Tales from the Peloton: Stress and Coping in Professional Women’s Road Cycling

Vaughan, S, McEwan, HE, Beggan, A and Whitehead, AE (2025) Tales from the Peloton: Stress and Coping in Professional Women’s Road Cycling. Psychology of Sport and Exercise. ISSN 1469-0292

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Abstract

Objective: The purpose of this study was to use narrative inquiry to explore professional women cyclist's stories of stress and coping from their race experiences. Method: Semi-structured interviews with 6 professional cyclists provided powerful accounts of their racing experiences. Pragmatist narrative inquiry emphasises the key characteristics of these experiences, which coupled with a reflexive creative analytic practice led to individualised first-person stories being constructed which were combined into an ethnodrama to tell the stories of a fictional women’s bicycle race. Results: Tension Lines: The Invisible Weight of the Ride is an ethnodrama portraying riders' situated racing experiences. It shows how appraisal moves beyond a focus on cognition and isolated experiences of stress and coping by providing insights into relationships between the different contexts that interplay within professional women’s cycling. Conclusion: This study provides novel insight into the stress and coping experience through the application of narrative inquiry and pragmatism. It details situated, nuanced interpretations, of stressors experienced by professional women cyclists to show the complex process of coping whilst racing. As non-participant elite women cyclists suggested that they found the ethnodrama to authentically represent their experiences, the findings could serve to emotionally connect and generate awareness with athlete support personnel of the complex relationships between stressors and coping.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	11 Medical and Health Sciences; 13 Education; 17 Psychology and Cognitive Sciences; Sport Sciences; 5201 Applied and developmental psychology
Subjects:	B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology R Medicine > RC Internal medicine > RC1200 Sports Medicine
Divisions:	Sport and Exercise Sciences
Publisher:	Elsevier
Date of acceptance:	13 May 2025
Date of first compliant Open Access:	16 May 2025
Date Deposited:	16 May 2025 13:21
Last Modified:	16 May 2025 13:45
DOI or ID number:	10.1016/j.psychsport.2025.102876
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/26370

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