British national champion to join WorldTour with Canyon-SRAM

British road champion Alice Towers has signed a three-year contract with Canyon-SRAM and will step up to the highest tier of women’s road cycling. 

The 19-year-old, who currently rides for British outfit Le Col-Wahoo, will join the WorldTour team for the start of the 2023 season. 

In a statement shared by Canyon-SRAM on Wednesday, Towers said that she was “grateful for the security and the trust from the team” and that she hopes to be a “good friend” to her new teammates. 

“It’s been a team that I’ve looked up to and been inspired by for a long time.

“I’m looking forward to becoming teammates with riders I idolise and learning from them and developing as a rider myself. I would love to be part of successful team performances, especially wins,” she added. 

Towers took her first career victory in June, when she broke free from the peloton and soloed to the finish line in the national championships. Earlier this month, the 19-year-old was selected to represent Great Britain at the UCI Road World Championships in Wollongong, Australia, where she lined up against a field of elite WorldTour riders.  

“In 2022, I started to find my feet in the peloton, which has been a product of getting stronger and putting together everything I’ve learned over the season,” Towers said.

“I realised I wanted to become a full-time pro rider when I was a junior. I started to take the sport more seriously, and I learned about the women’s pro peloton. With each step I took, I knew I wanted it to be a part of my future.”

Among Towers’s new teammates at Canyon-SRAM will be former world time trial champion Chloé Dygert and Amstel Gold winner Kasia Niewiadoma. As it stands, she will be the only British rider on the team, after it was announced former national champion Alice Barnes would leave for Human Powered Health at the end of the season.

In the same statement shared by Canyon-SRAM, team manager Ronny Lauke said: “We see a lot of potential in Alice. She is a young but motivated rider we are happy to have in our team for the next three years. 

“We believe we can provide an environment that will support Alice’s further development and that she will play an important role in our team’s future successes.”