The Backstedts – a remarkable cycling family
Magnus Backstedt Dad Magnus is a Swedish ex-professional road racer who won one of cycling’s oldest races, the one-day Paris-roubaix, in 2004. He’d already won a stage of the Tour de France in 1998 and won a stage in another prestigious race, the Giro d’italia, in 2008.
He’s a cycling broadcast commentator and has just become lead sport director of women’s professional cycling team Canyon/sram Racing – a rival to his daughters’ teams.
Meg Backstedt Mum Meg was Megan Hughes when she competed on both road and track at the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 1998. She was British National Road Champion in the same year.
Elynor Backstedt Elder sister Elynor, who’s 20, specialises in road racing and lines up alongside former world champion Lizzie Deignan in the women’s World Tour team Treksegafredo.
After successful junior years in both track and road racing, her first season in her elite senior team was hampered by injury before she completed a full 2021 season.
Her talent became more evident in the prologue of the Lotto Belgium Tour last year, with a second-place finish behind teammate and world time trial champion Ellen van Dijk.
Zoe Backstedt The 2018 Tour de France men’s champion, Wales’ Geraint Thomas, has called Zoe “one of the most talented young riders in the world”.
Aged 18, she holds four junior world champion titles across four cycling disciplines – road, individual time trial, track and cyclo-cross. She says cyclo-cross is her biggest passion in the winter months. It’s an intense form of off-road racing often on mud and with hurdles and obstacles.
When it comes to road racing, Zoe is part of pro women’s team EF Education-tibco-svb, where she was taken on as a stagiaire, or trainee, in May this year.
Zoe and Elynor both attended Y Pant School in Pontyclun and trained with Maindy Flyers as children, the club in Cardiff which nurtured Geraint Thomas.
What about Meg?
“Which team are you joining?” Magnus asks her. “I think at the moment I’ll just be trying to keep everyone in the right places at the right times and make sure everything’s running smoothly at home,” she replies. “Then hopefully I’ll get to travel out a little bit and hopefully there are races the three of them are at and I can go and watch.”
Elynor says the fact that she and Zoe are similar types of riders means there’s a greater chance they’ll be coming up against each other in races.
“Dad will be at most things and then we’ll be at similar things, so Mum will be able to come out to watch us, but you never know what will happen, if we end up missing bits because of injuries or illnesses, but it’ll be nice to see everybody there.”
Zoe says it means their mum will also be the linchpin when they want to talk about their teams.
“He’ll have his riders and Elynor’s got her team, I’ve got my team,” Zoe says. “It’s strange. If we want to all talk to someone from the family about something related to teams, you know, we all go to Mum now and she’s like the mastermind behind all of our teams’ plans.
“She knows everything,” Zoe adds as the sisters laugh in unison.
Women’s professional cycling has grown enormously with around 80% more pro riders now compared with 10 years ago. To add to the existing race calendar, this year saw the Tour de France Femmes, an eight-day women’s competition which started in Paris and finished at the famous La Super Planche des Belles Filles in a ski area of the Vosges Mountains.
The online cycling and training company Zwift has sponsored the Tour de France Femmes for four years, with the event attracting tens of millions of TV viewers.
This sort of prominence heartens the Backstedt parents, who’ve experienced the greater obstacles women and girls faced in a more amateur era.
“There are far more opportunities for the girls now with all the races and the television coverage,” says Meg. “Being able to make a career out of it was possible when I was racing, but you had to be a top, top, top athlete.”
Magnus adds: “You’re right. Back at that point, it was only the top four or five riders in the world that would make enough money to live on.
“Whereas now, there is a minimum wage for a professional rider if you’re riding in the world tour, which is the highest level of this sport. This minimum wage is definitely good enough to live on and probably even start thinking about putting some money aside.
“And that’s not going to get less with the adding of the Tour de France for women. The media for that particular race is crazy and we saw spectators along the road which was phenomenal, compared with any other race that we’ve seen on the calendar.
“And with that number of eyeballs on the sport, there are a lot more marketing opportunities for a lot more brands that are looking for a femalespecific marketing strategy.
“I think we’re only just scratching the surface. There’s going to be an avalanche effect over the next, I’d say two to five years. So, it’s changed a lot.”
“Women’s cycling has developed an insane amount over the last few years,” adds Elynor. “Even since I became professional, these last three years have been incredible to see the growth with Paris-roubaix and the Tour de France and all the races to come.
“I’m grateful to be a part of the change, but I’m
also very grateful for all the riders who came before us,” says Elynor, paying tribute to her team’s sport director Ina Teutenberg, a legend in women’s cycling.
“They sacrificed [so much], they had to have it as their hobby, for us to be able to have this as our job.”
“It’s even the same with Mum,” agrees Zoe. “She stopped cycling when she got pregnant with Elynor. If that was now, she probably could have carried on going and could have had a longer career. Times have changed for the better.”
