For the first time in her twelve-year mountain bike career, Evie Richards is an overall World Cup champion. Twice a world champion and 10 times an individual World Cup winner, 2025 was a year of yet more milestones for the Briton – albeit a year that she concedes was a “turbulent” as it was ultimately successful.
The 28-year-old enjoyed the perfect start to her season, winning back-to-back races in Araxa, Brazil. While there were no more wins forthcoming she was one of the most consistent performers across the year, achieving nine podium finishes. And having pulled on the short track leader’s red jersey in Brazil, she held onto it all the way to the end of the season to win her first overall World Cup title.
“Even in January I was like oh my God, everything’s going so smoothly, it’s going to be a great year,” she tells The Independent. “Brazil, I knew I wasn’t near where I could be fitness wise, so that made me really excited because the next World Cup after that was Nove Mesto and it was a really big goal to win that. I think I probably just committed too hard to that goal and pushed a bit over the limit of what I should have done.”
For the next two months Richards dealt with recurring sickness; she managed second in the Nove Mesto short track race but was forced to miss June’s round in Val di Sole. “It went from being a really smooth sailing start, and then just got a bit more turbulent, but I felt like I brought it back around towards the end of the year. I knew it was going to be a challenge to win an overall when you’ve missed a round and no one else has, so I’m really happy that I still managed to cling on to that jersey.”
That overall title has given her season a different complexion but was never the main target. “I’m a racer,” she explains. “For me the feeling of winning a singular World Cup is always my main goal. But I think as the season went on, and I was turning up every weekend in that red jersey, I was like, now I’ve got it, I really don’t want to lose it. I didn’t want to put too much pressure on myself because I still wanted to race in an all-out way to try and win the World Cups.”
Second place in the final short-track race of the season, in Mont-Sainte-Anne, Canada, meant she sealed the overall title and could enjoy a victory lap two days later in the last cross-country race (a longer, more endurance-based discipline). “I always get nervous before the short track, but then it was like, right, you’ve done this, now go and enjoy the other race,” she recalls. “I can’t say [it was] pure enjoyment because we suffered quite a lot, but it’s a course I love to race and it felt like the pressure was off.”
Finishing fourth in the overall cross-country standings was something of an unexpected bonus. “I’ve never been very consistent with cross country,” she says. “I don’t feel like it comes as naturally to me as the short track, so honestly, it felt like an amazing byproduct.
“It’s funny because all the training I’m doing is actually for the XCO, but I just feel I’m built for the short track. Imagine if I just trained to be good at short track, like, what can I do then?” she laughs.
“I’m 28 and I’m still learning how to race my best. I definitely feel like I’ve learned a lot this year and I know what I’m gonna take into next year to really step up and hopefully be on the podium in both of those overalls.”
The Trek Factory Racing rider laughs as she remembers her original introduction to short track; what has now become her favourite discipline used to be one she hated. “I stepped up into elite during lockdown and so my first short track race would have been my first elite race back, and I remember my coaches in lockdown, they were like, you’re gonna be terrible at it, you hate racing in a group, you hate being in a pack.”
Richards worked with her psychologist Rich Hampson on learning to feel comfortable riding in a group, and says during the pandemic she would practice mini-race scenarios, with her coaches and her dad racing her on e-bikes. The slightly unconventional training paid off: she won her first two elite short track races, and has continued in the same vein since.
The Red Bull athlete credits her cyclo-cross background (she is a former under-23 world champion) for how natural she has found the switch to an ever shorter format; short-track races are typically over in 20-25 minutes. A return to cyclocross at some point is “heavily on my radar”, she says, especially amid the rumours that it will become a Winter Olympic sport. “I need to start doing some secret training,” she jokes. “I don’t want to just turn up and just be mid-pack in all the races. I really want to win.”
Cycling disciplines of all stripes appeal to her: she suggests her muscular build and explosive power would make her well-suited to track sprinting too. Is another career pivot on the cards? “I think I need to learn to ride a track bike [first], but I would never say no if an opportunity to do that came up,” she muses.
In the short-term her goals are more straightforward, including winning both the European and World Championships – “to win both of them in the same year is the absolute ultimate goal” – and winning a cross-country World Cup, something she hasn’t done since Lenzerheide in 2021.
“I felt like I was so unlucky this year with mechanicals that, I felt like it was like torn away from me, so I’ve really got that drive to try to win a World Cup next year. Like, step up my performance, be more consistent, make sure I don’t get sick, and make sure I’m healthy all year.” She admits that “maybe just not pushing as much might help me, like less self-sabotage.”
Richards’ achievements have been made all the more impressive by the fact that she came to cycling relatively late. “I think I’ve always just loved the adrenaline of sport,” she says. “When I was younger my grandma used to take me to Center Parcs and bless her, she used to have to do the high ropes challenge and the bungee jumps and scuba diving because I was too short to go on any of that stuff [alone]. I think as I’ve got older I’ve got more sensible!”
Having played hockey as a teenager she wanted to pick up another sport, and she was selected for her first mountain bike World Championships in Norway in 2014, only around a year after she’d first picked up a bike. “I casually told my friends like, oh yeah, I’m going to Norway next week to race the Worlds, and they were like, no way, what?!”
That trip to Lillehammer flipped a switch, she recalls. “I couldn’t do the technical things, I had to go on all the chicken runs [an easier line around the course], and I think something clicked in me then. I was like, hockey is cool, but this is what I want to do for the rest of my life.”
More than ten years later, it feels safe to say that decision has more than paid off.
