Watch: China’s Miao Yao on Her Toughest Podium Yet at CCC 2026

When I first met Miao Yao, I only saw the top of her head.

I was having lunch with a group of journalists, Yao’s husband, and a few staffers from one of her sponsors, but I was most interested in getting to know the woman whose head was literally resting on the table—exhausted from no sleep and 100K of French Alps. Of course this was entirely understandable and actually appropriate: Yao had started the 2026 CCC with a knee injury of unknown severity, but she felt compelled to start; not just to start, but to reach for the win, even if she came up a little short.

And it was the knee injury, actually, that was the cause of Yao’s sleepiness, but now how you’d think: She had been slamming caffeine throughout the duration of her effort less than 24 hours ago, in an effort to distract herself from the pain in her knee, her husband confided. Yes, the tiredness was a result of the race itself, but it was also the fact that she’d been so wired the night before that she couldn’t get to sleep.

Somehow, the caffeine surge and her injury—that made each downhill agony—wasn’t the most dramatic thing about Yao’s third-place finish, it was actually a midrace train that ironically nearly derailed the CCC event nearly six hours in. While Yao and her husband insist the unplanned train stop didn’t have a positive or negative impact on her final placing, it did keep viewers on the edge of their seats as Yao and then-leader Toni McCann waited what felt like an excruciating eternity for the scheduled train to clear the tracks in Martigny.

If nothing else, it allowed Yao to catch up to McCann and put her back in contention for the lead, after so much back-and-forth throughout a thrilling day of racing in the French Alps.

From there, Yao made a massive push with her eyes on a second CCC victory (Yao had first won in 2018, and taken OCC podiums in 2023, 2024, and 2025), but it wasn’t to be—her knee injury was affecting her downhills badly. She held the lead until the last two hours, eventually hanging on for a third-place finish behind winner Yngvild Kaspersen—who took her second CCC victory—and McCann.

Yao told Trail Runner that she used a quote from famed American runner Steve Prefontaine to get her through the pain: “Somebody may beat me, but they’ll have to bleed to do it.”