{"id":34371,"date":"2026-05-12T08:45:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T08:45:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/34371\/"},"modified":"2026-05-12T08:45:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-12T08:45:09","slug":"katie-archibald-retires-as-one-of-britains-most-remarkable-olympians","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/34371\/","title":{"rendered":"Katie Archibald retires as one of Britain\u2019s most remarkable Olympians"},"content":{"rendered":"

It could have been even more. Having fought back from severe depression following Wardell\u2019s death, a freak accident<\/a> a few weeks before the Paris Olympics in 2024 \u2013 tripping on a garden step at home \u2013 caused her to dislocate her ankle, break her tibia and fibula and rip two ligaments off the bone. She was forced to watch the Games on television.<\/p>\n

When we spoke a few months later, Archibald said she was resolved to trying again in Los Angeles in 2028. \u201cI\u2019m aware that I will have to be patient,\u201d she said. \u201cFour years is a long time. I\u2019ll be 34 by the time Los Angeles rolls around. The basic physics. But I know I have the capability. There have been times in the last few years when I really felt I\u2019ve cracked the code.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018I\u2019ve fallen completely in love with nursing\u2019<\/p>\n

In the end, she clearly found the calling of her new career \u2013 Archibald first began researching nursing degrees a few months before Wardell\u2019s death \u2013 too strong to ignore. \u201cI began my first-year training to be a nurse last September, and I\u2019ve fallen completely in love with the whole thing,\u201d she explained in a statement released by British Cycling on Tuesday morning. \u201cWhen I let my friends and team-mates know I was retiring from sport, they assumed it was because I wasn\u2019t coping doing both. The truth is, though, that there\u2019s still a lot of \u201cstudent\u201d in \u201cstudent nurse\u201d. I\u2019ve had plenty of free time to train, and most of my class-mates have jobs and families and commitments more taxing than mine.<\/p>\n

\u201cI really want to stress that the nursing training isn\u2019t forcing me into retirement. At the same time, this thing that I\u2019m just enamoured with is making me excited for the future, and that makes this transition less scary. I just finished my first placement a couple months ago, and it feels so special being someone people can trust when they need help.\u201d It sounds typical of her.<\/p>\n

Archibald\u2019s departure deprives the GB cycling team of yet another of their big beasts, following her former team-mates Laura and Sir Jason Kenny, Ed Clancy, Sir Mark Cavendish and Sir Bradley Wiggins into retirement \u2013 and before them, of course, the likes of Hoy and Victoria Pendleton.<\/p>\n

Archibald very much belongs in that company. A mighty rider. The best female endurance rider in the world bar none at her peak. And one who always did it her own way. Archibald once incurred the wrath of Shane Sutton for crashing her Triumph motorbike at 70mph in wet conditions ahead of her first Olympic Games in Rio in 2016. But she refused to be cowed. She bounced back to win gold that summer, too. Team GB \u2013 and the sport as a whole \u2013 will miss her enormously.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It could have been even more. Having fought back from severe depression following Wardell\u2019s death, a freak accident…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,2919,771,330,15996,15995,8352,5885],"class_list":{"0":"post-34371","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-britain","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-cycling","10":"tag-sport","11":"tag-standard","12":"tag-tokyo-olympics-2021","13":"tag-track-cycling","14":"tag-womens-cycling","15":"tag-womens-sport"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116560732052984958","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}