'I felt quite lost and desperate' – How Ashleigh Moolman Pasio re-wrote the ending of her 17-year career, and how she's re-writing the future for African cyclists

Ashleigh Moolman Pasio's career could have ended very differently had she given in to a drawn-out and frustrating recovery to a fractured vertebrae. She considered hanging up her race bike during the 2025 season, a year earlier than planned, her confidence weakened after 18 months of trying to find form due to a crash at the 2024 Volta a Catalunya.

However, the South African was determined to write a different final chapter to her 17-year professional career, and saddled up for one last campaign.

Following the Road World Championships in Montreal, where she finished 19th in the road race, and the Gravel World Championships in Nannup, the pioneer of African women's cycling has retired in a much happier place than a year ago.

Speaking to Moolman Pasio over a video call from her home on the outskirts of Girona, it's clear that this conversation would have been very different had it occurred twelve months earlier. The AG Insurance-Soudal rider is leaving the peloton satisfied to have bowed out on her own terms and in good shape, rather than being forced out through injury.

She isn't leaving the sport altogether, however, and now takes up a role with Team Amani as the African Continental outfit's general manager, aiming to take its women's team to the Tour de France Femmes in 2028.

"At the end of 2025 I actually didn't know who I was as an athlete any longer. It was such a disconnect from the athlete I was in training and who I knew I was in terms of the power and the performance I could produce," Moolman Pasio tells Cyclingnews a few days after her final bow at the gravel worlds. "I felt quite lost and desperate. It did cross my mind to retire sooner than planned."

Alongside her T10 vertebra fracture, Moolman Pasio also discovered at that time that she was suffering from high insulin sensitivity, causing her muscles to flush out glucose from her bloodstream; a physiological concept known as the 'athlete paradox'. After adjusting her diet, she got back in shape for the 2026 season.

"I decided that I wanted to finish my career on my terms and managed to get back to a level that I was very happy with," she says, having finished fourth at April's Brabantse Pijl among several other strong results in her final year.

"I finished on my terms and I finished the athlete that I know I should be. Whereas if I had finished last year having had all those performance issues I would have felt like I was forced to retire because I'm not good enough any longer. Now, I actually could continue… I still am at the level that I could hugely contribute to a team."

"I didn't finish because I wasn't good enough any longer. I finished because I've decided it's time to put my focus into other things," she adds.

Moolman Pasio was pleased with her final road worlds performance, finishing in the top-20 on a tough course in Montréal. Things didn't go quite as smoothly on the gravel two weeks later, however, as she endured a cold in the days before and ended her final race early due to a crash.

No "fairytale ending," she says, but turning 41 in December, Moolman Pasio is now taking time to reflect on almost two decades in Europe that have themselves had the twists and turns of a good novel.

An outsider infiltrating a European sport

No African woman precedes Moolman Pasio for her longevity and achievements in professional cycling. After qualifying as a chemical engineer at Stellenbosch University, the Pretorian discovered her talent for cycling later than most, encouraged and supported by her husband, Carl.

Moolman Pasio began racing on the South African scene while at university. She soon signed for one of the country's big teams, Cyclelab-Toyota, which in 2008 enabled her to race in Europe for the first time at the Tour Feminin de l'Ardèche. She finished the six-stage race in 39th, doing enough to convince Lotto Ladies to hand her a life-changing contract.

"The Tour of Ardèche was a big big eye-opener. [I was] totally out of my depth at that point in time; crashing, punctures, all sorts of nonsense. But thankfully I made contact with Lotto. We managed to negotiate this ride for a couple of members of the local team on the Lotto set-up. [It was] for free. We just got our bikes and support," she explains.

"It took determination, it took guts. I had to be really brave to make this all happen. It also took the support around me which I was very lucky to have."

Moolman Pasio describes racing a 'double season' in her first couple of years; competing in Europe during the northern hemisphere summer with Lotto, and then again throughout the summer months in South Africa. She survived on the small amount of pay from racing in South Africa as well as some personal endorsement deals from South African companies.

She says her first "proper contract" came along in 2014 when she joined the Norwegian Hitec Products team after a season in which she finished on the podium at La Fléche Wallonne. However, throughout all this time, she and Carl had been struggling with visa restrictions due to their South African passports. Utilising his Italian heritage, Moolman Pasio's husband managed to get Italian passports for both of them, solving their visa restriction woes.

