ACCIDENTAL FIGURE HEAD

When Clay Davies became the only openly gay male elite level rider in the UK earlier this year he also became a figurehead for the LGBTQIA+ community in cycling. Alex Ballinger talks to him about why he came out

- Alex Ballinger

You very rarely get anyone saying anything outrageously homophobic to your face,” says Clay Davies, the UK’s only elite level openly gay male rider. “Everyone’s been extremely supportive. The only negative comment I had was from a cycling team manager, interestingly.”

Davies, 29, who races for the Spirit-Bontrager-BSS-Rotor elite team, made a historic decision earlier this summer, as he publicly came out as gay in an interview with cycling website British Continental. Revealing how a life-threatening crash on the bike, when his head was almost crushed after he was run down by a driver in St Albans, changed his perspective on life, Davies told the UK-focused website: “It took quite literally nearly dying for me to reveal my sexuality.”

In doing so he became statistically something of an anomaly. As Cycling Weekly detailed in a feature in May there are currently no male WorldTour pro riders who are out, despite the statistical likelihood of there being no gay men in the peloton being so vanishingly small as to be close to zero, and only a very select handful of amateurs. As a consequence he’s found himself at the centre of the debate on how our sport can become a more open and inclusive place.

Now, almost two months after that first interview was published, Davies tells Cycling Weekly his experience of being out in the cycling world has mostly been positive.

He says: “The interview was something I was thinking about doing last year actually, but with the lockdown being announced, I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to do it last year.