona and this year her partner relocated to join her. Still, having grown up in the rainforest of Mount Glorious, on the outskirts of Brisbane, when she’s not racing she’s happiest outdoors.

“I feel like my life up until pro cycling was relatively normal for a girl in her teens to mid-20s,” she says. “I’m absolutely totally happy to not have a balanced life and focus everything on cycling. I don’t need to have that work-life balance and have this great realisation that there is life beyond cycling and things matter, I know that... It feels like at any moment it could go back to that normal life. Since I’ve got the opportunity to race professionally for the foreseeable future, then I want to take it.”

Brodie made her Giro Rosa debut last year, supporting leader Uttrup Ludwig

“Sometimes I get reminded of how new I am to the scene. Even the routine of having your season and off- season, that’s still not settled in”