I have a strong, inspiring, and professional group of women around me with Boels-Dolmans. We race and train incredibly hard as a team.

The UCI have to make the decision to put in rules into women's cycling that they have in men's cycling: you know, like a minimum budget to run a women's team and that sort of thing so that it becomes more professional.

There are lots of things that could be done. We could get more help from the UCI, like forcing Pro-Tour teams to have a women's equivalent.

As a female athlete, I think it's really important to stand up on a podium and represent females and what we're capable of, and I always try to make political statements with what I do rather than with headlines.

If I'm going to be a leader then I have to go places that other people are afraid to go to. That's what makes a leader. To be not afraid to step out and go over the frontline. To stare darkness right in the face.

The sad thing is that apparently if you want to become the next Premier or the leader, suddenly you've got to shut down your human side.

Dad had great people investing in his life at a young age. His mother, his stepfather, his Boy Scout leader, his football coach. That's where integrity is planted, like seeds that are harvested later.

For the mob, habituated to feed at the expense of others, and to have its hopes of a livelihood in the property of its neighbors, as soon as it has got a leader sufficiently ambitious and daring, being excluded by poverty from the sweets of civil honors, produces a reign of mere violence.