Olympic cyclist Nicole Shields has company riding near the Tanzanian city of Arusha during her 4500km journey through East Africa. Photo / Supplied
After winning Olympic silver in Paris, Nicole Shields took a sabbatical – riding 4500km through East Africa to help kids get to school and to discover life beyond high-performance sport.
There’s a sterile precision to high-performance sport and for many years, New Zealand track cyclist Nicole Shields has lived and breathed it. But over the past few months her life has been the complete opposite.
The Paris Olympic silver medallist has just finished a 4500km bike-packing journey through East Africa, starting in Uganda and ending in Zimbabwe – swapping smooth velodrome boards for dirt roads, dusty villages and endless horizons.
“High-performance sport is so niche and narrow. It can easily be consuming,” Shields says. “I knew that I really wanted to step out of that, in the biggest way possible.”
A year earlier, she had crossed the finish line at the National Velodrome in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines alongside women’s pursuit teammates Ally Wollaston, Bryony Botha and Emily Shearman to win Olympic silver. Relief flooded in, but so did the realisation she needed to step away from the national programme.
“My run into Paris was super challenging,” she says.
In March 2022, Shields’ health began a downwards trajectory after contracting a Covid-like virus that left her fatigued and sick for two seasons. “There were days when I couldn’t get off the couch, let alone train. It was horrific,” she told LockerRoom in 2024.
“The whole build-up to Paris was a lot and I ummed and ahhed about taking a year off. But I knew I needed this time, otherwise there’s no way I’d make it to LA.” The US city is hosting the 2028 Olympic Games.
Granted a sabbatical year, something she acknowledges as a privilege, Shields knew the bike-packing adventure was what her creative, adventurous soul needed.
After putting the word out for a riding buddy, Olympic teammate and sprint kayaker Hamish Legarth signed up.
Before Africa, Legarth hadn’t done much cycling and although they weren’t travelling fast, there were some long, punishing days on rough terrain.
“Humans are made to adapt. He had a sore arse but he was pretty good… he walked up a lot of hills,” laughs Shields. Filtering 10 litres of water each day was Legarth’s job.
As part of the journey, the pair partnered with World Bicycle Relief, raising nearly $35,000 – enough to pay for more than 100 bicycles in the countries they travelled through.
Along the way, Shields stopped in two communities in each of six nations (Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe) to meet people whose lives had been transformed by the charity’s work.
“We visited a school in Tanzania and there were so many beautiful kids showing us how much they value education and how the bikes are helping them get there,” she says.
“To hear from these incredible people how getting a bike has changed their life, and their life trajectory, was incredible.”
Accustomed to riding an aerodynamic 6.7kg, carbon-fibre pursuit bike, Shields was instead chugging along on a 40kg aluminium bike-packing beast with no suspension.
The trip began in Kampala, Uganda, and while a few people questioned their decision to start there, it was eye-opening from the first day – navigating through slums with massive piles of rubbish and flooded streets.
“It was immediately a shock, coming straight from New Zealand,” Shields says.
Deep into the journey, there were days when Shields admits she questioned her life choices – the monotonous grind mixed with basic accommodation and less-than-ideal training food. But she says they saw the real Africa not the tourist highlight reel.
On one particularly challenging day in Iten, Kenya (the high-altitude mecca for distance runners in the Great Rift Valley), they were feeling the toll of hard days and poor sleep.
“We’d just descended this huge escarpment, dropping 2000m in two hours,” she says. “We stayed in the valley that night and the next day had to go straight back up the other side. It was just demoralising.”
In a humbling way, Shields found beauty and recovery in the mission.
What they didn’t recover from quickly, though, was what they initially thought was malaria, after testing positive on a RATS test.
“I remember waking up feeling a bit off. Fifty kilometres into an 80km day, we pulled over at a petrol station and I went downhill rapidly,” she says.
After a visit to a tropical medicine clinic in Nairobi, they discovered the tests were counterfeit. They didn’t have malaria – they had worms, stomach flu and the blastocystis parasite.
“We had to eat street food – it was that or nothing,” Shields says. “You can’t control what water they’re washing food in. But wow, we were both really sick and lost valuable time because we had to stop.”
Despite lost time and illness, Shields says the experience was humbling. “We were exposed to kind people who were just trying to survive.”
As she returns to the Cycling NZ high-performance environment, Shields says she’s reconciled the privilege of getting to use a bike in the pursuit of excellence rather than the pursuit of basic needs.
“We use bikes in such a niche, sterile environment. Seeing how one can completely change someone’s life is something I’ll never forget.”
With a fresh perspective and a big training block of a different kind behind her, Shields is energised to bring more creativity to her training and her life.
“It feels great to be in a place where I can carry on to LA, in a way that I want to and that I’m excited to get stuck into.”
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.