Lara Gillespie: ‘I had an eventful childhood ... sport was my outlet from life stress’

Enniskerry on a windy morning. The leaves are dancing around the lopsided village, whipping past your ankles and plastering the sides of the roadworks bollards. They’ve had rain here overnight and there’s plenty more in the post. Pop your umbrella with care, or you risk being Mary Poppinsed off to the top of the Sugar Loaf.

Lara Gillespie arrives, bundled up and gleaming. This is her home, swaddled by the Wicklow Mountains, somehow a place of both transience and permanence. She never gets to stay here for long. She makes sure to never quite leave it either.

“It grounds me, definitely,” she says. “If ever I’m overwhelmed or if everything is just a lot, all I want is to go to Wicklow, to go to the mountains. I just love being out in nature and just not even doing anything. Just being there, walking there with the dog and with family.

“It can feel like it’s calling me. Whenever I was sick in Germany, where I have a base, all I was thinking was that I know I would get healthier if I was in Wicklow right now. Also, with my mum’s food, we grow our own food. It’s a very calm place to be.

“You don’t need much here. You don’t need to be going to the shops. You don’t need to be driving. It’s very self-sustained, everything is in the one place. And it’s just a complete contrast to the other life of airports and moving and hotel rooms, blah, blah, blah. So I think I definitely crave that downtime.”

Her life doesn’t grant her a lot of it. Gillespie became a track cycling world champion for the second time in Shanghai last Sunday. She’s gone again next week, out to Abu Dhabi to start preparation for the 2027 road season. So when she’s here, it’s not just about resting and lolling. It’s a more purposeful thing than that.

“My family, my friendships, relationships – they’re all very, very important to me and I don’t have much time to invest in them or in their lives,” she says. “So when I’m home I’m very intentional about making time.

“When I’m away, my life is very regimented. When I’m here, I say no to a lot of things so I can make that effort with the people I need to. And in turn, it does make me feel better and stronger and healthier on the bike if I have that balance.”

Still only 25, Gillespie is comfortably the most successful female cyclist Ireland has ever produced, regardless of the surface under her wheels. Winning the points race in China last weekend made her the first Irish cyclist, male or female, to become a double world champion, having won the elimination race in Chile the previous year. We’ve had world champions before. We’ve never had one person with two rainbow jerseys.

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On the road, she was national champion for the third time this year and added the time trial title for good measure. Back in March, she had the biggest road win of her career, taking the prestigious Le Samyn one-day race in Belgium. She finished fourth in the points classification at the Giro d’Italia in June. Earlier this month, she was second in the Tour of Chongming Island, the final event of the season in the Women’s World Tour.

She keeps finding new levels in a world that was alien to her starting off. Gillespie wasn’t one of those sportspeople who are born into their event – she didn’t take up cycling until her late teens. Instead, she was the sort of kid who played every sport that was going. Saturdays were a trolley dash, shuttling in the car from this football match to that Irish dancing feis, taking the plaits out of her hair and cleaning the muck off her knees with baby wipes as they went.

“I did everything. It was always go, go, go. There was always a bag to be packed. My mum always made us put a list on the side of our sports bag with everything that we needed. So it was always just like that. My sister Bobbi is three years younger than me and she was always kind of dragged everywhere as the plus one.

“Not that she didn’t enjoy it, but if you ask her now does she cycle, she’ll be like, ‘I have an e-bike ...’ She’s not competitive, except maybe with board games. She did the same sports but she was able to lose without thinking about it for the rest of the day. Which, apparently, I wasn’t. I always said I wasn’t competitive and Bobbi would be like: ‘You are, Lara.’”

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Growing up, life was never still. Never felt that way, at any rate. Her parents weren’t together so she and Bobbi were, as she puts it, “always living in a suitcase, always ready to go different places”. Her mother, Suzanne Clarke, herself an Irish international in orienteering, did a degree in sports science and passed down an interest in psychology, sometimes using the simplest form of it on her.

“I used to get so nervous for cross-country running,” Lara says. “I don’t know what it was. I just felt like when you’re in the field and everyone’s watching you run around like that, they’re watching you the whole time. I found something about that really nerve-racking.

