I got into cycling because of these two retiring riders – It will be strange to cover the sport without them

As a professional cycling journalist, you're not meant to have favourites. And really, I don't. You do get rid of that pretty quickly once you have to ask them difficult questions, or accurately analyse races where certain riders may have messed up. Impartiality is key, and as someone who was a fan before doing this for a job, I take it seriously.

That said, however, I can't deny that I certainly did have favourites when I was younger, and just a very eager fan. In fact, there are two riders who top that list, being the very first riders I liked when I was getting into the sport over a decade ago, and really the two that got me hooked.

Those two riders are Geraint Thomas and Lizzie Deignan, and as fate would have it, both decided to make 2025 their last season. They both retired with vast and influential legacies, but somewhere among the long list of things they did in the sport is to make a young Tilda fall in love with cycling way back in 2014.

Not many things in cycling make a personal impact on me these days – and that's a good thing – but saying goodbye to Thomas and Deignan feels like the end of an era for me, and the official start of covering a sport that is very different from how I found it.

Let's rewind back to that fateful year in 2014, when, after several near-misses, I finally caught the cycling bug. Somehow, Olympic fever in 2012 had passed me by when it came to cycling – I was too busy obsessing over diving and gymnastics, I think – and several trips with my parents to Flanders and Roubaix somehow hadn't fully captured my attention.

But, in 2014, the Tour came to the UK, and although I didn't go with my family to watch it in Yorkshire, I watched the Grand Départ on TV, and then insisted that my dad take me to the London stage, so I could see my new favourite rider, Geraint Thomas.

Now, there is pretty much only one reason why I landed on Geraint Thomas as my first favourite rider, and that's because he is Welsh. I'm Welsh, and there is a tendency for us Welsh people to really latch onto our stars. It doesn't matter who they are or how obscure their sport may be; if a Welsh person is doing well in any field, Welsh people will get behind them.

Fortunately for me, Geraint Thomas was not really a particularly obscure rider; he was the chief teammate of Chris Froome and the team that had been dominating the Tour at that point. His Welshness certainly drew me in, but seeing the way he raced so boldly and often selflessly, and then seeing some of the personality behind the rider, too, made him a firm favourite.

He went on to win the Commonwealth Games road race later that summer, and I was hooked. My favourite rider was winning – I was definitely going to watch this sport.

The Commonwealth Games is where the second of my two first favourites comes in, Lizzie Deignan, though partly this was because she was the only female rider I knew. As the winner of Team GB's first medal at the London Olympics, Lizzie Armitstead had become close to a household name in the UK.

I think I kind of assumed that during the summer, she was probably racing the Tour de France, too, but the women's version. It hadn't particularly occurred to me that that might not exist for women, and it did take some time for this disparity to really sink in.

But, whilst I wasn't tuning in to the Thüringen Ladies Tour, that was the high point of the women's summer at that time – I doubt you could even watch it on TV in 2014 – I was seated for the Commonwealth Games when she soloed to victory. I probably couldn't even name another rider in the race at that time, but I didn't need to. Lizzie, she would be my favourite.

As my love for cycling grew, and I did learn who other riders were, a lot of it still revolved around Geraint and Lizzie for me. I got to see them hitting their peak: Lizzie winning Worlds and Flanders and the Women's Tour, whilst Geraint won E3, helped Froome to three more Tour titles and then – miraculously, emotionally – a Tour win of his own.

These were riders I'd latched on to largely because they were British, and they could have achieved very little, but instead they were world-class, providing me with sporting moments and feelings of pride I'd rarely felt through sport. I'm a football fan now, but I didn't grow up one, and until cycling, I didn't know sport could make you feel so strongly.

Looking back on that time now, there is a huge sense of nostalgia. For starters, I've changed from a teenage fan to an adult journalist. I still completely love cycling, and I still get excited about it, but it is different to be a professional journalist – it has to be. I don't swell with emotion seeing certain riders win anymore, but I do get to speak to them, write about them, see my byline on Cyclingnews, which is what young Tilda really wanted, as she watched it all happen through a screen.

But secondly, the sport has changed. British riders and teams aren't in a purple patch anymore. Grand Tour domestiques don't win cobbled Classics. Women's cycling is almost unrecognisable, with a Tour de France Femmes now, and a calendar that shadows the men's. You can't fall into men's cycling and be unaware of the women's side, as I once did – it's solidly part of the conversation and the narrative.

Geraint Thomas and Lizzie Deignan have been steadfast pillars through that change, in my eyes. Hard-working, humble, team players, but also winners in their own right. Some of those values are morphing as cycling morphs. Everyone wants to be a winner, and so few are able to be one, given the dominance of a few riders. Ballooning salaries have made money a bigger factor in the sport, and long-term loyalty to one team is becoming a rarity.

I'm hesitant to go on a 'back in my day' rant, or bemoan the state of cycling 'these days', since I am only talking about ten years ago, and changes aren't inherently negative, but things are different. Whether it's me or the sport, I don't look at cycling in child-like wonder anymore. My childhood favourites retiring seems to mark that shift – the end of the era I came to love, and the start of something new.

As now an adult and a journalist, I've been lucky enough to speak to both Geraint and Lizzie on multiple occasions, and whilst you can't be starstruck, I was always relieved to know that they weren't so different from the riders I once idolised. I've spoken to both about racing and their careers, but also about motherhood, fatherhood, growing up, and racing in the latter part of their careers.

For reasons other than just my own personal teenage fandom, they were riders I and the wider press would go to on important topics, because they'd been around the block, they were always thoughtful, and they always had an opinion or insight you felt like you could trust.

Next year, the men's and women's pelotons will continue without these two figures, and it will be different. By the sounds of things, though, neither are straying too far from the sport – Thomas is set for a role at Ineos Grenadiers, whilst Deignan is having another child, but planning to make a return to media work – but they will be gone from the peloton, and from the mixed zone.

Riders retire every year, but saying goodbye to Geraint Thomas and Lizzie Deignan in one season does mean two of the key riders in the golden British generation bowing out at the same time. That era is over, my time as a young, eager fan is over, and now cycling moves on to the next thing. New fans now have completely different favourites, I'm sure, and they watch a sport that is so different from the one I first loved.

Professionally, I have to move on to the next thing too, the next figurehead riders, the next stories. But personally, I'll always have Geraint Thomas and Lizzie Deignan to thank for me being here in the first place. Outside of the headlines and the drama and the results, that's the real impact of sport, I think.