Katell Alençon, the incredible third life

A common sprain, five years of suffering, an amputation demanded as a promise of a new beginning. Then cycling, high-level competition, and an existence now lived at two hundred percent. We could have started with her championship titles, the Paralympic Games, or the Cofidis jersey. But to truly meet Katell Alençon, one first had to push open the door of a camper van parked in a Breton car park. Behind the hatch, her bike was perfectly stowed. Inside, every object seemed to have found its place. Like a life long disrupted that she had methodically decided to rebuild.

By Jeff Tatard – © Photos: Cofidis Team

A Hatch Ajar on a Story

There are meetings that are organized several weeks in advance. Emails are exchanged, schedules are consulted, questions are prepared, and a sufficiently quiet place is agreed upon to gather perfectly usable answers. And then there are those that chance drops in a car park, amidst cars loaded with wheels, open doors, race numbers hastily pinned on, and that familiar hustle and bustle that precedes all Sunday cycling races.

We are in Grand-Champ, in Morbihan. I have to race in Access. My only concern is to park, get my bike out, and perform the little liturgy known to all amateur racers: check the tires, prepare the water bottles, find the pins, look for my helmet even though it’s exactly where I left it.

My car stops next to a camper van. At first, it’s just one vehicle among others. Then a detail catches the eye: on its side, a wide hatch is open. Inside, a racing bike is stowed with almost architectural precision. It doesn’t just rest there like a bicycle slipped into a boot after a ride. It has its own space, its place, its order. It is protected from the Breton rain, from prying eyes, and from bumps. Everything seems to have been designed so that nothing protrudes, nothing gets damaged, and everything is immediately available when needed.

Even before seeing its owner, I imagine someone methodical. An athlete who probably leaves little to chance. A person for whom organization is not a decorative obsession, but a way to reduce uncertainty.

Then the camper van door opens. Katell Alençon appears. She’s not racing with us that day. Her event will take place the next day. So she would have every reason to remain focused on her preparation or to politely close the conversation after a few words. Yet, she immediately makes herself available. She smiles, listens, and answers with that particular simplicity of people who have accomplished a lot without feeling the need to mention it in every sentence.

Beside her are her mother and a young girl. At first, I think it’s her daughter. It’s her niece, the second to last of her six nephews and nieces, who has come for the first time to discover a cycling race with her aunt. She lives on Île d’Aix, in Charente-Maritime. Katell and her mother are hosting her for two weeks. Katell’s father, however, is no longer with them.

The scene lasts only a few minutes, but it already contains almost everything: cycling, family, transmission, absence, competition, rigor, and hospitality.

I suggest a portrait for 3bikes. Not a rigid interview about her achievements, but a story capable of telling what lies behind the results. She accepts with the same quiet kindness. A few days later, we talk on the phone for an hour. To the first question, who is Katell Alençon when you remove the bike, the titles, and the sports categories? And she answers directly: “Someone who loves life and lives her passion. Today, I make a living from cycling, and it’s a passion. I love life and I enjoy it two hundred percent.”

Everything is already there. But to understand why living at two hundred percent is neither an advertising slogan nor an empty injunction for her, we need to rewind the tape. Go back to the little Breton girl, to her legs always in motion, to this family who didn’t yet know cycling, then to that trivial sprain that would devour five years of her existence.

The Little Girl Who Couldn’t Sit Still

Katell was born in Brittany and grew up in contact with the outdoors. As a child, she ran, moved, experimented. Sport was not yet a career project: it was her natural way of inhabiting the world. “I was very dynamic, rather hyperactive. I moved in all directions. I loved all sports. I cycled, but also did roller figure skating. I loved the mountains, nature, and everything that happened outdoors.”

The mountains already held a special place. Her brother lived there for a long time. Her mother accompanied nature classes. From the age of five, Katell learned about the terrain and that feeling of space that she still seeks today.

