Petra Stiasny’s breakthrough win on the Angliru was built from a doomed solo breakaway in Australia, a crisis of confidence, and a lesson in finding the space where she could thrive.
At the start of the season, Petra Stiasny’s career had reached a low ebb. The Swiss rider had come to cycling during the pandemic, rose swiftly through the ranks, spent four seasons bouncing between Fenix-Deceuninck and the Roland teams, and in Australia – her first races with her new team, Human Powered Health – everything had gone to shit.
She’d been sick, and then she’d DNFed out of the Tour Down Under on stage 2. A few days later at the Tour Down Under crit, same story. “I had some pretty bad days [that week],” Stiasny told me at Cadel’s Road Race. “I didn’t have the sensation.” She was, her sports director Clark Sheehan said, “rigid with nervous anxiety … she had a lot of things going on in her head.”
Her mission, and her team’s mission, was to turn that around. This past Saturday, Stiasny won the queen stage of the Vuelta a Espana Femenina, dancing her way up the outrageous gradients of the Angliru to take her first ever WorldTour win.
The ways that cycling often contextualises such performances is in statistics – watts per kilo, percentages of gradient – but that tells an imperfect picture of Stiasny’s Saturday, because it narrows the focus too far. This win was built on an arc that stretches from January to May, a period in which she went from DNFing to winning the most spectacular mountain stage the season has offered yet.
Terrain plays a part in that, of course. In Sheehan’s words, Stiasny’s a climber – “purest of the pure” – and there are few climbs that better cater for riders of those characteristics than the Angliru. But a ride like this is only produced by the body and brain working in harmony. It requires physical preparation paired with self-understanding, the ability to see tarmac rearing up at 20% ahead of you and think ‘yes, I can do that’, and an environment in which Stiasny was given both the trust and space to deliver the outcome that she did.
The beginning of the transition into the rider we saw on the weekend began two days before Cadel’s Road Race in late January. A frustrated and emotional Stiasny pulled out of a warm-up criterium, and, Sheehan explained, “she came over to the car and she was a bit weepy … she wants to do well, she wants to be part of the team, and you can see that.” For the petite Swiss rider, a fast, flat criterium was a long way from her preferred terrain, but Sheehan worked out a plan with her: cater for her strengths, accept her limitations, and work through visualisation to be in the right headspace. Mentally, she needed to be in her ‘happy place’ – a long climb, specifically the two and a half hour climb on Gran Canaria, from the bottom of the island to the top.
Geelong does not have such a climb, but the team worked out a plan that would allow her to build some confidence even in the unfavourable terrain. Stiasny can lack some confidence riding in the bunch, so Sheehan’s thinking was to place her in the breakaway: a place where she had the best chance of finding her ‘happy place’, even on flat roads, with a long controlled effort. Stiasny spent 106 km off the front, solo, holding the peloton off for most of the day’s duration and only getting caught when the race entered the finishing circuits. She finished dead last, but that doesn’t tell the full story: she won the combativity award, and most importantly, regained some self-belief.
A not-so-doomed solo breakaway
After 106 km off the front alone, Petra Stiasny was the last finisher at Cadel’s Road Race. But, for the Swiss rider, that was a win in itself.
As wildly different as the terrain and result was, this was the start of her journey to the Angliru. “It’s been really amazing to see her progress over the year since starting out in Australia,” Sheehan told me yesterday. “She really gained a lot of confidence there … that was the start.”
With Stiasny starting to back herself again, the team kept its eyes open for opportunities to back her, too. She was slated to ride the Ardennes Classics, but Magnus Bäckstedt – Human Powered Health’s head of sport – backed her for the Vuelta instead; as soon as the Angliru was announced on the route, the team had Stiasny in mind for it. And Stiasny had her eye on it, too: “When they announced that the Angliru would be part of the Vuelta, for me, I had only one thing in my head, every day … it was a dream to win this stage.”
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