Katie Archibald has announced her retirement from professional cycling, ending a 13-year career on the track that brought her Olympic, world, European and Commonwealth gold medals. The 32-year-old said she loves racing her bike, but that after 13 years on the international stage she has decided to step away from elite competition.

Archibald’s final medals came at the European Championships in February, closing out a career that made her one of Britain’s most successful track riders. She won 31 major championship titles and collected golds across individual pursuit, team pursuit and the Omnium, while also helping push the women’s Madison into the spotlight after the event was added to the world and Olympic programmes in late 2016.

Her retirement comes after a career that began far from the elite velodrome. Archibald grew up swimming before switching to grass track cycling, and by 2011 she was competing at the Highland Games at 16. Two years later she moved to Manchester to join the Olympic Development Academy, where her rise accelerated quickly.

That same 2013 season gave the first clear sign of what was to come. Archibald won team pursuit gold at the European Championships alongside Laura Trott, Dani King, Joanna Rowsell and Elinor Barker, and she was included in both rounds of the competition, setting a world record in each. From there, she became a fixture in Britain’s medal-winning squads and later broke the world record at every stage of the competition at the Rio Olympics.

Archibald said being part of the Great Britain Cycling Team meant being part of something bigger than herself, and called it a true honour to race alongside the best in the country. She also said she was not hoping for a grand legacy, but hoped she had made an impact on the individuals she worked with. Those words fit a rider whose record was defined not just by numbers, but by the way she helped shape events that were still finding their place.

One of those events was the women’s Madison, which Archibald singled out as a race she was proud to have pushed forward. She won gold in the discipline at the 2018 World Championships with Emily Nelson, then later partnered with Laura Kenny to win the first ever women’s Madison Olympic gold. In a sport where opportunity is often built slowly, Archibald left with a title haul that was exceptional even before her medals were counted. What she leaves behind is a record that stretched across three disciplines, a career that lasted more than a decade, and a place in British cycling history that is already secure.