THE FALL AND RISE OF RACHEL NEYLAN
None of my journey is separate from its other parts. I was riding for Virtu Cycling in 2019, and had quite a good year, two WorldTour top 10s, I won a stage at a tour in the Czech Republic. Then the project shut its door and the money was pulled out of the team. Long story short, they closed the Conti team and the women’s team.
Straight away, I got a phone call from this new Spanish project. It was supposed to be the next big thing. A three million dollar budget for four years. A fantastic agreement between three parties based out of Burgos, and we were assured it was with good people.
Come January there was still no money in the bank account. It had been lost in international money transfers. Devastatingly, the Spanish entrepreneur who had been backing the team faded, and the money remained in the cloud. It was pretty traumatic for everyone involved; to put it simply the project never came to fruition. Financially, there was no way to go backwards and zero capacity to recoup losses, which is the other side of the story.
On multiple levels, just really destructive. Not just for me, but for a lot of great
