IT’S GOT TO BE PERFECT
Ashleigh Moolman Pasio is a self- admitted perfectionist, one of the most consistent riders in the world, and has recently become the first eSports cycling world champion. However, she tells Procycling how she plans to learn how to lose, in order to win b
On a Team SD Worx training ride earlier this year, world champion Anna van der Breggen turned to her new team-mate Ashleigh Moolman Pasio and told her how close the South African had come to breaking her. “There are so many times where you’ve put in the most amazing move or attack, and you literally had me at breaking point, but you stopped two seconds too early,” said the
Dutch rider. “If you’d gone for another two or three seconds, I would have gone. But you stopped.”
A lot can happen in two or three seconds. It’s enough time, evidently, to drop a rider who is considered a generational talent. But you can also think a lot of things in two or three seconds. Such as: what happens if I fail? Will I blow and finish 20th? Would it be better to play it safe and guarantee a high finish? For a long time, Ashleigh Moolman Pasio has been asking those questions of herself, and giving the wrong answers. The result: a very good career, including many high placings and a reputation for consistency. She’s been on the podium at the Giro Femminile, the Women’s Tour and Flèche Wallonne, plus fourth in Flanders, Liège and Strade Bianche. But despite 41 wins in a career that stretches back over a decade, she has not yet won a WorldTour race.
The conversation with Van der Breggen was an epiphany. “It really hit home,” she tells Procycling. “It made me realise why I haven’t achieved these big wins. I think it’s because I’ve been too scared of failing. Instead of taking the risk of completely blowing and finishing 20th, I’ve always operated in the zone where I’ll be safe and finish second, third or fourth instead of giving everything and finishing first. I’m 35, 10 years into my career, and it’s only that moment that I really came to that realisation. When I was riding for Cervélo, I was often the only leader. I knew because I’m so consistent I can always be there or thereabouts, so I suppose I took that responsibility, or maybe took the pressure too heavily and never took the real risk of losing.”
Moolman Pasio is a selfdescribed perfectionist. In many ways, being a perfectionist is helpful to being an elite athlete. There are a lot of details to get right in training, racing and life, and being half-assed about it doesn’t cut the mustard, especially these days. A perfectionist will follow training plans exactly, remember to take their shoes to races and be at the team bus on time.
However, a bike race is also a challenging place for a true perfectionist to operate. Bike races, like life, are neither fair nor predictable. They are sold as an arena in which physical talent may blossom, but the reality is that they are imperfect environments, full of politics, variables and agendas. Moolman Pasio has the physical gifts to be the best in the world, but it’s managing the other things that is difficult.
“I’ve had to let go of my perfectionism,” she says. “It’s a weakness. Because of the personality I have, being a perfectionist by character, being analytical and problem solving - these are all things that could be seen as weaknesses. I’m very much a calculated person; I think a lot. I want to solve all the problems of the world.
“Over the years I’ve had to learn how to get more in touch with instinct, not to think too much but to just go with the flow. It’s taken a lot of discipline and training to switch off my brain. My brain automatically wants to override everything, so I’ve had to work hard on getting in touch with my body, with my feeling, with the bike and with instinct. I haven’t perfected it, but I’m much better. Even when it comes to riding my bike, I’ve learned over the years to hear the sounds, to listen to the bike, to take the time to feel my body, and if I feel that something is wrong, or there’s resistance, I need to trust that feeling.
“It’s been a journey to learn how to switch off the thinking side and turn on the instinct side. Cycling can be a very frustrating environment for a perfectionist.”
She pauses and laughs. “Ja, it’s been a real journey.”
NUMBERS GAME
Moolman Pasio didn’t have a typical route into professional cycling. As a sports-mad child, she dreamed of going to the Olympics, but never found the right sport. She was small and fast, good at a lot of sports, but says she lacked strength. She was academically gifted, and so when the time came to go to university, she pragmatically put aside the dream of sport and focused on her studies. At university, she met a guy, the guy invited her to meet his parents, the guy and his family took her out for a bike ride, her on a hybrid bike borrowed from her mother and wearing trainers, and the guy’s family were impressed by how fast she could ride.
Carl Pasio had represented South Africa as a junior triathlete, so he knew about cycling. Ashleigh Moolman Pasio knew about maths.
