INTERVIEW
Czech photographer Markéta Navrátilová covered the Tour de France for 25 years - 15 of them from the back seat of a press motorbike. From capturing a great cycling shot to documenting a changing sport, we spoke to her about her life behind the lens.
PUBLISHED
July 3, 2025
WORDS
Regroup
PHOTOS
Markéta Navrátilová
How much of life is defined by happenstance, off-hand remarks, chance encounters and straight-up serendipity? Answers may vary. But it's probably a lot more than we'd like to acknowledge. Take the arc of one Markéta Navrátilová, a top-ten Czech tennis player who became a professional photographer at the Tour de France after an accident cut her time on the court short. A female photographer, no less, who covered 25 editions of the Tour de France and more than 15 of them on the back of a motorbike, documenting a race which changed through her lens, from the rim brakes and rum goings on of the 90s, to the clean-cut professionalism (and some might say, sterility and soundbites) we know, love and bemoan today.
“When I was playing tennis, I didn’t think about anything else,” says Markéta of her pre-photography tennis career. “But at 18, I had a car accident, and my time as a professional tennis player ended.” So no Wimbledon, no French Open. “Top ten in one country doesn’t translate to top ten in the world!” she laughs. “I don’t think I could have got there, but I certainly wasn’t looking for anything else outside of tennis while I was playing it.”
Which is how Markéta came to find herself lying on the sofa in her parents’ house one day in June of ’92, with not a lot to do, but a lot of worries about her future. Until her dad popped his head around the door. “He said he was going to watch the Tour de France with some friends and would I like to come along?” she recalls. “He was an amateur photographer, and he handed me a camera. Anyway, it happened that John Pierce from Photosport International – an English guy – saw me by the side of the road on one of the climbs. I think he noticed my long hair and short shorts,” she laughs. “He stopped and asked me if I was taking pictures professionally, and I told him no, just for fun, but he asked me to send him some, which I did, and that was that, I was off and working.” By today’s hyper-competitive standards, it all sounds remarkably breezy. “I think back then, it was easier to get along,” she says. “Now everything is different.”
If Markéta’s story followed the usual course, you’d read about her passion for cycling and her excitement at getting the chance to photograph her heroes. This is not that story. Markéta knew nothing about cycling. “At the beginning, I didn’t consider cycling as something important,” she admits. “But I consider that an advantage – I wasn’t burdened with the weight of the sport, its history, or visual history and how it should or should not be documented. I was free of all of that.” She did, though, study Applied Art at University, trading tennis balls for paper and pencils that same summer, a clue that Markéta had more of an artistic side than her story so far suggests, one which would reach full bloom through the medium of photography.
After that, it was all about the bike. “I made contact with the publisher of the Velo magazine, now known as 53×11 here in the Czech Republic, who I still cooperate with today, thirty years later, and he knew I’d been to the Tour with my dad, so he asked if I’d like to shoot some more races, ” she explains. “Then John Pierce asked if I’d like to go to the UK and cover the Milk Race, then some other Brits mentioned a new race in Malaysia they were organizing, the Tour de Langkawi, Alan Rushton and others. They said they’d like someone to cover it, so I went there. It was a slow start but steady.” Why does she think she passed these early hurdles? “I think I was always able to bring some pictures back from whatever I shot. There was always something a publisher could use.”
For a young person from the Czech Republic, the early 1990s also represented a surge of freedom and the opportunity to travel in a new post-communist world. “I remember going to the Malaysian Airlines ticket office in Vienna and seeing a map of the world without Europe in the middle, and I thought, ‘Fuck, maybe there’s a lot out there,'” she laughs.
As to the Tour, Markéta’s quarter of a century covering the race from the back of a motorbike began when she met her current agency, Cor Vos, a Dutch company that had a licence to operate a motorbike during the race. “We met at some world championship or other, and the owner, who named the agency after himself, Cor Vos, asked me if I was interested, although I had to work for free at the start to prove myself,” she says. “They were a well-established company and part of cycling herd which included for example L’Equipe, AP, Reuters and AFP. Graham Watson was the English guy and Roberto Bettini the Italian, covering the race independently with their own motorbikes.” From what Markéta explains, there was something of a passing of the reins in her relationship with Cor Vos, with the owner looking to find a photographer who could replace him on the bike. “Yes, he was shooting on the bike himself,” she says. “And when I started, we’d do tests like sitting on the bike and shooting on the flats, then a climb, then a descent. After each trial, as you might say, I seemed to do ok, which led to me taking the Cor Vos seat on the agency motorbike.”
Female professional cycling photographers are still too few and far between, but back in the 90s, there was only one: Markéta. “I think it was harder for the guys than it was for me,” she says. “I always felt like a photographer. To the guys, though, I was the outlier, the one who needed to prove herself. I think that it took about two years of them coming over to check my work after each stage to see what I’d got.” It doesn’t sound like she had too rough a time of it? “Well, I was never pushy. I did the work, I did what I was expected to do, and hopefully took some good shots that won their respect. They didn’t open the door for me, and I didn’t expect them to. I’m still friends with many of them today.”
Scrolling through Markéta’s photographs reveals the depth of her work and a real sense of history. She was in the hot seat, photographing riders such as Marco Pantani, Alex Zülle, Bjarne Riis, and Lance Armstrong, all helmet-less and riding steel bicycles with impossibly small tubes. She witnessed the final days of a certain romance, soon to be replaced by a new kind of professionalism and the utter ruthlessness of the early 2000s.