In the Alençon family, however, cycling is not passed down through blood. Her mother plays handball. Her father plays football. Cycling entered the family through her elder brother, who joined a cycling school. Katell then did what many little sisters do when they admire their elders: she wanted to try it too. “As a self-respecting little sister, I wanted to do the same. At five or six years old, I got my first license at the cycling school. That’s where my passion was born. Then the whole family got into it: my older brother, my second brother, me, then my parents.”

Her parents didn’t just transport the children to races. They got involved. They became volunteers, educators, and organizers. Her mother took responsibility for the cycling school and would manage it for several decades. Katell understood very early on that sport is not just about the person wearing the race number. Around every child are parents who set up barriers, transport bikes, prepare snacks, comfort a fall, and applaud an anonymous finish with the same enthusiasm as a victory. “We were always immersed in volunteering and involvement within our club.”

This culture of transmission would be important. As a teenager, Katell didn’t pursue competition for long. Her small stature made confrontation difficult. In the U15 category, she was about 1.20 meters tall. Against taller and more powerful girls and boys, the gap became difficult to close.

She didn’t turn this difference into a tragedy. High-level competition was not her dream. She still loved cycling, but didn’t yet feel the need to measure how far her body could go. She found another role: that of an educator. “I wasn’t really competing anymore, but I was a leader at the cycling school with my mother. I always liked taking care of the little ones and passing on what I had learned. High-level competition wasn’t for me. I had a very orderly life, the daily grind. I cycled for leisure and looked after young people. That suited me very well.”

Knowing what came next, it would be tempting to look for the foreshadowing signs of the champion in this first life. A hidden determination, a destiny already written. That would be betraying her story. Katell Alençon was not waiting for her moment. She didn’t dream of the Paralympic Games, a professional jersey, or world championships. She was happy in a simple, active, and useful existence. Then one day, she fell off her bike. Or rather, she put her foot down.

Just a Foot Placed Wrongly

Major ruptures often have a spectacular narrative. A crash, a collision, a clearly identifiable second separating before from after. Katell’s catastrophe has no dramatic grandeur. No speeding car. No ravine. No accident likely to make newspaper headlines.

Just a foot placed wrongly. “I fell off my bike. I put my foot on the ground, it twisted, and I sprained my ankle. It’s really a common thing, not very fun to tell. There was no dramatic event. It was just a small hiccup in a life. Nothing at all.” Nothing at all. A sprain is precisely the kind of injury one talks about lightly. You immobilize it, you wait, you rehabilitate. A few weeks later, the body returns to its habits. Except this time, the small hiccup doesn’t disappear. It grows.

The foot deteriorates and deforms. The pain sets in and then invades everything. Months turn into years. What was supposed to be just a parenthesis ends up swallowing the entire sentence. “This small hiccup turned into a big hiccup. Behind it followed five years of struggle, five years of hell. Five years that I wouldn’t wish on anyone and that I would never want to relive.”

Six months after the sprain, the condition of her foot already left little room for illusion. The expected recovery doesn’t come. Yet, no one can yet imagine amputation. How could they? One doesn’t associate a sprain with the loss of a limb. Between the two lies an abyss that reason refuses to contemplate. Katell gradually moves forward into this unknown territory, to the rhythm of consultations, hopes, and disappointments.

The physical pain is immense, but it is only part of the suffering. The body suffers; life, meanwhile, shrinks. She can no longer drive. She loses her autonomy and moves around in a wheelchair. At an age when others are building their first great freedoms, she again depends on others for the most ordinary actions. “The only times I left the house were to go to the cycling school to look after the kids. The physical pain was horrible. I couldn’t do anything anymore, couldn’t drive, I had no more autonomy. Then I was in a wheelchair.” She is between twenty and twenty-five years old. This period is often presented as one of all possibilities: travel, encounters, projects, and first independences. Katell watches it pass from a seated position. “Me, those years, I didn’t live them.” The sentence is short. It demands no emphasis. Five years are not just a medical ordeal: they are five years of existence that will not return.

