Kelsey Mitchell says UCI Track Champions League is ‘anyone’s game’ ahead of third round in Paris

Kelsey Mitchell will have reason to celebrate on Saturday, whether she has a great night at the Track Champions League or merely a good one.

The Canadian track star, who sits in second place in the competition, turns 30 on Saturday. Another victory or two on Saturday evening, in the keirin and/or sprint, as well the leader’s skinsuit that could come with it, will be the candle on the cake.

“I’m excited to be here in Paris,” she tells Eurosport via video link, on the eve of the eve of competition. “And yeah, there’s a bunch of us all fighting for the race lead. It’s anyone’s game, so it’s exciting. It’s fun.”

She’ll be hoping – and has reason to expect – to have a more successful experience than the last time she was in the French capital, for the Worlds at the beginning of October. In the battle of the rainbow bands, Mitchell performed below expectations, coming away without a single medal. Nonetheless there are no demons to be conquered on the Saint-Quentin boards:

“I’m a completely different rider than I was six weeks ago,” she says. “My confidence is there. I’m hungry for it.”

Hungry and confident. If you need a pair of words to describe her, you could do worse.

Mitchell is typically one of the more relaxed riders on the startline. That’s something she puts down to experience – of life, as much as cycling – and having done all she possibly can beforehand.

“I know what I can control, and that’s kind of my thing,” she says. “All my confidence comes from my preparation.

“I know what to expect. I know what I need to eat. I know how loud it’s going to be out there. I know that it’s gonna hurt.”

It is certainly going to be noisy in the Vélodrome de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, with most of the anticipated crowd volume aiming to roar a few extra watts into the wheels of Mitchell’s rival, Mathilde Gros. In both Berlin and Mallorca, Gros won the sprint, but failed to make the final of the keirin on either occasion. Mitchell has been more consistent across both events.

“I’m in second right now, but it’s anyone’s game, and every race matters. I’m just gonna go out there and try and get that blue jersey here [in Paris]. And if not, I’ll try and get it in London,” she says.

The women’s sprint league, as with the three others, is far closer at this point in proceedings than it was in the first series of the TCL. Then no-one could really come close to Emma Hinze.

Rather than Hinze’s absence, Mitchell attributes the increased competition to “more depth” in each category.

“People are targeting this event, whereas it was new last year, so no one knew what to expect,” she says, adding that riders “saw how much of a success it was and how good it was to be racing at that level. They wanted to come here and really take advantage of it.”

Indoor cyclists tend not to have quite the same profile as their road counterparts. Mitchell recognizes the Track Champions League as offering “an amazing opportunity” to somewhat redress that imbalance.

“You win a race and you make some decent money, and then at the end, if you’re in the top few, you’re walking away with some really good money. It’s amazing because I would do it for free.”

There is no danger of anyone asking her to do that.

The Track Champions League has also provided the sort of platform for track riders to raise their personality profiles, seldom seen outside of an Olympics.

Now into her second season, Mitchell is one of the most popular stars of the Track Champions League, as much for her willingness to engage with the off-track demands as her impressive performances on it. She understands there’s more to athletic competition than mere results.

“What I love most about sport is people’s stories and why they are the way they are, how they ended up where they are, why they do what they do.”

Her own story is certainly worth telling in full.

Mitchell was born and raised in a town called Fort McMurray, in Alberta, before her parents moved them down to Edmonton where there were more opportunities to participate in organised sport:

“Any sport that I could play, I played. I did gymnastics; I did judo; I did ringette; I did volleyball, soccer, basketball, floor hockey, track and field. Anything where I could be active and push myself. I was never the best on the team in any of them, but I just worked really hard, and I think that’s why it translates so well to cycling. I’m obviously not the most skilled cyclist. I don’t have the most talent or tactical skills, I just work really, really hard and I’m able to push my body.”

After university, throughout which she played football, she went travelling in South East Asia in order “to try and find myself.”

That was semi-successful, as a conversation one evening at one of many parties caused her to re-evaluate her direction. She realised that the path she was expected – and expected herself – to follow, to “go home, get a job, buy a house, settle down, have a family” was not the one for her after all.

Rather than helping her to figure out what she did want to do, it left Mitchell “more confused” than ever. What happened next sounds like the intervention of fate.

Shortly before she was due to fly home, Mitchell was bitten by a mosquito and fell ill with dengue fever.

A week in hospital caused her to miss her flight home and an interview for a job which, had she gotten, would have taken life down a different direction entirely. Not so much the butterfly effect as the mosquito consequence, then.

