This season, 20-year-old Zoe Bäckstedt took her first pro win, at the Simac Ladies Tour - where she also finished third on the GC. Now, she's into the cyclocross season, where she holds the rainbow stripes of the Under-23 World Champion.
But the outcome could have been so different, with a summer of illness keeping her off the bike. Cycling Weekly caught up with the Canyon-SRAM rider before the muddy-season kick off, to find out about how she made her 2024 season comeback possible.
You were sidelined for most of the summer with illness. How did you train to return to racing?
Zone 1 rides, as flat as possible, keeping the heart rate low. For the first week, I started with just half an hour a day on the turbo, and slowly progressed from there. When I started to feel stronger, I added 30-40 watts and just kept the chain tight for a few minutes. I’d sometimes do four times four minutes over the space of two hours. By the time I got up to eight minutes and it started to hurt a bit, I knew I was getting stronger.
You won the time trial on the first stage of the Simac Ladies Tour, your first pro win. Was it a target?
No, I hadn’t targeted anything. Simac was just a race that I needed to do to get some more race days under my belt. I’d done a few weeks of hard training and came into that first stage thinking I’d be happy with top 10. When I crossed the finish line and heard I had the fastest time, it was a bit of a shock. I thought maybe they were talking about someone else, but then my dad [Magnus Bäckstedt] confirmed it on the race radio. I hoped to hang on for a podium – to win was really something special.
With the CX season coming up, are you approaching it all guns blazing, or will you keep half an eye on the road?
Yeah, for now I’m focusing on the cross, with about 16 races to do. I want to put as much into each one as possible, and then think about the road season afterwards. Otherwise, it becomes a season of six or seven months, whereas if I look at it as lasting just until the end of the cross season, it’s only two and a half months.
How do cross and road training differ – can you combine the two?
Lately, there’s been a lot more shorter intervals, ahead of the first races. You come from the road season, having done lots of super-long efforts, to the cross season, where the power is so up-and-down. At the start of next year, when we go on a training camp before the [CX] Worlds, it’s more of a mix of efforts, as you’re then coming into the road season – I’ll adapt the intervals the others [team-mates] are doing, making them shorter or a little higher-power. I won’t be doing 20-30-minute efforts for a cross race, when I need to be doing 30-second all-out sprints.
Quick fire round...
If you could ride one place for the rest of your life, where would it be?
Sweden – great off and on road, with a mix of snow and sun.
Dream race to win?
Paris-Roubaix
Your biggest inspiration?
My sister [Elynor Bäckstedt]
Favourite mid-ride cafe snack?
A pastry with cream in the middle and strawberries on top – my go-to.
What’s the most embarrassing song on your playlist?
The whole playlist is embarrassing!
What’s your favourite sport or hobby outside of cycling?
Watching Formula One, and I like building Lego.
Name the celebrity you’d most like to take on in a bike race?
Zendaya [US actress and singer] would be cool.
This article was originally published in Cycling Weekly magazine. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.