What was it like photographing from the bike? “I have a quiet head,” she says after pausing to think. “I don’t panic, or at least, I realized that in certain situations, I stayed cool. I also did my homework. Before the stage, I would assess everything: what I needed to shoot, the landscapes, and certain riders. But more than that, I would try to assess the teams, injuries, and chances of success to put myself in the right place at the right time. I’d also speak to other photographers, such as Graham Watson, to see what he was planning. My drivers, too, were experienced.”
Her approach always yielded what she calls ‘agency pictures’. “Something you might not have seen before,” she explains. “A picture which nobody else was taking.” And as she notes, when you’re one of twelve photographers following the Tour on motorbikes, the picture that sticks might not be the one taken from the bike. “Everybody was good, and we were all shooting from the same perspective,” she notes. “It’s all either side-on or from the front – there are not a lot of options. You need to be very lucky to get a truly original shot from the seat of the motorbike. So I would always try to get off the bike to get a different view, perhaps from the side of the road, or a field, or running up a climb!” she laughs.
Out of all of the photographs she has taken over the years, what makes one stand out above the others? “If there’s a story, it will usually last,” she says. “It might even make it great. It should also have some universal value that people outside of cycling can understand.” Like the shots of Pantani and Ullrich, captured close mid-apex as they rounded yet another switchback, ever upwards? “Yes, it’s there in the eyes,” she says. “Something that communicates a real emotion – hunger, fear, ambition.” As she describes it, those pictures unfolded right before her. “You just have to be ready, with a good lens and try not to fuck it up,” she says. “But then there are the pictures that you have to create yourself, when you’re waiting in the mountains and hope the peloton comes in the way you imagined. Or the times when you stay on the road and observe the fans for half an hour, and hope that when Froome is coming in yellow, they act in a way you imagined. I always liked to do pictures like this.” It sounds like street photography, albeit at altitude. “Yes, in some ways, it is very similar, the waiting, the framing. Tuning in to a certain energy. But of course, we never usually had the luxury of time!”
While other photographers might baulk at the idea of taking a cycling photograph without a bike in it, Markéta has no such qualms. “Can it still be a cycling photograph without a bike? Absolutely.” Heresy, perhaps, but more a reflection of Markéta’s willingness to see beyond the expectations of others and a desire to take a great photograph, however it comes. “I was braver when I was younger, ” she laughs. “Climbing things, taking risks. Anything for the photograph.”
Any chat with Markéta has to include Lance Armstrong. She was there for every Tour, every win. “I managed to take some pictures of Lance, which no one else got,” she says, including one that graces the cover of his autobiography, shot from below the fence on the Champs-Élysées, with Lance speeding past and the Eiffel Tower looming in the background. “He brought a big change, but it happened at the same time as the internet arrived. The two things played into each other.” Did she talk to him much? “No, not a lot, but I liked him. And especially so as a photographer because he had a strong personality. He was always nice to me. If you joked with Lance, he’d joke back. I treated him the same as I would anyone. People who were too respectful tended to get the cold shoulder, I think.”
The riders in the Tour de France, as in any cycling race, are so exposed, their facial expressions so visible, that Markéta must have witnessed many moments of humanity and emotion over the years. “You would be surprised,” she says. “Cycling is all about winning. Cycling is elation and despair. There’s not a lot in the middle, which means there’s not a lot for photographers to capture between those two extremes.” But when Markéta shot an amateur mountain bike race back home, she saw a different side. “It was a rose garden. There was a real range of emotions. It was very refreshing.” She credits that one event with bringing her back to cycling once she departed the Tour de France after photographing it for the last time back in 2022. “The Tour de France shares many similarities with the Olympics,” Markéta says, which she shot several times. “It’s win or lose. Second place is still a failure to a professional athlete, I think. The riders have no time, finite energy and no real space to allow themselves to feel beyond the demands of the stage and the next stage. The Tour is brutal.”
As our conversation draws to a close, I ask Markéta about the terrain of the Tour and what she preferred – flat stages, mountains, or climbs? “Descents!” she laughs. “I loved the descents. It’s a lot of adrenaline when you climb, with so much noise, and of course, it’s very difficult for the driver. But once you get over the top, suddenly it’s silent, no people and just the descent ahead. I loved that.” And on that point, it’s worth mentioning Markéta’s compositional style, which tends towards the abstract in the mountains, with riders pushed to the side, to the corners, and the mountains seemingly at risk of toppling over, taking the cars, camper vans, and people with them as they watch the race. “I like space in photographs,” she says. “I think if you have something in the middle, it’s uninteresting. Space allows you the chance to feel something else.” Treating the cyclist almost as a secondary character feels like a real Markéta move.
“Ha, maybe. It’s also why I enjoyed photographing cycling races in Malaysia. Things felt freer there somehow, with more time to take the shots and opportunities to play with space.” She makes special mention of one of the photos from her time in Malaysia. “There’s a reflection of the Twin Towers (at the time the tallest buildings in the world) and the riders. But I had to wait for something else to complete the picture, which I got when a guy started walking through the scene. I shot an entire film there. It felt like an unrepeatable moment.” Later, the picture got picked up by the cycling press, although at the time, Markéta thought it might be too hard to read. “Once it was published, it went around the world, just like the Lance shot that’s on the cover of his book. Those moments gave me the confidence to show people another way, that perhaps I could lead the conversation, or at least, demonstrate my taste. Perhaps that’s the duty of any artist.”
To see more of Markéta’s work, visit her website.
