Start, stop

Rewind four years and Barnes was hurtling past the former Smithfield headquarters of RCUK with arms aloft, on a magical June evening in which she had seemed to right the wrong fate had dealt her with the collapse of Team Ibis Cycles, the Netherlands-based professional outfit she had left Britain a year earlier to join.

“That was a really, really hard year for me,” Barnes remembers of her relocation, as a 19-year-old, to Holland. “It took six or seven races even before I was even able to finish a professional race.”

Time seems not to have erased the disappointment. Which race? And what was her finishing position? “Gent-Wevelgem,” she says, ruefully. “I was ninety-sixth.”

It is a measure of Barnes’ standards that finishing among the first 100 riders at one of the toughest races on the professional calendar, as a teenager, living and racing abroad for the first time, remains a source of disappointment.

On track?

Indeed, there was a time when Barnes might have joined Trott in the elite quartet of Britain’s all-conquering women’s team pursuit squad. At the end of 2013, with a dominant campaign on the domestic circuit a reminder to sources in Manchester of her innate ability, British Cycling invited Barnes to a team pursuit training camp.

“I was on the Talent Team from the age of 13, and I’d always had the option to join the Olympic Academy, but I made a choice not to go,” she says. “It wasn’t that they didn’t want me, I just felt that I was more of a road cyclist than a track cyclist.”

You get to your final year as a junior and think, ‘I have to start finding teams that race in Europe and take on the biggest races on the calendar.’ I definitely found out the hard way that’s not always the best option.

“For me, [the road] was an adventure, and I was able to go wherever I wanted. Road cycling offered the best variety of racing; the track seemed so repetitive. I’ve always had support from British Cycling, and I had contact with everyone, saying they admired my decision to take a completely different path.”

UHC and the USA

If the road had promised adventure and a chance to go where she wanted, it should have come as little surprise when Barnes headed to America to join UnitedHealthCare. The precocious talent brought back home by the collapse of her first team was again heading abroad, and this time considerably further afield than the Netherlands.

Barnes is not the type to be cowed, however. Life in America, she says, was like a whirlwind, and like nothing she’d ever experienced. UnitedHealthCare is no small enterprise: a well-funded outfit with a men’s and women’s team, mechanics, soigneurs, and supportive team-mates. Barnes lived among them, near the service course, in Asheville, North Carolina.

Things began with an email (her success in Britain had not gone unnoticed), then a training camp in Arizona, and then, with temperatures presumably not hot enough, a place in the team for the Gran Prix San Luis Femenino in Argentina, where she bagged her first professional victory.

Better still, when she returned to Europe to race again, at the Women’s Tour, the Giro d’Italia Femminile, and La Course, Barnes was no longer outclassed by the opposition she had struggled to contend with as a first-year pro with Team Ibis Cycles.

Success breeds success, and confidence too. The European peloton had not become slower; Barnes had got faster. Despite her advancement, however, after nearly two full seasons, she was ready to return home. In cycling circles, Europe is the big time.

“It’s quite astonishing, the difference between racing in Britain and then in America and in Europe. In America, I got quite lazy. The roads are so big that you can go from the back to the front of peloton in seconds, whereas in Europe, the roads are so smalll, that if you’re not in the top 20, it can be very difficult,” she admits.

Canyon calling

“Every cyclist knows Europe is where the real racing is,” Barnes says.

With nearly two years completed at UHC, Barnes began emailing her CV to European teams. Ronny Lauke, the vastly experienced manager of the newly-disbanded Velocio-SRAM was keen to secure Barnes’ services, even when a broken talus (a complex bone in the ankle) brought a premature end to her career Stateside.

“They still wanted me,” Barnes says, with a note of surprise still in her voice. “They signed a rider, even when they didn’t know when she would be back on bike again. My second race back was Flèche Wallonne and for Canyon-SRAM to give me that opportunity was really great. The support they’ve given me has been really special.”

She remembers her first training camp with Lauke’s squad, an occasion she showed up to wearing a surgical boot. While her new colleagues racked up the miles, Barnes headed to the gym for a no-less grueling series of rehabilitation exercises. A photo on Barnes’ Instagram account, where the muscle wastage in her right leg is shown into sharp relief by the definition in her left, offers a pictorial summary of what must have been a challenging period.

“I didn’t know any of the riders well, only Alexis [Ryan], who had come with me from UHC.  I spent 12 days in Mallorca without putting my leg over a bike. I couldn’t even walk, with my leg in a boot. I just worked with the physios.

New beginnings

“I’m looking forward to going into this year fit and healthy. Last year, I was pretty happy with my season overall, considering the circumstances, and hopefully I can take some confidence from that.”

It will be a second season under Loake’s leadership. The joke among the riders, she says, is that while he seems “German and scary”, team meetings can be like “Christmas dinner with your uncle.” Equally, he “takes no messing”. His complements are worth having, Barnes says, simply because they must be earned.

I don’t know how I got through it as I did. Tao saw me in some pretty dark times

She praises two further German influences within the team, those of Trixi Worrack and Lisa Brennaur. It is Worrack especially who brings the team together, off the road and on, Barnes says. A quiet presence at the dinner table, yet one able to bring the team together, on the road she is Canyon-SRAM’s captain, unafraid to speak up when leadership is required to navigate the shifting sands of a race.

Best to come?

Barnes hopes to show at the Classics, perhaps even assuming the status of protected rider as she evolves, in her own words, from pure sprinter to all-rounder. Such a path is well trodden; the fast-finishing rouleur is often one of bike racing’s most exciting exponents.

The long period of recovery may only have sharpened Barnes’ hunger for victory. Canyon-SRAM is home to significant talents, notably that of new acquisition Pauline Ferrand-Perot, a former world champion on the road, cyclo-cross, and mountain bike, but Barnes does not seem out of place. After relocations and recovery, and with the British champion’s jersey on her back, she seems poised to deliver her best.