Kim Le Court: Her journey from a malaria-induced coma to the front of the WorldTour peloton

Kim Le Court is talking about the time, around two-and-a-half years ago, when a host of professional cycling teams rejected the opportunity to sign her.

“A few teams said no, saying they were full,” Le Court, from Mauritius, tells The Athletic. “A few others asked for data but only AG Insurance-Soudal seemed really interested. Now, looking back at all the other teams who I spoke with, almost every manager regrets it.”

And for good reason: in just two short seasons, Le Court has transitioned from a 27-year-old newbie to one of the best cyclists on the planet — becoming the first African woman to win a Monument (Liège-Bastogne-Liège) — one of cycling’s most illustrious one-day races — and to wear yellow (for four days) in the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift.

But in fairness to all those teams who said no in late 2023, Le Court admits she herself would have said the same thing. “I understood where they were coming from because if I was in their position looking at my results I wouldn’t have signed myself. So I don’t blame them.”

The reason is that Le Court’s first forays into professional road cycling, back in 2015 and 2016, were a disaster. “I wasn’t a pro — I was a survivor. I was actually an idiot, that’s what I was,” she laughs.

She then spent seven years out of the road scene, working as a coach, a bike fitter, and then winning the biggest mountain bike race of all — the Cape Epic in South Africa — that paved the way for her incredibly successful return to the peloton.

Long before all of that, Le Court almost died from malaria aged three, and nearly ended up moving to the U.S. as a teenager to play college soccer. You could write a book on Le Court’s travels and travails, but the best chapters, she insists, are still to be written. “I think the sky’s the limit for me,” she says.

This weekend she goes in search of winning her second Monument: Milan-Sanremo.

Born to a Scottish mother, Patricia, and a Mauritian father of French descent, Bernard, Le Court grew up on the tiny island of Mauritius, which sits in the Indian Ocean, almost 2,000km away from continental Africa.

“It feels like a holiday destination every time you’re there,” Le Court says of her homeland. “It’s so much more relaxed — it’s hard to be serious when you’re in Mauritius. People are so slow, so chill.”

Due to her father’s ever-changing work — he has worked in the hair, nail, yacht, hotel and paper industries — Le Court, her older brother Olivier and her parents moved around and uprooted frequently.

At one point, they were in serious financial trouble. “The four of us had to sleep in one room in my grandmother’s flat just to scramble to find a way,” she says. “For me living with Gran was awesome and I never felt the bad side of it, but now I know the stories of what we went through and it must have been terrible.”

That prompted a move west to the much bigger island of Madagascar, where Le Court’s father ran a hotel. “It was really wild and we lived on the river where there were crocodiles,” Le Court says. “After finishing school I’d have lunch with the people in the village and speak Malagasy, the local language, with them. Now I don’t have a clue how to speak it, but as a kid you learn so fast.”

It was in Madagascar, however, where Le Court picked up malaria, a life-threatening disease that is spread by mosquitoes. But it was only when they were living in the French mountains for an extended period of time did the illness show.

Taken to a children’s hospital in Grenoble, Le Court was placed in an induced coma. “Doctors figured out it was malaria and told my parents there was a 10 per cent chance of survival.

“They found a medication but its success rate was 50/50. They told my dad to bring my brother into the room to say goodbye because I might not wake up, and they made my parents sign papers so that if it didn’t work out it wasn’t the hospital’s fault.”

Le Court had the injection and it saved her life (she says the only long-term effect of malaria is that she no longer gets bitten by mosquitoes). As she was recovering, a glimpse of her future profession appeared. “The only thing I remember is riding a bicycle up and down the corridor but keeping my arm straight as I had a massive drip in my arm.”

Yet upon returning to Mauritius, Le Court first became enamoured with another sport. “I was six or seven and really in love with this boy who played soccer, and every Saturday I’d ride my bike at 6am to watch him play,” Le Court says.

“At one point the coach said, ‘Hey, Kim, don’t you want to join us one day for a game?’ I was like, ‘Hell yeah!’” At the time, however, the football club was male-only. Le Court’s father had to fight hard until the club relented to register his daughter.

“At the time soccer was everything to me,” Le Court says. She made quite the impression once she started playing, culminating in her receiving an offer of a scholarship to play soccer at an American college.

“When I saw it I was in panic,” Le Court says. “I wasn’t ready to go to the States. I was 14. Coming from Mauritius to go to America was madness. I didn’t want to leave.”

The bursary rejected, Le Court stayed in Mauritius, dropped soccer and started cycling more seriously. “My brother was doing it and everything he did I did. I won my first race with a piece of wood stuck in my knee after crashing. I was like, ‘Oh, this is so hardcore, this sport is so cool’. I liked the vibe of it.”

Le Court began to make trips over to South Africa to compete, and the victories kept stacking up. “I was winning big races as a junior with very little training. I started to think that maybe it was something I could do.”

In the early summer of 2015, a 19-year-old Le Court signed with British team Matrix Fitness and moved to Belgium to begin her European cycling journey. But it ended in broken bones and a tearful video call back home.

“I went to Europe with dreams of everything looking so cool, but it was a mistake for me to go,” Le Court says. “I wasn’t ready mentally and I don’t think I knew what I was putting myself into.

“I know people believed in my talent and they knew I could be something great, but I didn’t believe in myself. My only goal was to finish a race. I was terrible and I hated it, really hated the sport.

“I honestly felt like I was doing it for other people, and doing it because of the sacrifices my parents had made for me to be in Europe. It was like: this is it, you can’t fail.”

On the second day of the 2016 Giro d’Italia, Le Court was put out of her misery. “I crashed really hard and broke a few ribs,” she recalls. “I realized it was my chance to step out, because if I didn’t I was going to hate the sport forever.