There is also the gaze of others. The way some stop truly looking at the person as soon as they are in a wheelchair. Conversations take place above her. Able-bodied people remain standing, at their usual height. She observes the world from an angle no one chooses. “Apart from people’s bottoms and boogers, I didn’t see much. When you talk to people, they don’t really talk to you. They look over us because we’re not at the same height. It’s complicated to have an interaction.” Disability is then not only what the body no longer allows. It is also the place to which the collective gaze assigns you. A lower place, sometimes invisible, often infantilized.

During this period, a sentence attributed to Albert Camus accompanied Katell: “The important thing is not to heal, but to live with one’s ailments.” It doesn’t promise a miraculous cure. It offers something else: to stop suspending all possibility of living until the hypothetical arrival of a repaired body. “This sentence helped me. It carried me for five years.” Yet, Katell doesn’t simply want to learn to bear the unbearable. She wants to find a life again. For that, she gradually comes to consider the idea that no one wants to hear after a sprain: amputation is necessary.

Fighting to Lose a Leg to Regain a Life

In the classic narrative, the doctor announces the amputation and the patient must accept it. Katell’s story reverses this scenario. The decision comes from her. The medical world hesitates, temporizes, refers to previous establishments, and assesses the risks. Amputating a limb is irreversible. Katell, however, knows her daily life. She knows that this foot no longer allows her to live. She is not asking to lose a part of her body. She is asking for the possibility to start over. “It wasn’t a medical decision. It was my decision. I fought against the medical world. No one wanted to take the risk of amputating my foot. They told me I had to go back to where I had been treated initially, that they couldn’t take such and such responsibility. It was very complicated.”

Between the moment she understood that amputation represented her best chance for reconstruction and the moment doctors authorized it, two and a half years passed. Two and a half years of asking for what most human beings dread. Two and a half years of having to convince them that preserving the limb no longer meant preserving life. “Fighting to be amputated and rebuild myself, I found that horrible. Somewhere, you shouldn’t have to fight to be amputated. You should simply be able to fight to live.” This sentence constitutes the true turning point of the narrative. In the collective imagination, amputation remains a definitive loss, an end. For Katell, the end had begun long before, in pain, dependence, and immobilized years.

Amputation opens the third life. Because Katell doesn’t divide her existence into two parts, before and after. She distinguishes three. “I had an incredible first life. I was always happy in my childhood and adolescence. Then a second life, a shitty life, a life in parentheses, during which I fought with the medical world. And I have a third life, completely different, but just as incredible as the first.” She nevertheless rejects the easy fable that all suffering is a disguised gift. “I’m not going to say my life is better than before. It’s different, and I thrive in it just as much.” The nuance is essential. Reconstruction does not erase the loss. Rediscovered happiness does not transform the five years of pain into a necessary step. It simply means that misfortune did not get the last word.

The Word She Can No Longer Stand

This is often called resilience. The word has become so frequent that it seems capable of explaining any healing, any comeback, any adaptation. “Resilience? Oh yes, I can’t stand that word anymore.” It’s too neat. Too convenient. It gives the impression that after the shock, human beings naturally bounce back, as if willpower alone were enough. It erases regressions, anger, lost days, and the immense invisible work. What better describes Katell is perhaps a step-by-step approach. Not constantly looking at the summit when it seems inaccessible. Focusing on the next refuge. Transforming an immense mountain into a succession of achievable actions.

Putting on a prosthesis. Getting up. Standing. Taking a step. Then another. Getting back on a bike without immediately wondering if one will become European champion. Making it to the evening. Starting again the next day. Katell doesn’t become who she was. “I think I’ve become someone else. I was very shy, very routine-oriented, very normal. I think I’ve become different.”

She discovers within herself an ability to go further than expected. But she rejects the word “grace”. She doesn’t want to give suffering a merit it doesn’t possess. “I won’t say thanks to this adventure, but because of it, I discovered a strength I didn’t know I had.” High-level competition is born in this third life. Before, she was athletic but didn’t seek her limits. Now, she wants to know how far she can go. She trains more, with a structure and demands unknown to the young woman she once was. “Today, I ride better than before because I wasn’t training in the same way. I’m much better because I work a lot more and I now seek to reach my limits. I didn’t improve because I’m an amputee.”

