The founding story of Trek's women's WorldTour team

In 2018, Lizzie Deignan’s world was measured in numbers. Every heartbeat, every watt, every gram — tracked, optimized, compared.

At the time, Lizzie ranked among the top three riders in the world. She was an Olympic silver medalist, a world champion, and one of the most accomplished riders in the women’s peloton. Then, that spring, she announced she was pregnant with her first child.

Pregnancy doesn’t follow a training plan. It rewires the machine. Muscles soften. Blood volume surges. A body trained for efficiency starts to spend recklessly, redirecting its resources toward creation.

Professional cycling offered no model for what came next. There were no maternity clauses in the contracts of the day, no blueprint for athletes who wanted both a career and a family. The unspoken rule was simple: when you got pregnant, you retired.

Deignan’s then-team, which she helped turn into one of the most dominant in the world, didn’t see a comeback on the horizon. The team offered her a contract so small it wasn’t livable. Officially, she wasn’t dropped. But in practice, she was on her own.

“It was a really hard time,” Deignan said later. “The reactions of people who only saw me as a cyclist — fellow riders, family members— made it feel like I had betrayed them.

“I just needed someone to understand who I was — not just as a cyclist, but as a full person, as a mother — and support me.”

So, she kept riding. Officially self-employed, training on faith and habit — an athlete without a team, a mother-to-be.

That same year, Trek’s Chief Financial Officer Chad Brown was traveling to women’s races across Europe. He saw what many in the sport knew but few acknowledged: the gap between men’s and women’s cycling was a chasm. 

Trek was the title sponsor of British-based Trek-Drops team, an independent program working to push women’s racing forward with limited means. The partnership had helped keep riders in the peloton and raised the sport’s visibility. But it also revealed the structural gaps in women’s cycling. Sponsorship alone couldn’t close them.

Low pay. Sparse staff. Riders cramming croissants into jersey pockets to make lunch stretch to dinner. The talent was undeniable. The investment was not.

To Chad, it looked less like a problem and more like an opening. If the sport was this underdeveloped, a company willing to commit fully could change it quickly.

So, he walked into John Burke’s office and asked a simple question: Do you know what’s happening in women’s cycling?

Trek’s leadership decided the company could, and should, do more. Rather than simply sponsor a team, Trek would build its own women’s WorldTour program from the ground up — one that matched the men’s in support, equipment, and respect.

They just needed the right rider to build around.

When Trek called Deignan, she was eight months pregnant. They didn’t ask for her race weight or training data. They asked how she wanted to return to racing.

“From the off, they negotiated with me as one of the best riders in the world,” Deignan said. “They assumed my comeback would reflect that.”

Trek also hired former German pro and longtime women’s cycling advocate Ina-Yoko Teutenberg as team director. Together, they assembled the inaugural Trek–Segafredo Women’s roster for the 2019 season.  

“There was an immediate mutual respect.”

Through this patience, Deignan got the space she needed to navigate uncharted territory. For twenty years, her life had been guided by metrics and logic. Every choice — training blocks, race calendars, altitude camps — had been optimized for performance. Pregnancy broke that pattern.

“Becoming a mother was the first emotional decision I’d made in twenty years,” she says. “It was liberating.”

It was also terrifying. There was no handbook for elite athletes who wanted both. No data set to reference. No doctors or directors who could tell her what was safe. She learned by instinct and contradiction: advice from her mother and sister (“wrap yourself in cotton wool”), advice from Google (“don’t”), and her own inner voice that said keep going.

In March 2019, less than a year after giving birth to her daughter Orla, Deignan returned to the peloton. That summer, she won a stage and the overall title at The Women’s Tour in the United Kingdom, proving her form and focus had not faded.

Over the next two seasons, she became one of the sport’s most consistent riders and the public face of Trek–Segafredo Women. In 2020, she won the overall title at The Women’s WorldTour. The following year, she captured the biggest victory of her career at the inaugural Paris-Roubaix Femmes.

The first-ever edition of cycling's most famous (and infamous) one-day race, held 120 years after the first men's edition, was one of the most significant moments in women's cycling history. Deignan attacked early, riding solo across 80 kilometers of cobblestones to take a commanding win.

When Lizzie returned to racing, her body was different. The control she’d once prized was gone, replaced by something messier but more human.

“Because of motherhood, my perspective shifted,” Lizzie says. “I felt real joy whenever I won a race. Before, I used to just feel relief.”

Motherhood stripped away the tunnel vision that once defined her. After giving birth to her second child, Lizzie became Trek’s road captain — a mentor whose intuition mattered as much as any power file.