Kasia Niewiadoma’s unlikely path from Polish village roads to Tour de France champion
“Maybe I can start by saying that bike was always a big part of my life,” Kasia Niewiadoma says, settling into her story with the quiet confidence of someone who has learned to trust unexpected journeys. For the Polish cyclist who would eventually wear yellow at the Tour de France Femmes, two wheels began as pure adventure—a passport to freedom in the mountains of southern Poland.
“It was our way of having fun or exploring the world,” she recalls. “It was like this one thing that would allow us to go far without our parents knowing where we were at.” The racing came naturally, as it does with kids testing limits. Bombing downhills without braking, crashes inevitable, all part of the game.
She grew up in a region called Górki, among people known as Górale—mountain folk with a reputation. “They’re very stubborn, loud, they know what they want. They’re really hardworking and driven people,” she explains. “I would say that my parents are a good representation of that. Especially my dad.”
That father would change everything with a simple gesture. One day he appeared with a road bike and asked, “Do you want to go try riding a bike with me?” What happened next revealed something fundamental about his youngest daughter’s character.
“I remember just like going so hard down the village where I grew up just to like show him that I’m something basically,” she says. The next day, he signed her up for a local race. She won—against both boys and girls. “Everything just like fell into the right places.”
The Youngest Child’s Fire
Being the youngest sibling had shaped her in ways she was only beginning to understand. “When with my brother, I would be like wrestling or fighting,” she remembers. “I don’t know why you have this feeling. You don’t even know what racing or riding a bike is, but you want to make sure that others are suffering when they ride on your wheel.”
That competitive instinct would crystallize around a Nike tracksuit—expensive, coveted, seemingly out of reach for a teenager in small-town Poland. The solution was pure Kasia: make it a competition.
“Maybe I can have a bet with my dad that if I drop him on a climb, he can buy it to me,” she proposed. Her father, confident in his fitness, “shaked my hand straight away.”
But something shifted on that climb. “I just remember going so hard from the start. Then I started to feel that he’s dropping and that gave me so much power.” She got the tracksuit. More importantly, she got something else.
“And from that moment, yeah, I would always drop him. I had that confidence.”
Finding Her Place
The path from Polish village roads to professional cycling wasn’t straightforward. In 2013, when she first put on the Rabobank jersey, “I was just so stoked. That was like the moment where I was like, ‘Okay, I made it now.'” But she was green in ways that mattered. “I had no idea about what echelons were.”
More challenging than tactical ignorance were the cultural assumptions she faced. “I think that as a Polish person coming to a Dutch team, there’s always this prejudice about Polish people, especially in Holland,” she reflects. “But I knew I had to show them that we Polish riders are better than they think.”
Everything changed when she signed with Canyon SRAM. “Once you feel very accepted and well known within the team, then it’s like so easy to just like always bring the vibe up. Naturally, we build each other up.”
But success brought its own complications. “I feel like I became very obsessive with like wanting to win,” she admits. The harder she chased victories, the more elusive they became. Then came a revelation that would reshape her approach: “I feel like once I stopped pursuing it, that’s when it came. So, I feel like it’s just a process that maybe I will never understand.”
The Paradox of Pressure
The lesson crystallized at the Gravel World Championships in Italy. She went in with minimal expectations: “It’s going to be a nice trip. We’re going to have good food, nice drinks.” Race day arrived, and suddenly, “I just had perfect legs and I was like, ‘Okay, let’s let’s go.'”
“Sometimes when you release the pressure, that’s when the results come,” she discovered.
This philosophy would prove crucial when the biggest opportunity of her career arrived. Her training partners in the U.S. could see the competitor lurking beneath the surface. As her husband Taylor Phinney puts it: “If I pass the threshold and put that wheel in front, then I will look over at Kasia. She won’t look at me and I know that it’s game on. She’s ready to kill.”
Yellow Jersey Dreams
The journey toward yellow began in an unexpected moment of vulnerability. “I feel like the start of the yellow jersey journey was the second last stage,” she recalls. During pre-race preparation, warming up on the rollers, her partner Taylor Phinney approached with a question that would prove prophetic.
“I was like, ‘Damn, can you imagine if actually I won this race?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, that would change your whole life.'”
The final stage tested everything she had learned about pushing through pain and trusting her body. “I was in so much pain. I just was like, I want this freaking race to stop.” But something unprecedented happened: “Then my body followed and that was like the first time when actually the body overcame mindset.”
Crossing the finish line, exhaustion overwhelmed everything else. “To be honest I was like thank God like this is over I don’t want to be here.” Then came the radio chatter, the realization, the explosion of joy.
“The moment when I actually realized that I won the tour was euphoric feeling of like happiness and joy and everyone is hugging you. You, I don’t know, kiss strangers. You just like you’re friends with everyone. It’s such a funny feeling.”
The Mystery of Excellence
Even now, the victory carries an element of mystery that she’s comfortable leaving unexplored. “I still don’t know how I did it,” she admits with characteristic honesty. “But at that moment, I gave more than I thought I could.”
It’s a fitting conclusion to a story that began with a stubborn kid from the Polish mountains, determined to prove herself on village climbs. The girl who once made a bet over a tracksuit had discovered that sometimes the greatest victories come not from forcing your will upon the world, but from trusting your body to carry you beyond what your mind believes possible.
The mountains of Górki shaped her, teaching lessons about suffering and persistence that would translate perfectly to the world’s biggest cycling stages. But it was learning to let go—to stop chasing and start trusting—that ultimately brought her home to yellow.
