Not quite 19 years old, Lia Ladbrook is not one for half-measures. Her first race? She won it. First injury on the bike? She doubled the number of bones in her foot. First trip to Queensland? Brought home an Oceania Champs Jersey. What book is she currently reading? That would be Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
We first came across Ladbrook when she joined our crew, shooting a video for the launch of the Indigo Epic. We were taken aback not just by her natural skill and steeze on the bike but by the way she carries herself through the world. Intelligent and well-spoken, funny and humble, Ladbrook isn’t your typical teenage DH rider from regional Victoria. She is about to embark on her first World Cup racing campaign and will be writing about her adventures through an unknown land here on Flow. So before she jumps on a plane, we paired her with local photographer Sam Purdie for a lap down the Woolshed Falls Downhill in Beechworth, and got her on the phone for a chat so we could give her a proper introduction.
In the beginning
Hailing from Beechworth, the UK-born downhiller came to Australia before she was walking or talking. A promising field hockey player in her younger years, Ladbrook’s mountain bike racing debut wasn’t exactly traditional.
“My parents were against me racing for a long time because of the big rocks and injuries. So my first race was McKayos at Falls Creek. I won that one.”
For those playing at home, McKayos is the Australian take on Mega Avalanche. This is a mass start Downhill where 350 riders are set loose off the top of Mt Mckay and race to Bogong Village, braving snow, singletrack, stair sets and sketchy fire roads along the way. In short, it’s absolute chaos.
But this lit the fire and convinced her parents that racing was nothing to worry about. It didn’t take long for Ladbrook to start appearing on the podiums at the Victorian Enduro Tour. Then the AusCycling National Championships. Then the UCI Enduro World Cup.
And now, only a few years after surviving the chaos of battling a legion of gravity riders on a course designed for carnage, current Oceania Elite Downhill Champ is about to embark on her first European racing campaign, flying the flag of a local team, Synergy 37.
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Lia and the Fat Boys
When Ladbrook first started mountain biking with the Beechworth ChainGang as a sprightly eight-year-old, she was the only girl in the Junior Ride Program.
“When I started, there weren’t many girls riding bikes, and all the guys were like, eww cooties. So I hung out with middle-aged men on Sundays. It was a ride called the Fat Boys Sunday Ride, and my dad used to go on it — so I’d tag along,” she says.
Known to her Synergy 37 teammates as Tommy Tough Knuckles — or TTK for short — the lack of girls her age riding bikes didn’t deter Ladbrook from wanting to pursue mountain biking. It wasn’t even something she noticed by her own account until now.
“I was a big tomboy when I was younger, and I never really made that connection then. I only really started to see it when girls began to race a bit more, and I could see them out on the tracks — there was no one when I was starting. But I liked that.
At school, I’d play footy with the boys instead of doing whatever the girls did. So when it came to mountain biking, it wasn’t really a big thing for me,” she says.
For Ladbrook, just hanging onto the back of the Fat Boys ride turned into keeping up with ease and showing the ol’ fellas how big granite features should be ridden.
“I’ve always been very competitive. But I’ve also looked for goals — I’d pass a hurdle, and right away, I’d be onto the next hurdle. Even when I was younger, I always looked for improvement,” she says.
Feet like Humpty Dumpty
By the end of 2021, Ladbrook was riding well and ramping up. She was working with a coach and was getting appreciably faster. About to embark on year 12 and an extensive suite of exams, she looked ahead at the potential of balancing a Bachelor of Science and racing around Australia and beyond; one rock changed her trajectory.
This was Ladbrook’s first downhill race since Nationals the year before, and she was excited to challenge the clock at Buller — maybe a little too excited.
“It was my last run of the day — and I even said ‘last run.’ I was going way too fast, and I took my foot out, and it landed on a rock. It wasn’t a side impact or anything, but it just kinda crushed the middle of my foot. I didn’t really even crash; I just kinda stepped off the bike,” she says.
In an instant, the hurdles had shifted from chasing tenths of seconds through corners and carrying speed through rock gardens to learning to use crutches. And school work, because, well….VCE exams. After surgery and plenty of time in the books, Ladbrook is back and absolutely firing.
Shattering her foot into a million pieces forced her to slow down and conveyed a valuable training and racing lesson — beyond never saying the last run out loud. Ever.
“My first race back was at Mount Buller, where I’d broken my foot and had another crash — which really messed with my confidence. I was getting way too excited and making mistakes, but that’s the kind of thing you need to learn with racing; it is not going so hard all of the time,” she says.
Fortunately for Ladbrook, that ding to her confidence didn’t require much panel beating. The next race on the calendar was DH Nationals at Thredbo, where she took second behind Sian Ahern and got a taste of competing against an international field. But this was just the start, as Tommy Tough Knuckles would confirm that she was more than just a good local racer at Oceanias in Toowoomba and the Tassie leg of the EDR.
Ladbrook stepping up to the big leagues
The trouble is the categories for downhill are U19 or Elite, which is a massive jump in speed. Ladbrook’s racing age means she’ll be lining up with the big dogs when she lands in Europe.
“I’m definitely nervous about the scale of the races. All the people I’ve been watching since I was eight (years old) on Red Bull TV, I’m actually going to be racing against them. I never expected to be doing something like this, but it’s also the thing I’m the most excited for,” she says.
It’s a huge step up from juniors to the elite field. Never having done a World Cup before, Ladbrook says the first couple of races will be to set a baseline, find her feet and see where she falls in the pecking order.
“The big goal — I don’t know how far to reach before I’ve even done a race. It would be very cool to be happy with how I’m riding. I’m not necessarily looking at results at the moment. It’s going to be a learning curve,” says Ladbrook.
She won’t be going it alone, as Ladbrook has just signed on with Synergy 37, a relativity young team seeking to create new pathways for Aussie riders to the World Cup, which started last year under the Collab Racing moniker. Made up of Ladbrook, Mario Baldwin, Elise Empey, Matthew Empey, and Carter Sloan, they’ll have a base in Morzine, a mechanic and a manager. This little alpine village has been a breeding ground for riding talent, and as far as places to be based out of go, we could not be more jealous.
Being her first World Cup campaign, Ladbrook doesn’t plan to over-extend and burn out trying to squeeze in every possible race. So instead, she’s focused on the six European World Cup rounds and World Champs in Fort William.
We’ll check in with Lia throughout the season, and she’ll be reporting on the ground about what it’s like to be a part of the big show, the hijinks she and her teammates get up to, and putting together stories from the road. So stay tuned for more folks.
Photo credit: Sam Purdie / @sgpurdie, Flow MTB