A junior doctor from Thornborough, near Ripon, has won a silver medal in e-cycling at the 2023 UCI E-sports World Championships.
Zoe Langham, who now works part-time as a junior doctor in Birmingham, went one better than last year, where she earned a bronze medal only hours after finishing a shift in A&E as part of her medical training.
E-cycling is a sport rapidly growing in popularity. It consists of cyclists pedalling on stationary bikes, powering virtual avatars moving on a screen.
Zwift, a competitor to Peleton, which provides the e-cycling technology and software for the world championship, has a reported user base of 2.5 million users, including runners as well as cyclists.
Former Ripon Grammar School student Zoe took up the sport to accommodate the demands of her medical training.
She balances her time on the wards alongside road racing and e-cycling. She competes for cycling team Pro-Noctis on the road and Wahoo Le Col in e-cycling.
Zoe studied at Ripon Grammar School before attending the University of Nottingham. Photo: Zoe Langham, Instagram
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The e-cycling world championship featured a new format for 2023, where competitors faced three short, explosive events.
The first event was The Punch, an 13.8km elimination-race where 100 riders competed with only the top 30 moving on the second race. In an interview after the competition, Zoe said:
“If you’d asked me what I’d be happy with coming out there, if I made it past that first race I’d be ecstatic”.
The second event was The Climb, an 8.5km series of hill repetitions which whittled the field down to 10.
The final 10 then went through an event called The Podium, where riders were eliminated one-by-one at a series of intervals until three riders remained, who then raced for the title.
Reflecting on the race, Zoe said:
“It makes all the long days at work, trying to train in the late evening hours worth it.
“It’s been really hard to juggle the job I do with the training hours necessary, and female cycling in general is just going from strength to strength.
“It’s really lovely to see and be a part of, but it definitely takes its toll. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to go part time now, so I can fit in a bit more training and time to race abroad with my team Pro-Noctis- Heidi Kjeldsen-200 degrees coffee. They’re a fantastic and very experienced team and I’m very excited to see where things go this year with them.”