Moolman Pasio helped Carl with his maths, and in return he taught her about cycling. He used to say to Moolman Pasio, even really early on, that she had the talent to be a world champion. “I would look at him and say, ‘What?’ I thought he was crazy,” she says.
She joined the university cycling team, and did her first national championships, with a bike whose derailleur had been damaged in transit. One of the team cars, for a semi-pro outfit called Cyclelab, stopped to give her a hand when her chain dropped as a result, and watched her chase. They were impressed with her fighting spirit. They were less keen when she got in touch to ask about joining the team - they were based up in Johannesburg, while she was studying full-time in Cape Town. (In case you’re not aware of how big South Africa is, the two cities are 15 hours’ drive from each other).
Cyclelab were reluctant, and couldn’t see how it was going to work, but she pushed and pushed until they sent her a Powertap wheel to do a power test. Moolman Pasio thinks that they were probably humouring her. In the end, they bit her hand off.
“I did the test, sent the file to them and within five minutes I had a phone call saying, you’re in,” she says. “My career,” she adds, “has always been about the numbers.”
Though her route into cycling was atypical, there has been linear development that must be pleasing to an analytical mind like Moolman Pasio’s. Her results have improved, and improved some more, almost all the way through. She came 17th in her first Giro Femminile in 2010, and her results since have been: 13th, 10th, eighth, 13th, fourth, second, fourth, sixth, with a DNS in 2016 when it clashed with her Olympic preparation and an injury forcing her out in 2017.
“It’s been linear, rather than exponential,” she says. “It’s been a steady progression. The Giro has helped me to gauge my progress. I believe as a pro athlete you have to dream big, because dreams fuel your motivation. But there also have to be reality checks along the way. The Giro was a great way of making those checks. I was 17th, then 13th. I kept seeing progress and that was reassuring.
“It was a nice steady progression up to 2018, but the past two years have been somewhat of a lull, looking at my world ranking. But I know that it’s circumstance rather than because I’m no longer good enough. Through the whole process I’ve still seen progression in my training and numbers. I haven’t yet plateaued in terms of performance. My numbers are still on their way up.”
Which brings us back to why she has the numbers, and results, of a world-beater, but not the wins.
“Carl has from the beginning said I could be a world champion, and through my career it has become somewhat frustrating that although I have the talent which is visible in my numbers, why am I not achieving that ultimate goal?
“One big reason is the country I ride for. Being South African, it’s really quite a challenge to be successful at a World Championships or an Olympic Games. I don’t have the support some of my peers do in the stronger nations. If I start a World Championships race often I’m literally man alone against nine riders in the Dutch team, or eight in the Italian. The tactics and nature of the sport, having so many uncontrollables, often is what I think is my barrier to achieving that result. It’s not impossible for me to win a world title, it just means that everything has to go perfectly right on the day, and maybe that day will still come.
“And even now, I don’t have the same instinct that Marianne Vos has, or Anna van der Breggen. They grew up racing their bikes. I only started racing when I was 21. That’s a big difference. Although I feel every year I get closer, I’m nearly there and I feel that I’m getting it. But it didn’t come to me as naturally. 2018 was my most successful year and I was always there - second in the Giro and with some nice victories, but then I lost a little bit of momentum with a bad turn of luck.”
WORLD CHAMP
Luck and circumstance are the enemy of the perfectionist in road cycling. But Carl Pasio’s prediction actually came true in December, when Moolman Pasio won the inaugural eSports world cycling championships, held on Zwift. Out there in the real world, numbers can mean nothing when it comes to the dark arts of peloton management, tactics and conflicting agendas. On an indoor bike, however, none of that matters. For once, Moolman Pasio could write the story of a race in equations, logic and numbers.
She was a reluctant convert to indoor cycling, however, paradoxically because of her perfectionism. Before covid hit, she avoided indoor training because she found it hard to hit the same numbers as she did outdoors, and she was obsessive about either hitting the prescribed numbers or exceeding them. But when lockdown hit Spain, she had no choice. And she was lucky that Zwift, who had used Rococorba Cycling, the cycling tourism business she and Carl have set up in Girona, for an event a couple of years back, had left a stationary bike and large screen behind. Through 2018 and 2019, the equipment was underused - though she’d had fun at the Zwift event, she still didn’t get why anybody would choose to ride indoors when there were such amazing roads starting outside her front door.