After recovering and returning to Canada Mitchell “had nothing lined up. I was very lost. I got a job driving a truck for eight hours a day, just working for the city.”

In her early twenties, at this point Mitchell had barely been on a bike since she was 12 years old.

“The only time I rode was if I was injured, and couldn’t run,” she says. “I’d be on a stationary spin bike and I’d be miserable because I’d want to go run around the soccer field, but I couldn’t. My relationship with cycling wasn’t a positive one.”

Mitchell might not have known what she wanted from her life, but she at least knew she was, at her core, an athlete.

The next intervention came when she learned about the RBC training grounds in 2017, an event which “tests an athlete’s speed, strength, endurance, and power, nothing to do with, tactics or technical ability in any of the sports”

She said to herself, “Okay, it’s my last chance. I’m just gonna go and see what happens.” Using the last of her travel money, she signed up to the final event of the programme and booked a flight across the country.

There, after watching her perform a particularly impressive vertical jump, Mitchell was pulled aside by a representative of the national cycling federation, who said they wanted to see what she could do on a WattBike. The numbers she put out easily met the requisite standard. Cycling Canada practically offered her a contract on the spot.

Having been given the chance of a lifetime, under the guidance of the national programme, she was never going to let it go to waste:

“I just loved being an athlete, I loved pushing my body, I loved working hard. I just loved all of that. I was given an opportunity to live an athlete’s lifestyle again, to be able to live off of what I make as an athlete.”

When it’s suggested to Mitchell that perhaps not every cyclist would speak quite so highly of the grind, she puts her attitude down to the fact that it’s really not long ago “I was working 12-hour night shifts at a refinery, or I was driving a truck for eight hours a day.”

“If I’m dying in training, my body hurts, or I’m in pain, I ask myself, ‘what else would I rather be doing?'”

To hear Mitchell tell it, it almost sounds easy, which it simply cannot have been.

But regardless of whether Mitchell is remembering the months of work that took her to Tokyo through clear lenses or rose-tinted ones, she and her sprint team-mate, Lauriane Genest, unquestionably put Canada on the cycling map there, taking home a gold and a bronze respectively.

“During Covid, we just trained and we loved it, and it was amazing, and it was perfect. We showed up at the Olympics and we kicked ass. I think we surprised the world.”

They definitely did.

Mitchell had been racing to a world-class level before the pandemic struck, coming fourth at the Worlds in Berlin in February 2020, so she doesn’t know she wouldn’t have won gold anyway. What she will say is that Covid pushing back the Olympics by a year was “100% a blessing in disguise. I was always playing catch up, trying to learn how to pedal properly or bend my arms and stuff, so I gained another year of just being on the bike and training, becoming a high-level athlete.”

Mitchell is the first to admit that she is still learning her trade, but the fact that when she loses, it is more often the result of eradicable errors, than a lack of athletic capacity, only supports the sense that she can win more races, and surely will.

“I don’t want to ever downplay it – you definitely need skill to be able to go up against your opponent – but the way I won the Olympics was, I think, that I was just stronger and more powerful at that moment. Tactically and technically, I definitely wasn’t the strongest one there.”

She was relegated in Mallorca – the result of prematurely entering the sprinters lane in her opening heat – which could be another example of that inexperience in action. Taking it on the chin she says “it was a fair call. I normally never do that.”

For Mitchell every setback, rather than a mortal wound, is something to build on.

“I know I’m not near the end of my career,” she says. “I’m in the middle, and I think I’m just learning more and more every single time.” Given how recently she first jumped on a track bike some would say Mitchell is much closer to the start, with many years and titles to come.

Including, hopefully, the Track Champions League. Which takes us back to the disappointments of Saint-Quentin last month:

“Worlds was the turning point where I’m like, ‘Okay, I need to fix this.’ From the day I got back from worlds, I was training. If I wasn’t training, I was resting. And that’s all I did for two and a half weeks until I came to Mallorca. I just was trying to get the best shape I possibly could, see if I could turn it around. And then I showed up on race day with that confidence back because I was like there’s nothing else I could have done.”

It all comes back to that Olympic gold, the pinnacle of athletic achievement, which she keeps beside her bed and will willingly show to anyone who “isn’t sure what they’re doing in life, or thinks they’re too old to try something new.”

“This is my dream,” she continues. “Every single day, I’m so grateful. The cherry on top is I get to represent Canada and travel the world and go to the Olympics and win a gold medal for Canada, which is a dream so big. I hadn’t even thought that was possible.”

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