The first time I had a Women's WorldTour professional on the podcast, it was Tayler Wiles. We'd had a long run of riders on — World Tour lads, week after week — and a listener pulled me up on it: where are the women? Fair point. I said, honestly, that I didn't know that many pro women to ask. So I asked Tayler's wife, the former Irish champion Olivia Dillon, and she said the obvious thing: get Tayler. And she was right. What followed was one of the best conversations I've had — funny, sharp, and about something that matters.
Because Tayler Wiles sits at the crossing point of two stories that don't get told enough. One is about inequality, and a sport that for too long treated half its athletes as an afterthought. The other is about possibility — a woman who bought her first bike at nineteen and rode it all the way to the top. Both are worth your time, whoever you are and whatever you ride.
The bike at nineteen
Let's start with the story that should be pinned to the wall of every rider who thinks they started too late.
Tayler grew up in Utah — skiing with her dad, outdoors constantly, and above all playing soccer. Competitive soccer, from as far back as she could remember. When she got to the point of choosing between an academic scholarship and playing soccer at a smaller school, she chose the books. Pre-med. Sensible, focused, the athletic dream filed away.
And then she found she missed it. She talked about going to the field house at university and running laps on the inside track, trying to beat strangers around the corners, just to get a hit of the competition she'd given up. That's not a hobby. That's a competitive engine with nowhere to go. A friend rode bikes. She got curious. And at around nineteen or twenty, she mowed lawns for a summer to buy a pink Cannondale — and the moment she rode it, that was it. She was gone. She didn't want to just ride it; she wanted to race it, almost immediately.
From there to the WorldTour. From a first bike at nineteen to the top of professional cycling. Sit with that, because it demolishes the most common excuse in the sport: I started too late, the door's closed, the people who are good have been riding since they were kids. Tayler Wiles is the answer to that. She came to it late, with a competitive fire and no peer group of good cyclists, and the only ceiling was how fast she could climb. For an amateur — for a masters rider who didn't touch a bike until their forties — that story isn't just inspiring, it's instructive. The rapid early progression of a new rider is one of the genuine joys of this sport, and it's available whenever you start.
The honest part: inequality
Tayler is, and was, an outspoken advocate for equality in cycling — for the women, and for the LGBTQ riders in a peloton that hasn't always made space for them. And when we talked about wages and inequality, it reflected the reality of women's professional cycling at the time: a sport where the very top riders in the world were, in many cases, not earning a living wage from it, where the structures that men took for granted simply didn't exist on the women's side.
I'm not going to dress that up. For a long stretch of cycling's history, the women's side was under-resourced, under-paid and under-broadcast, and it took riders like Tayler being willing to say so — loudly, on record — to start shifting it. That advocacy carries a cost. It's easier to keep your head down and race. Choosing instead to use your platform to push for the people coming behind you is the kind of thing that deserves real respect, and it's a big part of why this conversation mattered.
How far it's come
Here's the good news, and it's worth telling plainly because the trajectory has been genuinely heartening. Since the period Tayler was describing, women's professional cycling has grown enormously.
The sport introduced minimum salaries for its top tier and has raised them in stages, pulling the women's side toward the kind of professional baseline the men long had. Marquee races have returned and been built — a women's Tour de France back on the calendar, more big stage races, more one-day classics with real prestige and real coverage. Live broadcasting has expanded, so you can actually watch the racing now, which drives the sponsorship that funds the wages that lets riders be full professionals. It's a virtuous circle that, for years, simply didn't turn. Now it does.
None of that happened by accident, and none of it is finished. But the direction is unmistakable, and riders like Tayler Wiles, who were willing to speak up when it was harder and less rewarded, helped turn it. The sport that a girl picking up her first bike enters today is a far better one than the sport Tayler entered — and that's the whole point of the fight.
The calendar, and what it asks of a rider
It's easy to forget, watching the highlights, just how hard the racing Tayler does actually is. The women's WorldTour is not a shorter, gentler version of the men's — it's a brutal calendar of one-day Classics over the same cobbles and bergs, week-long stage races, and now multi-week Grand Tours, packed into a season and ridden at a ferocious intensity.
And here's the part that's specific to the women's side: the races are often shorter than the men's, which doesn't make them easier — it makes them faster and more relentless. There's less time for the race to settle, fewer quiet hours, less room to hide. The aggression starts early and rarely lets up. A rider like Tayler has to be sharp from kilometre one, able to read a race that can be decided in a single explosive move, and durable enough to back it up day after day across a stage race.
That shapes how these riders train, and there's a lesson in it for amateurs. The demand is high-intensity, repeatable efforts and the race-craft to be in the right place when it matters — not just long, steady aerobic hours. It's the same truth that runs through everything we talk about: training has to look like the thing you're preparing for. For Tayler, that means sharp, punchy, tactical racing fitness. For you, it means building your week around the specific demands of your own events rather than just accumulating miles. The fitness that wins a fast, aggressive women's Classic and the fitness that gets you to the front of a hard club race are built the same way — with intensity and specificity, not just volume.
The other thing worth saying plainly: this is professional sport, done full-time, at a level most people never glimpse. The growth of the women's side means more riders can now do exactly that — train as full professionals, supported, rather than holding down a second job to fund a WorldTour career. That's what the rising wages and the bigger calendar actually buy: the time and security to train properly. It's why the racing keeps getting faster and deeper, and it's a long way from where Tayler started.
Why this matters to everyone
You might be reading this as a fifty-year-old bloke wondering what a Trek pro's story about women's cycling has to do with your Saturday club run. Here's the answer: more than you'd think.
First, a chunk of this audience is women, or rides with women, or has daughters who are watching what the sport offers them. A healthier, more equal, more visible women's side isn't a niche concern — it's the whole sport getting richer, with more racing to watch, more role models, more reasons for the next generation to fall in love with it the way Tayler did with that pink Cannondale.
Second, the late-starter lesson is universal, and it's the deepest thing we talk about here. Tayler reached the WorldTour from a standing start at nineteen. You're not chasing the WorldTour — but the principle scales straight down. The idea that your best riding is behind you because you didn't start young is a story you tell yourself, and it's wrong. Meaningful improvement is available at any age, from any starting point. That's the entire "not done yet" idea, and Tayler Wiles is one of its purest examples — proof that the door opens later, and wider, than almost anyone believes.
The sport is growing. It's getting fairer. And it keeps proving, through riders like Tayler, that it's never as late as you think. Whatever bike you're on, that's a story worth carrying with you.
Hear the full conversation with Tayler Wiles on the Roadman podcast. For more on riding strong at any age and stage, read the complete guide to cycling over 40, and join the conversation on Skool.