Cypriot road and TT champion Antri Christoforou is the odd one out in her family.

The 31-year-old didn’t come from a particularly sporting family, certainly not one that was at all interested in cycling, but she found the bike at a young age and loved it. She had a lot of energy to burn as a child, and cycling was a good way to get rid of some of it.

Christoforou is one of five children with three sisters and one brother, but except for one tentative go at cycling from one of her siblings, she was the only one to pick it up. Her mother wasn’t initially keen on her riding so much, but a young Christoforou managed to use her good grades as a bargaining chip.

“I was good at school, so that was easier to make my mom say okay, to go for training. Because if I keep having the same grades, I can keep cycling,” Christoforou told Velo. “Only my one-year younger sister did some cycling, but she doesn’t really like it. My brother is a football player, but not in a big team. He’s the only one doing sports.

“My mom was always saying that cycling is for boys, because sometimes we have crashes and for girls she can’t do that. Now she likes it and she always asks me how was it and how did your team do. She’s learning. My brother maybe understands more now and he watches some races on TV when I’m racing.”

Christoforou is from a village not far from the Cypriot capital of Nicosia, where she lives now. Her introduction to cycling was fairly straightforward as she rode around with other children in her neighborhood after a day of classes.

It wasn’t until a local club was set up for the children that she was able to broaden her horizons and see what she was able to do on a bike.

“I liked to ride my bike with the kids after the school. It was what we did every afternoon and when I was in the last class of primary [elementary] school, they made a small cycle club for the kids for the first time,” she said. “I was really active when I was a child, whatever they wanted to do, I was the first kid to do it. So, I started in the club, and I was good.

I liked it because we could ride our bikes for a longer distance. We could go to the next village, so it was easy for us to do a more interesting adventure. I stopped a bit for some years because of school, I wanted to have good grades, and then in the last class of high school, when everyone stopped, I started again.

Despite enjoying riding her bike, Christoforou never thought she would actually make a living out of it. She wanted to race on the road, but there were limited opportunities for that, and instead, she raced mountain bike in her teenage years, which is more popular in Cyprus than road racing.

Christoforou didn’t see a big future in it as a full-time profession, so she decided to put her focus on her studies again and went to university, where she got a degree in biology. It was as she was wrapping that up that she was finally able to start competing in road racing and her path toward professionalism began in earnest.

“I think about that a lot of times because I started with mountain bike and I didn’t really feel that I could [be professional] in mountain bike. I always want to have another option, like to go to university and take a bachelor’s degree to be able to feel safe,” Christoforou said.

“I wanted to be a road cyclist, but it was hard because we didn’t have a national team so I couldn’t race. But with mountain biking, I could race as one rider. After that, when I was 21 I think, I did some road races with the national team and some races with a club in Europe. And then I started dreaming of being a professional road cyclist. This age, not earlier because before I didn’t feel that I could do it on the mountain bike.”

Christoforou made a quick impression on the road and won the Cypriot national road race title in 2010, a title that she has won nine more times since then. She went to the youth Olympic games that year as well and finished sixth in the time trial.

In 2013, she made her first appearance at the European Championships in the U23 category, and the following season she contested her first elite event outside of Cyprus when she rode the GP Féminin de Chambéry and the Bretagne Ladies Tour.

With a growing list of solid results behind her, Christoforou was attracting attention from teams. She was in conversation with a UK-based squad for the 2015 season when she made a life-changing discovery.

“I found the team at a club team, and they asked me if I want to start racing with them in Great Britain, she said. “That was on Monday that we had a call and on Thursday, I found that I was pregnant, so I never started with them.”

Though she was delighted with the news, the 23-year-old Christoforou felt as though her cycling career may have come to an end before she had a chance to see how far she could go. Christoforou, who is married to former mountain biker Marios Athanasiadis, stopped racing and later gave birth to a son.

Cycling wasn’t done with her yet and an opportunity to race with the national team arose at the beginning of 2016. It had been over a year since she had competed, but it was not a chance to be sniffed at and she decided to go.

Prior to the invitation, she wasn’t sure what her cycling future looked like but the decision to go was one that would ultimately springboard her into the professional ranks.

“We received an invitation from Israel, for some races, UCI races, or points for Olympic qualification. I was lacking because I was out for one year. They invited us and I said let’s see,” Christoforou said. “We went with the national team, and I won these races, so I got a lot of points. It was first the invitation and then it was the motivation for me to get back on my bike.
t was without any stress or pressure because no one expected something for me. Then say I want to start again, I want to make something, I just want some reason to get back on my bike. I came back stronger and when I won these races, I said, ‘okay, I want to try because I felt that I never tried the way I wanted.”

Christoforou got a contract with the Italian Servetto-Footon team for the remainder of the season, her first pro deal. After a strong start to last year, including winning the Classique Morbihan, she did a mid-season transfer to Human Powered Health to catapult her into the WorldTour for the first time.

When Christoforou had her son back in 2015 and then made her return, she was a rarity in the sport. There is a lot of progress still to be made but a lot of change has happened in the intervening years with maternity leave introduced for WorldTour teams and a growing number of riders taking time out to have a child and then continuing their career.

“Before, there were really few riders who had kids and I felt that it was difficult for the teams to understand and accept the situation,” Christoforou said. “But now I feel like because big athletes, like for example, Lizzie [Deignan], is still a very strong rider, but she has now two kids, and she’s on Trek, all these things help all the female cyclists. Now, more and more riders make the decision that I can have the family and be an athlete at the same time. It’s very good for us and yes, I feel like we are strong now all together.”

Christoforou is also no longer the only mom on the Human Powered Health roster after Jesse Vandenbulcke joined the squad at the start of this year. Though there is a language barrier between the two children, their sons met and bonded for the first time earlier this year when the team raced in Cyprus at the start of the season.

“She understands me 100 percent. We had our kids together in Cyprus, and they were really similar. It was nice and crazy because they can’t talk to each other.” she said. “But it was cute. They had our jerseys on, and they were playing together without talking, it was nice.