“I called my parents, told them I wasn’t happy, that it wasn’t what I wanted to do, and they were so supportive.”

Back in her home continent, Le Court joined a small team in South Africa. “But only to race for fun,” she insists. “I did one small stage race and stopped at all of the water points, ate all the sweets, took pictures, and really tried to fall in love with the sport again.”

At the same time she began coaching younger athletes and became a bike-fitter. “I couldn’t stand relying on my parents all these years, so I phoned my dad and said I didn’t want his financial help anymore. It was time for me to do my own thing.”

Le Court’s income was modest, but she found her cycling mojo once again, and regularly topped her income up with prize money from races, mostly in mountain biking.

In 2022 she competed in the Cape Epic in South Africa, a demanding eight-day race of teams of two that is often coined the ‘the Tour de France of mountain biking’ (The 2026 edition finishes on March 22). On debut, she finished second. “I really wanted to come back and fight for the win,” she says.

Partnered with one of her best friends Vera Looser, the pair won the 2023 race after a week of mechanicals, torrential rain and treacherous mud. “It’s still the hardest race I’ve ever done,” Le Court says. “Nothing compares to it — it’s so unpredictable.

“You have to carry everything with you on the bike — that’s what is so flipping cool about it — and if something breaks you have to figure it out yourself. Things can go south so quickly.

“Winning it was the most amazing, insane feeling ever. I was so emotional because it’s the biggest race in mountain biking and what everyone wants to win.”

That set in motion a return to road cycling.

Le Court had ridden the occasional road race since her ill-fated stint in Europe, but she wasn’t on any professional team’s radar. It fell to her soon-to-be husband, Ian Pienaar, to do the haggling on her behalf, with him sending emails to every team to make the case for signing her for the 2024 season.

Natascha den Ouden, the then general manager of AG Insurance-Soudal, was the only person to really express genuine interest in Le Court. A week before her wedding, Den Ouden called her up.

“She said to me, ‘Kim, I’ve got a present for your wedding: we’re going to give you a contract’,” Le Court remembers. “I didn’t know what to say. I was speechless.”

Following her wedding and honeymoon, Le Court joined her new teammates at a training camp in Calpe, Spain. “I was telling all of them that I was going to be the best domestique this team has ever had,” she says. “But my first goal was to finish my races — I didn’t tell them how sh*t I was in 2015 and 2016. Honestly, I was petrified.”

Almost as soon as Le Court began racing, though, it was obvious that she was going to be much more than a helper. “At Strade Bianche (25th) I got good comments from the team for how I was racing and it snowballed from there.”

She recorded her first top-10, finished the Tour of Flanders in 23rd, and then rode to 10th on debut at Paris-Roubaix with an injured wrist. “In mountain biking it’s win or nothing, and I didn’t know that a top-20 in the WorldTour is good if you’re a new rider,” she says. “My teammate Jolien [D’Hoore] said to me, ‘Holy sh*t, Kim, where were you all these years?’”

A first professional win on the final stage of the 2024 Giro d’Italia followed in July — particularly special given her past trauma at the same race — but it wasn’t until she won Liège-Bastogne-Liège in the spring of 2025 that it really hit home to her that she was now one of the strongest riders in the peloton.

“I remember telling a journalist that once I get a big result it will make me unstoppable, and will make me want so much more. So when I won Liège that was the moment when I knew I could do really, really great things. It was the day when everything changed.”

The moment was historic for African sport, too, with her becoming the first cyclist — male or female — to win one of the sport’s Monuments. “It proved that we belong there — Mauritius and Africa in general,” she says. “It proved that a girl from a small country could dream big.”

At the subsequent Tour de France Femmes, more history was made. Le Court finished second and third on the opening two stages and claimed the yellow jersey on the second day. South African Daryl Impey is the only other African to lead the Tour (Kenyan-born Chris Froome represented Britain in his riding career).

Le Court lost the lead after a day but then reclaimed it for three days after winning stage five. Going into stage seven, the first of three consecutive mountain stages, Le Court had a 26-second lead over eventual winner Pauline Ferrand-Prévot. Both were untested in the high mountains, but Le Court believed she could win the race overall. “For sure I had those thoughts — you’d be stupid not to. And I felt super good.”

On stage eight, however, Le Court sacrificed her own chances to work for her AG Insurance-Soudal teammate Sarah Gigante. “There are some thoughts in my mind about regretting not trying, because I’ve never tested myself to the max in climbing so far and I would have loved to know how far I could have gotten, but I made the decision to kill myself for Sarah and I don’t regret it.”

Gigante moved up to second on GC, but slipped back to finish sixth, while Le Court fell to 16th overall. This summer she returns to the Tour with designs on winning yellow.

Before returning to the Tour, though, Le Court has big hopes at the spring Classics, which resume this weekend at Milan-Sanremo. She was fifth in the race last year which ended in a bunch sprint won by Lorena Wiebes.

“I don’t want it to be a sprint race,” she says. “Knowing UAE [Team ADQ] with Elisa [Longo Borghini] I’m sure they’re going to want to break it apart completely, because the only chance for someone like myself to win the race is to go over the Poggio with a small group and without a pure sprinter. For sure this year it’s going to be raced differently.”

Le Court turns 30 two days after Sanremo, but her cycling journey has only just started. “I’m still lacking a lot of experience and a lot of self-belief,” she says. “There are a lot of things like the time trial bike that I’ve not discovered yet, and even with coaching there is margin for improvement.

“I really enjoy being a one-day rider but I want to test my full potential as a GC rider. I want to go to the Tour next time to see what can be done. I don’t want to stop my career having thoughts of what if I did this or that.”

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