This precision protects the narrative from a common trap: making disability a kind of mysterious power. Katell didn’t become high-performing through the magic of adversity. She became a champion because she trained like a champion.

She discovered para-cycling in 2013 and gradually joined the French national team. She participated in the Paralympic Games in Rio and then Tokyo, won European titles, and established herself among the French references in her category. But when asked what this experience taught her about happiness, she doesn’t mention any podium. “Today, happiness is every day. Certainly, there are also misfortunes, but I try to be happy, to live in the moment, and to enjoy every little moment. Life is short. If you don’t enjoy it, you’re unhappy.” For her, happiness is no longer a state one would achieve after finally solving all one’s problems. It becomes a discipline of attention: identifying what deserves to be lived now.

The Camper Van, a Rolling Home and a Memory

We return to Grand-Champ. To the camper van. To that hatch that first told me about the professional before its door revealed the woman to me.

Katell lives at the tip of Finistère. From there, almost everything seems far away. Competitions require kilometers, hotels, reservations, and constant logistics. The camper van becomes a pragmatic answer to this geography. “When you live at the tip of Finistère, everything is far away. The camper van was a magical solution: no more hotels to plan, you stop where you want, when you want. I train where I want. Even when I do my training camps in the mountains, I can sleep at the altitude I choose.”

But the vehicle is not just a performance tool. It first belonged to her parents. The layout was conceived by three: Katell, her mother, and her father. She made a specific request: a large storage compartment, spacious enough for her bike to stay inside. “I absolutely didn’t want my bike to be outside. I wanted a large storage compartment to keep it safe and dry. Because we’re in Brittany and it rains from time to time.” Inside, the camper van is a small world. “It’s a bit like my cocoon. The camper van is my universe. There are my little stuffed animals, those from the Plouay race, and my little dog that I got when I passed my driving test. There are all these little life stories.”

Then her voice joins the absence. “Today, my dad is no longer here. But the camper van, that was his home. Every time I go in, I remember my dad who used to come to races with me. It’s a part of us.” Suddenly, the impeccable organization takes on another dimension. The father is no longer sitting in his place, but everything they imagined together continues to travel. The storage compartment they had chosen still protects the bike. The objects retain their position. Her mother still pins on her race number before starts. Katell doesn’t just take her belongings to races. She carries a family home that has become a rolling memory.

When she prepares for a trip, each element follows a precise logic. Everything is stored in the same place. Road trips and plane travel are counted in weeks. Faced with this instability, Katell builds routines. On the morning of a competition, she eats three hours before the start. On the camper van table, she sets up the water bottles, gels, helmet, shoe, and prosthesis. Each object prepares the next action. Then comes the race number ritual. “I like my mother to put it on. I go get my race number, she pins it on me. I have a lot of rituals.”

In the past, her mother prepared the children of the cycling school. Today, she pins the race number of her daughter, who has become a professional athlete. High-level sport loves sophisticated data and protocols. But sometimes, what secures a start comes down to four pins placed by the right person.

Apparent Calm and Inner Storms

In the Grand-Champ car park, Katell had seemed serene to me. This serenity is real, but it is not permanent. Races competed with able-bodied athletes serve as training and allow her to reproduce her habits without the pressure of an international championship. “I need to be serene and organized, because if I don’t do it there, I won’t do it later in the World Cup or World Championships.”

Stress exists nonetheless. “No one sees it, but it’s there. Afterwards, I’m annoying when I’m stressed. People around me see it because I’m not pleasant.”

The confession cracks the too-perfect image of the imperturbable champion. Katell hasn’t conquered all her emotions. She organizes them, like everything else.

