GB'S NEXT GOLDEN GENERATION

With two wins out of two in the Nations Cup races this year, is there a team out there who can stop GB's latest stars in the making, asks Tom Davidson

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Cat Ferguson was just 16 years old when she made her Nations Cup debut at the Piccolo Trofeo Alfredo Binda in March. In her first year of A-levels, she had just joined GB’s junior academy and was gearing up for her first road race with the squad. She was nervous, of course she was nervous, but there was no real pressure to perform. The race was twice as long as she was used to, and moreover, some of the riders on the start list were two years older than her.

“I was hoping to maybe get in the front group, and maybe get a top 10,” she tells Cycling Weekly. So you can imagine her surprise when she went and won the thing.

“It was quite a shock,” Ferguson, who has now turned 17, says. With 40km to go, she tore clear from the pack, together with a French rider, and won the two-up sprint to the finish. She covered her mouth in disbelief as she crossed the line.

First-year academy riders winning on their international debut is almost unheard of, but the latest crop of GB junior women is special. For the squad’s coach, Emma Trott, older sister of fivetime Olympic gold medallist Laura Kenny, Ferguson’s feat is the reserve of “super talents”, of which there are a handful in the eight-rider cohort. A glance at the Binda results shows that, of the six girls the national federation fielded, four of them finished in the top 11. What’s even more impressive is that they’d never ridden together before.