Moolman Pasio went on to take a total of 49 UCI victories throughout her career. She became the first African woman to win a WorldTour stage race in 2022 at the Tour de Romandie, won the UCI eSports World Championships in 2020 and was twice overall runner-up at the Giro d'Italia Women. For much of that time, Moolman Pasio has been the only African rider at the top level of women's cycling, something which she plans to change in the next phase of her life.

'The hunger in their eyes' – Paying it forward with Team Amani

Moolman Pasio's career has not only been characterised by what she has achieved on the bike, but also her activities off it. She set up Rocacorba Cycling in 2021 alongside her husband, a boutique cycling hotel in a restored 17th century estate, nestled in the mountains near Girona and named after one of the local climbs. Alongside the hotel, Moolman Pasio established the Rocacorba Collective, a thriving indoor cycling community with a particular mission to uplift and bring women together.

In a sport that has become more insular, with riders able to focus on little else aside from their performance, Moolman Pasio has always ridden with a wider set of goals in mind. In 2023, during the middle of her Classics campaign, she travelled back to South Africa to support women from Khaltsha Cycling, a cycling project partnered with Rocacorba Collective in the country's largest township, to ride the Cape Town Cycle Tour.

"I've always been driven by impact, purpose, paying it forward, deeper than winning bike races," she says. "Yes, performing at bike races motivated me, obviously, to keep always giving my best, but my real inspiration as an athlete was so much more than winning bike races."

Now that she has hung up her wheels for good, Moolman Pasio will plough her full focus into her new role as general manager of Team Amani. She will guide the East African cycling project's women's Continental team, which aims to enable African women to race at the very top levels. The ultimate and immediate goal is to race the 2028 Tour de France Femmes.

Moolman Pasio's original plan in the latter stages of her career was to set up her own cycling team, linked in with the Rocacorba community. However, after speaking with Ethiopian former men's WorldTour rider Tsgabu Grmay, she recognised a synergy between her ideas and what Amani was already putting in place. Instead of competing with Amani, Moolman Pasio was invited to join the team staff, and has even spent time supporting its riders this season, hosting a small group at Rocacorba and spending a day coaching them in descending.

Instantly, Moolman Pasio was gripped by the potential of the riders from Ethiopia, Rwanda and elsewhere in East Africa.

"It was actually quite mind-blowing really," she recalls of her day coaching the riders in June.

"We went out for a session on Rocacorba to do some downhilling skills and it still gives me goosebumps to think of that day because it was just so high impact… The hunger in their eyes, that's something that really stands out to me with these girls. They have so many challenges back home, especially the Ethiopians with war that's looming [In October, fighting resumed in the Tigray region, where Amani's Ethiopian riders are from, following the 2020-2022 Tigray War between the Ethiopian Armed Forces and the Tigray People's Liberation Front – Ed.].

"Two of them have young children and their families are there, but the hunger and just how they were soaking up everything that I was showing them, everything I was saying to them. I could just see their eyes, I could see the sparkle, I could see the switch flick in their brains."

Days later, Moolman Pasio raced with her AG Insurance-Soudal team against Team Amani at the Volta a Catalunya, finishing 12th. Amani's best finisher was Ethiopian Eyerusalem Haftu Reda in 20th overall.

"Seeing how [Eyerusalem Haftu Reda] moved in the peloton, how she was fighting for her place. She transformed her descending just from spending a few hours with me. I was just blown away by it and that's when I was like these girls have it, you know."

"It's now moved from 'I want to pay forward, I want to help Africans, I want to give them opportunity', to saying 'We can get to the Tour de France, we can compete at the highest level'. If this is how quickly they can turn things around, imagine if they have a full season. They can do it."

"It didn't change my motivation, I was always motivated, but it just amplified everything. We need to make this happen. So that's when we really started talking quite aggressively. We want to be at the start line of the Tour de France in 2028 and we really do believe we can do that. So now it's about putting everything possible in place to make that happen."

The loss of Moolman Pasio's presence in the WorldTour peloton will be felt in 2027. This driven rider, with her punchy style and consistency, has been a constant figure in the bunch for 17 seasons.

However, speaking with this giant of African cycling, you get the sense that she is just getting started.

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