Emma Pooley

Emma Jane Pooley (born 3 October 1982) is a British-Swiss athlete in multiple sports.

A former professional cyclist who specialised in time trials and hilly races, she later transferred to endurance running, duathlon and triathlon, and was four-times world champion in long-distance duathlon.

She competes in long-distance and uphill mountain running and has represented Switzerland at the world trailrunning championships.

She began studying for a mathematics degree at Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 2001 before switching to engineering and graduated with a first class honours degree in 2005.

She started cycling at university after suffering an injury from cross-country running.

At Cambridge she won university sporting blues in cross-country running, triathlon and cycling.

After a surprise fourth place in the national road championship in 2005, she was signed by UK national team Team Fat Birds UK and rode in the British team supporting Nicole Cooke in the road race at that year's world championships, but crashed out of the race.

She rode for the same trade team in 2006 when they were based in Belgium and registered as an international-level UCI Women's Team under the name Team FBUK.

She signed with the Switzerland-based Team Specialized Designs for Women for 2007, with whom she won her first UCI race, stage 3 of the Thüringen Rundfahrt der Frauen, after a 120 km solo escape, the first of many wins from solo breakaways.

She represented Britain in the 2007 UCI Road World Championships, finishing 8th in the time trial and 9th in the road race.

She won an Olympic silver medal in the time trial in 2008 and was world time trial champion in 2010.

She has won six UCI Women's Road World Cup one-day races, as well as several stage races including the ten-day Tour de l'Aude.

This earned Great Britain one of their places in the 2008 Summer Olympics.

In 2008, she won the Trofeo Alfredo Binda UCI Road World Cup in Italy after another solo breakaway.

She finished 23rd in the Olympic road race on 11 August 2008, where she rode in support of Nicole Cooke's successful gold medal bid but her greatest success of the summer came in the time trial on 13 August, where she won the silver medal behind American Kristin Armstrong.

In 2009, Pooley signed to the Cervélo Test Team, where she remained until their disbandment at the end of 2011.

She won the 2009 national time trial championships and took wins for the team in the Coupe du Monde de Montreal, GP de Plouay, and Grand Prix Costa Etrusca one-day races, and the final edition of the Grande Boucle Féminine, once dubbed "the women's Tour de France".

Due to financial issues the 2009 Grande Boucle was reduced to only four stages, leading Pooley to joke that it was "more of a Petite Boucle than Grande".

She also wore the leader's jersey for three stages of the Giro d'Italia Femminile, but finished the race in fourth place in the general classification after losing the race lead due to her poor descending, which she improved after the 2009 season with the help of her coach Tim Williams and British Cycling psychiatrist Steve Peters.

She is three-times a British time trial champion and in 2010 also won the British road race championships.

2010 saw several of Pooley's greatest successes.

She won her first major stage race in May, the final edition of the Tour de l'Aude, the longest-running event on the UCI women's calendar.

She went on to win another top-level stage race in June, the Giro del Trentino Alto Adige-Südtirol.

She also won two UCI Women's Road World Cup one-day races, the La Flèche Wallonne Féminine and the GP de Plouay, and earned a rainbow jersey by winning the time trial at the Road World Championships.

She was British national time trial champion for the second year running and also took her only national road race champion's jersey.

She finished the year 5th in the 2010 UCI Women's Road World Rankings, the highest end-of-year ranking of her cycling career, and received one of the British Olympic Association's Athlete of the Year trophies, recognising her performance that year as the best by any British cyclist of either sex in any Olympic cycling discipline.

In March 2011, Pooley won the one-day Trofeo Alfredo Binda World Cup race for a second time, again after a lengthy lone breakaway.

She broke her collarbone in training on 12 April so was unable to defend her Flèche Wallonne title and did not race again until the women's invitational time trial at the Tour of California on 20 May, in which she placed fifth.

Following the discontinuation of the Garmin Cervélo women's team at the end of 2011, Pooley began riding for the Dutch team AA Drink–leontien.nl which, in turn, wound up at the end of the 2012 season.

Later in the year, however, she won the hilly Tour de l'Ardèche stage race in France and finished second to Marianne Vos in the Giro d'Italia Femminile, both achievements that she would repeat in 2012.

At the 2012 Summer Olympics she competed in the Women's road race, helping teammate Lizzie Armitstead to win a silver medal, and placed sixth in the Women's time trial.

Pooley took a step back from pro-racing when she signed for the long-established, but non-UCI registered, Swiss-based Bigla Cycling Team for the 2013 season in order to concentrate on completing her PhD in geotechnical engineering.

In a severely reduced season, she missed the 2013 UCI Road World Championships.

Pooley retired from professional cycling after the 2014 Commonwealth Games to concentrate on triathlon, duathlon and long-distance running, having won the Lausanne Marathon and the Swissman triathlon the previous year.

She went on to win the ITU Powerman Duathlon World Championships at Powerman Zofingen in September 2014 and again in 2015.

On 16 December 2015, Pooley announced that she would be returning temporarily to cycling, seeking to qualify to represent Great Britain at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, as she felt the unusually mountainous time trial course on offer played to her strengths.

In June 2016, Pooley came out of retirement and re-signed for her former team,, in time for the 2016 Giro Rosa.

After racing in the Olympic time trial and road race she returned to duathlon with two further world championship titles at ITU Powerman Duathlon World Championships at Powerman Zofingen in September 2016 and 2017 as well as a European middle-distance duathlon title in 2017.

Pooley was a founding member of Le Tour Entier, which campaigned for a Women's Tour de France and improvements to women's cycling generally.

Born in Wandsworth, London, Pooley grew up in Norwich, where she attended Norwich High School for Girls and the sixth form of Norwich School.