The French racer and Tour de France Femmes stage winner is as relaxed as ever, as she approaches her first big goals of the year. She has made great friends with her new EF Education-Oatly teammates and is in a good spot going into her early season campaign. Cédrine will race the Trofeo Alfredo Binda and Milano-Sanremo, before traveling north to the Ardennes for her favorite classics of the year: Amstel Gold Race, Flèche Wallonne, and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. She already feels at home at EF Education-Oatly.

“I'm super happy,” Cédrine says. “We have a really strong group of riders, who are all very different, but I think we complete each other. There is a high level of professionalism in the team, which makes me really calm. I really feel like a pro and just have to think about riding my bike and taking care of myself well. The rest of the team is filling their roles very well. That is my impression so far.”

Cédrine likes helping her teammates get the most out of themselves, so that they can make their mark on the great races together. Cédrine wants to make sure that all of her teammates are included in EF Education-Oatly’s success.

“It’s just natural,” she says. “I’m not thinking, ‘Oh yeah, I need to act like a leader or I need to be a leader.’ I just think I'm someone who is sociable with my teammates. I really like it when everyone in the team feels good and feels in her place. That is something that really matters to me. I like to see that everyone is going well and that they are happy and healthy, because we are a squad. We are a team and without the girls in a race, I'm nothing. We need to do everything together. For me, it is really important to be close to my teammates.”

Asking her teammates on EF Education-Oatly to ride in the wind for her and lead her out into climbs like the Poggio, Cauberg, Mur de Huy, and La Redoute takes a lot of confidence. Cédrine has been training hard this spring to make sure that she will have the legs to pay her teammates back. She enjoys the steady process of getting better every day and has spent a lot of time in the Pyrenees over the last few months, pushing hard on the climbs and enjoying the tranquility she finds in the mountains, which reminds her of her home in Brittany.

“For me, the secret is to not expect to make huge jumps,” Cédrine says. “I have made a natural progression over the past few years, without changing so many big things. I just want to make sure that my body and mind are calm and ready for evolution. I try to do it in a smooth way. For me, the key is to be consistent always. For two years now, I have been much more consistent in my training. I studied nutrition, so I know how to eat well, and I focus a lot on sleep. For four or five years now, I have taken a nap every day. And I’m getting better at feeling less pressure and racing more cleverly. I think I have progressed a lot on that over the last few years just by racing. And I know I'm going to continue to progress, because I'm going to race even more. For me, it is like a game.”

Finding the fun in challenges has always been Cédrine’s way of managing stress. Even at the Tour de France Femmes, where she won a stage last year and finished sixth overall, she does best when she approaches racing and her life as a pro cyclist in her own playful way.

“It is funny, but at the Tour, I never felt any pressure,” she says. “Even with all the media, I was just speaking naturally, having fun. Everything was going well at the Tour. It is quite easy to handle the pressure when it's like that. It might be more difficult when something a bit less good happens, but right now, the only pressure that I feel is the pressure that I put on myself.”

At the moment, Cédrine’s quiet, internal drive has her dreaming big.

“I’m going to race Sanremo, Binda, and then all of the Ardennes,” she says. “Liège, especially, is a race that is important for me. It’s a race I love and where I have the most fun. It suits me well with all the climbing. It’s a different race to the other ones. But for sure, the goal will be to be at 100 percent for all these classics, to have no regrets and try to do our best. I have a lot of fun in the Ardennes. I’m always very excited and year after year, I feel like I’m progressing. I see it on a climb like La Redoute, which is quite a big one. Every year, the time I take to climb it gets quicker and quicker. That motivates me a lot.”

Watch Cédrine fly up climbs like the Poggio, Cauberg, Mur de Huy, and La Redoute this spring. No one needs to tell her what result she is going for in these races. She wouldn’t put a number on it anyways. She is going to approach the classics in her own calm way.

“It is better for me to go to races easy peasy, just no stress, and trust the process,” she says. “If someone tells me, you need to win, or you need to do a top three or top five, it’s not something that is going to push me in a good way. The team knows that. Every race I do, when I start, I want to give the best of myself, and if I have the chance and it's my role, then I'm going to try to smash it.”

Trofeo Alfredo Binda

Milano-Sanremo

Amstel Gold Race

Flèche Wallonne

Liège-Bastogne-Liège