WATT WORKS FOR ME Fred Wright

The Bahrain-McLaren neo-pro on dealing with the heat, hard training and Garmin outages

- David Bradford

You live near Manchester and share a house with Ethan Hayter and Matt Walls – was that a good training environment?

It was actually really good in lockdown, having others to train with who could push me on. I don’t think there were many riders who had that situation, so I was quite lucky really. For me, lockdown didn’t seem that bad – compared to some other riders not even being allowed to go outside.

Your first race back post lockdown was Strade Bianche (1 August). How did it go?

To be honest, I was a little bit disappointed [to DNF], it being such a big race. I got a bit unlucky and then I just didn’t have anything in the heat. I was cooked really early on, and that was me done for the day. My Garmin recorded 42ºC, and I’d never raced in that kind of heat before – being from the UK doesn’t help sometimes!

How did you get started in cycling?

It was just something my dad recommended for the summer holidays, to fill my time as a nine or 10-year-old. I was pretty young, but just loved it straight away.

And when did you get more serious about it?

Around the age of 14 or 15, when I got selected for the [British Cycling] Talent Team. When all that started to happen, I was like, ‘Wow, I’m pretty good at this’. From then on, I stayed with British Cycling until last year [upon signing for CCC].

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