Before an important time trial, she creates a detailed reverse schedule. Each stage has its time. What can disrupt her is the unexpected: a modified distance, exceptional weather, a schedule change. “I need everything to be planned to the minute. An external element can disrupt me, but I am capable of regrouping and refocusing.”

Ultimately, Katell resembles her camper van. Everything in it is methodical, organized, and prepared for movement. Yet, she knows better than many that existence escapes the best-laid plans. She simply creates enough order around her to face disorder when it arises.

Auntie Katell

In the car park, her niece discovers a cycling race for the first time. Katell has neither children nor a partner, a choice she also links to the reality of her career. “It’s a life where you’re constantly traveling. You don’t necessarily have the time to properly take care of a child. As long as you’re a high-level athlete, especially when you’re a woman, it’s complicated.”

But family holds an immense place. Katell has six nephews and nieces. The one who came to Grand-Champ is the second to last. The next day, Katell falls at the start of the event. She could abandon. The race remains a training session. Yet, her niece is there. “It was important for her to see that I finished, that I didn’t give up despite the fall. If she had only come to see two kilometers of racing, that wouldn’t have been good.”

The episode says a lot about the importance she places on transmission. She doesn’t seek to present the image of an invincible woman. Her nephews and nieces primarily observe someone who keeps going. “I think she sees me like the others who cycle. My nephews and nieces don’t really see that I have a disability anymore.”

In the eyes of the children, the disability has ceased to be the center of the image. They don’t first see an amputee who cycles. They see their auntie racing. Katell wants to show them that you can go all the way. Not because you never fall, but because a fall doesn’t necessarily decide the end. When she talks about her greatest victory, sport almost entirely disappears.

After the amputation, walking again was an intimate battle. One day, her godson looks at her and says: “Bravo godmother, you’re walking. That will remain a greater victory for me than any medal won on a podium.” He probably knows neither the classifications, nor the value of an international title, nor the depth of the five years in parentheses. He only sees his godmother standing.

Finally Considered as Athletes

When Katell discovered para-cycling in 2013, her primary ambition was elementary: to get back on a bike and check if she was still capable of doing something with her body. “My first goal was just to get back on the bike. I wanted to prove to myself that I was still capable. I didn’t even know about para-cycling.”

She eventually discovered friends, a sporting family, and a new career there. Cofidis entered her story about ten years ago. At the time, support for para-cycling didn’t yet have the same structure as it does today. “When I arrived at Cofidis, the perception wasn’t the same. They gave you a bike, an outfit, then you went to races. Sometimes it felt like we were doing a bit of social work.”

The word describes a reality long experienced by para-athletes: being supported without being fully considered as athletes in their own right.

In ten years, things changed. “Today, we are considered athletes. We are completely part of the group. Cofidis has become my second family.” Katell especially wants people to understand that the daily investment does not differ from that of able-bodied athletes. “We train just as much. We make the same efforts. Our life is organized around sport. The investment is the same.” Comparing raw performances doesn’t always make sense between different bodies and categories. However, the demands, sacrifices, fatigue, and seriousness need no translation.

Katell eats three hours before the start, builds her reverse schedules, spends weeks on the road, and organizes a considerable part of her existence around a few minutes of competition. This is not an imitation of high-level competition. It is high-level competition.

Suffering Is Not a Superpower

In some para-athletes, the ability to push effort seems almost disproportionate. As if the suffering already endured had shifted the boundaries of what a body still accepts to bear. “I think we are capable of going very far into suffering. Perhaps sometimes beyond what should be. Is that good? I don’t know. It can also cause problems.” Suffering is not a gift. The ability to endure it can produce feats; it can also cause harm. Katell doesn’t romanticize what she has lived through. She simply observes that she now knows an inner strength she was previously unaware of.

After relearning to walk, she got back on her bike. After cycling came the championships, the Games, the titles, and professional status. But her next dream will not be realized on two wheels. “I would like to climb a mountain. I would like to reach the summit one day by walking.”