These two young women find it difficult to define what the greatest differences between them as competitive athletes are.
“It’s really strange because we’re so similar and so different at the same time,” says Elynor when I ask them what characterises them individually as cyclists. “Dad probably has more of an idea than we do, to be honest.”
Magnus’ intense knowledge of the sport and of his daughters’ strengths is clear when he assesses them.
“Elynor is a very powerful rider who also loves the teamwork of the sport,” he says. “She doesn’t seem to necessarily always want to ride for her own results, she sees the bigger picture of the sport and helping the team to win because ultimately it’s a team sport as much as an individual sport.
“It’s a funny one because, ultimately, it’s one rider standing on the top step of the podium, but without the team there, that rider wouldn’t be on the top of the podium.
“Elynor’s got this real knack and understanding for that side of the sport that’s probably far beyond her years as a bike rider and her current team are valuing that very, very highly.
“Whereas Zoe is more a purebred winner in that respect I would say, but she’s also very much understanding the team side of the sport.
“They both ride on the road as well and Elynor’s focus is purely on the road, whereas Zoe’s loving the cyclo-cross in the mud and that’s her big, big passion within the sport of cycling, so they do different things in different ways.
“It’s just nice to see that they love what they do.” When it comes to advice for other parents and young female cyclists, the Backstedts say the most important thing is to embrace the fun side of it.
“Quite a few of our family friends have started cycling because of us and the girls. So, enjoy it, or make sure the kids enjoy it, I should say,” Meg advises.
“We’ve met a lot of people through the kids and the racing that they’ve done in Britain and around the world as well. There are various youth races that go on yearly and I know a lot of friends who’ve now got friends all over the world just because of it. It’s like one big community, one big family.”
“Having had this time that we’ve had with the girls travelling around the country and half of Europe, just being together every weekend, that’s been time that’s invaluable,” adds her husband.
“Seeing so much of them and being able to go and ride our bikes together.
“We’ve been away on training camps and we were down in the Alps together as a family and riding our bikes.
“Maybe not as much together because the girls are obviously too quick for us nowadays,” he adds, explaining that he and his wife rode together while their daughters were off at a faster pace.
“Just spending that time as a family and doing a sport is, as far as I’m concerned, the best thing ever,” Magnus concludes.
the task of cleaning boots with playing for the youth team.
When he turned professional the following year, the young winger soon caught the eye, although it quickly became apparent that life in the first team wasn’t going to be a cakewalk.
“I was introduced to the team as a young winger and some of them were saying things like, ‘I hope you do well’, and all the rest of it,” he says. “But I do remember one player coming up to me and saying, ‘George, if you make a fool of me I’ll break your bloody legs’. I always remembered to stay out of his way!”
Despite such a frosty welcome, it felt like his career had finally taken off, but later that year he was conscripted into two years of military service, where he was barracked at several locations across England.
“I was told to go in the artillery,” he remembers. “I had to go and get kitted out in Carlisle and then after a fortnight I got my posting. And the posting was Plymouth. I thought ‘lovely’ because it meant I could keep playing, at least for the home games.
“So I was waiting on the platform at Carlisle station. Then some army policeman came up to me and said, ‘Gunner Baker. Give us a look at your ticket. Yes, you’re the one I want’. I asked what they were on about and they told me I wasn’t going to Plymouth, but was instead going to Sheerness-onsea. They wanted a footballer.”
George then spent much of his time in the army playing for military teams, but his connection to Plymouth remained strong. Indeed, the club managed to pull some strings to prevent him from going to Germany and he was instead stationed in nearby Bideford, working in the police.
When he returned to Plymouth as a full-time professional for the 1955-56 season, his career finally began to gain momentum. At this point, Argyle were now in the second tier and George became something of a favourite with the Home Park faithful.
But his real breakthrough would arrive in the 1957-58 season, where after missing the first half of the campaign with a knee injury, he would make the move from winger to centre-forward under the guidance of former Manchester United striker Jack Rowley, whose nickname ‘Gunner’ was due to his goal-scoring exploits at Old Trafford rather than any expertise in artillery.
Rowley was player-manager of the Pilgrims, but was getting ready to hang up his boots and was subsequently worried about a possible gap up front. George was seen as the perfect option and, on Christmas Day 1957, he played against Newport County in his new position for the first time.
He never looked back, scoring eight goals in 21 games, ending the season with a total tally of 12.
After netting the only goal of a 1-0 win over Millwall in 1958, the Western Evening News wrote: “Baker won many hearts with his hearted efforts against Swindon last week and encouraged the directors by his display. So they are pinning a lot of hope on the Welsh lad who joined Plymouth as a winger in September 1953.”
Meanwhile, having booked their place in the World Cup finals in Sweden in January 1958, Wales boss Jimmy Murphy (another Rhondda lad, by the way) was busy thinking about his squad.