Gay cyclist
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The organization’s mission has always been close to Mortensen’s heart, especially following the loss of two friends to suicide. That is really amazing.”
It is important to me that Run Tri Bike be the supportive space that I dreamed it to be when I started the company in 2020. I like racing more now.
Not because I’m faster.
From China, he went onward into Pakistan and India. I then turned to Lori and said, “I love this article by Hollie. Unlike in team sports with openly gay leagues, it's harder to find like-minded people and role models in cycling."
There is no deterring him, though - his 2025 race schedule is already filling up.
It's a quiet, sobering reminder that while cycling is becoming broadly more welcoming for LGBTQ+ people, the same cannot always be said for the places they call home.
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When I show up to a start line now, it’s all of me. "The training as a WorldTour rider is f****ing hard."The final frontier
Cycling may be far more LGBQ-inclusive these days - but what about the T?
With trans inclusion an ever more politicised and polarised issue, what is the lived experience of a trans cyclist in Britain?
We spoke to 50-year-old Farrah Herbert to find out. You don’t owe your story to anyone. "There are some riders I've told, and none of them have reacted badly, but I'm very selective." Jack explains that in the training environments of his youth and junior days, "homophobic slurs were thrown around" frequently, uncensured by coaches.
Since graduating into the senior ranks, he has witnessed far fewer such comments - with one striking exception.
"I'm very lucky to be London- based, meaning I was able to join LGBTQ+ cycling club Lan Riders, who have been nothing but welcoming. I’m not a pro, not sponsored full-time, but I take the sport seriously. Acknowledging that he is more open and less guarded around his university friends, Jack sketches what sounds like a compartmentalised life - shifting between identities depending on who he is with, perhaps a habit shaped more by necessity than choice.
I mention how Davies told me his parents had always been so relaxed about sexuality that he never felt the need to come out to them.
Before, I was always doing little calculations, how to phrase things, which pronouns to use, whether I was being too vague or too specific. No one stopped riding with me.
I think I had built it up in my head to be this make-or-break moment, but it turns out most people were just like, “Cool, thanks for telling me.”
Did anything change in how you raced?
It’s hard to explain, but yes.
Coming out gave me back a lot of mental energy.
I'll keep saying it-come and have a go!" Two weeks pass, then a WhatsApp message arrives from Davies telling me that one of his LGBTQ+ contacts has agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. Around the local scene, he’s known for his consistency, his obsession with tire pressure, and more recently, for coming out as gay after nearly a decade of racing.
It wasn’t a grand announcement…just a quiet decision to stop filtering himself at the start line.
It just means you’re doing something real. The following year, Britain saw its own breakthrough when Blackpool FC's Jake Daniels came out. “As I got to the end, I thought back on all of the challenges that I faced that someone who was straight wouldn’t have had to face. It’s the kind of racing that feels like chaos, but the good kind…mud, cowbells, adrenaline.