Her brother practiced mountaineering a lot. She wishes to accomplish this project with him. This mountain resembles the perfect continuity of her story. She simply wants to place an additional summit in the territory of what is accessible to her. One step after another. One refuge, then the next.

The Secret Part

At the end of the interview, I ask her if there’s an essential part of her story that no one talks about. She gently rejects the idea that a portrait should reveal everything. “We all keep a part of ourselves secret. We don’t say everything, and fortunately so. We need to remain a person.”

The answer is precious. Our era sometimes confuses sincerity with total exposure. Katell talks about pain, the wheelchair, amputation, her father, her choices, and her hopes. But she keeps one room closed. This limit protects the person behind the public figure. One doesn’t rebuild oneself only by telling. One also rebuilds oneself by deciding what still belongs to us.

Three Lives in One Vehicle

As our conversation ends, I think back to the Grand-Champ car park and that first mistake: I had thought the young girl was her daughter. She was her niece. The correction enriches the scene. In the camper van were three generations and an absence.

Katell’s mother, who continues to pin her daughter’s race number. Katell, who became a champion after long thinking that high-level competition wasn’t for her. Her niece, who came to discover this world where her auntie simply seems to cycle like everyone else. And Katell’s father, invisible but present in every detail of the layout imagined with them.

Behind the hatch, the bike was perfectly stowed. Inside, the water bottles, gels, shoe, helmet, and prosthesis would soon find their precise order. The stuffed animals recalled races. The mother would fix the next race number. The niece would watch her auntie get back on her bike after a fall. This camper van didn’t just tell the story of a professional athlete’s organization. It contained the three lives of Katell Alençon.

The first, happy and carefree, that of the hyperactive child, of the mountains, of the cycling school, and of volunteer parents. The second, suspended, enclosed in pain, a too-low wheelchair, and an incomprehensible medical battle. The third, different but just as incredible, that of rediscovered cycling, the Games, Cofidis, nephews and nieces, and the summits yet to be climbed.

“She Succeeded, Why Not Me?”

Before hanging up, I ask her if she would prefer to be remembered as the champion or the woman. “Rather as the woman. The athlete is only a part of my life. What I want to show is not just someone who knows how to cycle. It’s someone who knows how to rebuild herself. I would like all people who have a small or big problem in their life to be able to say: she succeeded, why not me?”

This is what should be remembered. Not the naive idea that willpower alone would be enough to fix everything. Some battles require doctors, family, years, operations, prostheses, and circumstances that are not entirely within one’s control.

Nor the obligation to become heroic. Rebuilding oneself does not mean transforming every misfortune into a podium. It can simply mean regaining one’s place in a conversation. Driving again. Leaving home. Walking again in front of her godson. Rediscovering a passion. Accepting a different life without considering it inferior.

Katell did not rebuild who she was before. She built someone else with what remained, what returned, and what she discovered. She doesn’t thank suffering. She doesn’t claim to have healed from everything. But she refuses to surrender all the space to it. In the Grand-Champ car park, I thought I had seen a perfectly stowed bike. I now understand that I had primarily looked at a life set back in motion.

A life in which nothing is left to chance, precisely because one day chance turned everything upside down. A life where water bottles, gels, helmet, shoe, and prosthesis are carefully prepared. A life where a mother continues to pin her daughter’s race number. A life where a deceased father still travels in the details of a camper van. A life where a niece sees her auntie get back on her bike after falling.

A life where the greatest victory was not played out before a finish line, but in the voice of a child saying: “Bravo godmother, you’re walking.” The medals tell of Katell Alençon’s level. Her achievements tell of her consistency. The Cofidis jersey tells of the professionalization finally granted to her talent. But the essential lies elsewhere. In this ability to consider that an existence can contain several lives. In the lucidity of not claiming that the third is better than the first. In the strength of not letting the second decide all the subsequent ones. And in this project of one day joining her brother at the foot of a mountain, then starting to walk. Not to erase the past. Not to prove that she would have become invincible. Simply to reach the next refuge. Then the next. To the summit.