Tiree Robinson, 17, training during a Black Magic Women Cycling pre-season camp in Wanaka last December. Photo / Craig Butland
A Kerikeri teen is heading to Europe to pursue her dreams of becoming a professional cyclist and competing in the Tour de France.
Tiree Robinson, 17, was the first female junior and the first female overall in the four-day BDO Tour of Northland that ended on March 19.
It was a fitting farewell for Tiree, who’s heading to Australia next week to race and then to Europe, where she has been selected for development programmes in the Netherlands and Italy.
Tiree finished Year 13 at Kerikeri High School last year and had planned to study at Waikato University, but she’s put that on hold while she pursues her cycling dreams.
On March 28, she’s heading to Brisbane to compete in the Oceania Road Race Championships as the only Northlander in the Black Magic Women Cycling development team.
She expects the racing, in Brisbane on April 1, will be “really hot, hard and fast”, so she’s been heat training to ready herself for the steamy Queensland conditions.
On April 4, Tiree will join a group of six Black Magic riders, all under 19, heading to the Netherlands after being selected for the squad’s 2023 European campaign.
There she’ll be based at a sports park in the southern city of Sittard for five weeks of training and competition in the Netherlands, Belgium and France.
That will include two multi-stage Nations Cup events and plenty of “flat and fast” racing.
Then, while her Black Magic teammates head home, she will travel to Italy, where she has been selected for a two-month stint at the Down Under Academy in Verona.
The academy was established by Italian rider Valentina Scandolara, who had her first big win in Australia and wanted to give a leg-up to young Australian and Kiwi women who don’t have the same opportunities as their European counterparts.
Tiree said she’d never travelled further than Australia before and never competed overseas.
“So it’s going to be a massive culture shock I reckon, but I’m really excited. I’m looking forward to riding with a lot more people — there are not many girls riding here — and having a lot more competition. I’m also looking forward to the food in Italy, the pasta and pizzas, and the scenery.”
In July, she’ll head to the United Kingdom to visit relatives and where she’ll be ideally located if Cycling NZ selects her for the junior team at the UCI Cycling World Championships in Glasgow the following month.
If she doesn’t make the cut she’ll just enjoy the holiday.
Ultimately, Tiree’s goal is to go professional and represent New Zealand, but also to race in the Tour de France.
“That’s been a big dream for me. We used to watch it on TV when I was young, but it was never even an option because there wasn’t a women’s Tour de France. Last year they had one for the first time. It was pretty exciting to watch. That would be a cool thing to do.”
Tiree has only recently made cycling her sport.
As a child, she was a keen gymnast but in her teens, she didn’t know what sport to take up. She gave mountain biking and triathlon a go, but neither captivated her for long.
Seeing her parents’ road bikes, bought for the Lake Taupō Cycle Challenge, piqued her interest in road racing.
“I gave it a go and I loved it,” she said.
She joined a local cycling group and started training, mostly on her own, on the roads around Kerikeri.
Tiree eventually bought her own bike — “that was a big step” — and got serious about racing around 2021.
She described the 360km BDO Tour of Northland, held for the last time this year after a 20-year history, as “lots of fun”.
“It was really special to be able to race around my hometown. That’s probably not something I’m going to be able to do again. It was a nice send-off before I go to Europe.”
The appeal of road racing was the sense of being fit and fast almost without effort, “when everything feels like it’s in place”.
“I love the racing, I love the strategic side of it — you don’t have to be the fittest or fastest person to win — and I love being able to see what my body’s capable of. I like pushing myself and not just on the bike. As an athlete, you have to have everything fine-tuned, and I love the challenge of that.”
Patrick Harvey, the director of Black Magic Women Cycling, said because Tiree lived outside the main centres and didn’t belong to any of the big clubs, she would turn up at events and surprise everyone.
”People would say, Who’s this Tiree? Where’d she come from?”
“So we were really excited when she applied to be part of the team. We believe she has huge potential,” he said.
“She ticks all the boxes — organisation, dedication, enthusiasm, resilience, tenacity — and in terms of physiology, she has a really good engine.”
Harvey said some of Tiree’s attributes came from being in Northland, without a big club or support network behind her, so she’d had to rely on herself.
He’d also been “super-impressed” by her ability to balance training, study, work and travel.
However, everyone on the team heading to the Netherlands had their eyes wide open to the reality that their experience wasn’t on the same level as European riders.
“So we’re going over, from little old New Zealand, to bridge that gap,” he said.