Sam Boardman Returns to Racing’s Road With More Stories to Tell

Sam Boardman’s return to writing starts with a confession: he didn’t disappear because he stopped racing. For two years, he kept moving between competitions in the United States and overseas, often spending only a day or two in one place. What stopped him from telling those stories was the feeling that his performances weren’t worth describing.

That gap matters because Boardman’s earlier work made room for the parts of racing that don’t fit neatly into a results sheet. His account of getting dropped was an attempt to show the strain behind simply finishing, in a sport that can look increasingly controlled from the outside. But when getting dropped began to feel like the recurring pattern of his own racing, he wondered whether readers wanted to hear about it again and again.

Now racing at ProTeam level with Modern Adventure Pro Cycling, Boardman is back to put those experiences into words. He says he has more perspective than he did during his first rush into European competition, and he’s ready to bring readers into the sport’s odd details, setbacks and moments of discovery once more.

His last dispatch came after the 2024 US National Championships, with Boardman riding in the passenger seat of an old Subaru Outback through West Virginia at night. He’d just completed his first block of European racing and a successful run of American races. His body was spent; his spirits, despite the fatigue, were high. He promised more accounts from inside bike racing. Then the promised stories stopped arriving.

The explanation wasn’t a dramatic disappearance on a lonely road. Boardman describes getting lost in his own head, and learning, with help from others, how to find his way through it. His playful detour into spooky-season imagery sets up a more serious point: the challenge wasn’t a lack of material, but his growing doubt that he had anything worthwhile to say about it.

His recent racing schedule would have supplied plenty to write about. Boardman describes a life of repeated trips across the United States, several stretches abroad in different countries, and brief stays that sometimes lasted no more than a day or two. The pattern was dictated by a simple aim: get to as many races as possible. He jokes that a rider’s travel map can look like the movements of someone fleeing from place to place, with the race calendar providing a convenient explanation for constant motion.

For all the mileage and variety, Boardman’s account of the past two years isn’t a list of results. The central thread is how disappointment changed the way he viewed his own experience. He had raced across different settings, languages, disciplines and levels, yet came to believe that his performances made his stories repetitive. The cycle, as he saw it, went like this: he tried, struggled, and eventually finished without the result he wanted.

That interpretation wore down his confidence as a writer as well as a racer. Boardman had once seen value in describing the difficulty of being dropped, because those accounts could show the human effort behind the sport’s polished image. But when the same difficulty seemed to define too much of his own time in the peloton, he began to question whether repeated honesty would hold readers’ attention.

He also felt pressure to make his writing an escape for readers. If people came to the site for relief from everyday troubles, he reasoned, accounts of his own frustration might offer the opposite. That thought helped push him away from writing and, gradually, from posting race recaps on social media. He stopped sharing because each update seemed to confirm the same private verdict: he had failed.

Boardman’s return challenges that verdict. His story doesn’t suggest that the difficult races have vanished or that he has found an easy answer to self-doubt. Instead, he’s willing to treat the experiences he once discounted as material worth sharing. That gives his return a clearer purpose than simply catching up on missed posts: it reopens a view of racing built around what happens to a rider when the result isn’t the story they hoped to tell.

His next chapters will come from the same restless world of travel and competition, now seen with more experience behind him. Boardman’s promise is to write about the beautiful and ridiculous minutiae of bike racing, including the parts that don’t flatter him. For readers, that means the most revealing stories may come from the messy middle of a career, where effort, expectation and performance don’t always line up.