“And she just said: ‘Oh, just don’t do it then. You don’t need to race.’ And then I’d be like: ‘Well I’m definitely doing it now. How dare you say that? I want to win.’ That’s always been her way, she’d never be pushing me. She’d never be like: ‘Go there and do that.’ So I think I’ve been drip-fed psychology my whole life. But in a very natural way.”

As the elder sister in a single-mum family, life accelerated under her feet from pretty early on. In that scenario, you have to sprint to stay upright sometimes, whether you’re ready for it or not.

“I had an eventful childhood, let’s say. I definitely grew up very fast and I was very much in some ways responsible for my sister, even at the age of five. So it was very much growing up fast, not really having, like, a child’s life. Sport was my outlet from life stress.

“And that’s why I just did every sport. I think it was my happy place. Because there, you don’t have to worry about your family, you don’t have to worry about where you’re sleeping that night. You’re just having fun with your friends and expressing yourself. So I think that’s also why I don’t take… obviously, I take sport seriously, but I know it’s sport as well.”

Maybe it’s no big surprise then that the road she took to the top of her sport wasn’t exactly linear. She thought she was going to be a runner and as a teenager she trained in a group with future European champion Sarah Healy. But she was doing triathlons as well and it was through them that she ended up in cycling.

She went to the European Youth Olympics in Hungary in 2017 and won silver in the time trial on the road. She was 16 years old and had only been cycling competitively for a few months, but it was the first time she thought that maybe this should be the sport she focused on. But it took a few more years for her to properly get it.

“I went to the World Championships as a junior in 2019 and I was getting my Leaving Cert results literally on the day of the worlds. And my coach was like: ‘Why do you even care? Why are you even looking at your results? This could be your job. Cycling could be your job.’

“And I was like: ‘No it can’t.’ I did not believe that that was a thing. I didn’t even know about road cycling. I didn’t know that it could be a professional job at that point. But I won a medal at that Worlds and then I qualified for Sport Ireland carding. And I was like: ‘Oh, maybe there is a future here.’”

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Her talent carried her, as did the fact that she played so many sports growing up. Even the couple of years she missed out on through illness in her early 20s have possibly stood to her in some respects. Gillespie was born with a rare gynaecological condition that started causing her issues when she was 15 and which she will probably have to deal with throughout her life.

She had surgery in 2021 but had a difficult recovery from it and ended up with glandular fever. All in all, she lost the thick end of two years to it. Hard as it was at the time, she’s able to look back now and see a blessing in disguise.

“Definitely. It taught me to not compare myself with anyone. Because I remember at that time I was so jealous of the girls that I knew I was as good as. They were on world tour contracts and stuff and they were getting all these opportunities and I was like: ‘Oh, that could have been me.’

“And I’m getting much more opportunity than some of those riders just simply because they went into the professional world very early and got worked and worked and worked. I was out of it so I wasn’t burning myself out. It also gave me the opportunity to finish college, which I don’t think I would have been able to do at the time if I was competing.

“My grandad was dying around that time too and I wouldn’t have been able to spend as much time with him. So I’m really grateful to actually have been sick at that time. It meant I was able to be home and help care for him. We lived with my grandparents from the age of five. Caring for them and being with them really gave me another angle on life.”

So here she is. Ireland’s top cyclist, a medal hope when it comes to LA in 2028. Her first Olympics experience in Paris was a bit of a write-off – the focus was more on the team pursuit but when it came to the day, Ireland didn’t get through the qualifying round.

She gave the Omnium everything she had and was within three points of a medal at one stage. But ultimately, it washed out as a 10th-place finish. Not terrible for a first attempt. But not what she was after either.

She was the last Irish competitor of the Games as well, which sucked some of the joy out of the whole experience. Her race took place an hour outside Paris on the last morning of the Olympics, meaning that by the time she got back to the rest of the Irish team, they were all demob happy. Make-up on, hangovers percolating, ready to go again for the closing ceremony. And all she wanted to do was eat something.

“They had all been partying for days at that stage. I missed all that, in my own little bubble. I think the next time I’d like to be a bit more relaxed and actually enjoy it. Even though maybe at the next one I’ll have more pressure, more expectation. But I think for me, I need the balance of fun as well. I don’t like it to be all just serious. I think it takes away the joy of it.”

Nobody deserves it more.