One More City

575km and 9,000m of climbing in four days.

This year, 40 riders will take on the road from Vence to Montpellier for One More City.

RCC London member Christine O’Connell founded One More City (OMC) in 2018. The project evolved from a 24-hour London–Paris ride the year before that raised money for breast cancer services. Christine’s own personal journey, having been diagnosed with secondary breast cancer in 2018 has propelled OMC forwards. With secondary cancer, treatment is lifelong and research ongoing. One More City’s ethos – always progressing towards the next city – reflects this. “The challenge is never over” says Christine, declaring the desire to overcome for both riders and researchers is resolute.

Since then, OMC have supported research into secondary breast cancer, first at Imperial College London and now at The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) in London. The campaign has expanded internationally, with rides taking place in multiple cities around the world and supporting local and national research institutions.

Be part of it. The proceeds of every jersey go directly towards research. This September, Rapha Clubhouses are hosting open rides in support of One More City, no invite required, just a way to ride for the same cause.

Find a Clubhouse ride

One More City was founded to fund research into secondary breast cancer. To date, OMC has fully funded two PhD students and a Clinical Research Fellow currently at the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) London, and one at Imperial College London who has completed their doctorate, as well as projects at the University of California San Francisco, Memorial Sloan Kettering (New York) and the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (Melbourne).

This year, the aim is to raise funding for a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the ICR , exploring whether vaccines, together with immunotherapy, could offer a new way to tackle treatment resistance in secondary breast cancer. 

Breast cancer becomes life-threatening when it spreads beyond the breast to other parts of the body, in a process called metastasis. Understanding exactly how cancer cells escape the original tumour and travel elsewhere is one of the biggest challenges in cancer research.

Professor Sanz-Moreno's lab works on exactly this. Her team decipher how metastatic cancer cells interact with their microenvironment while evading anti-cancer therapies. The ultimate goal is to find new treatments that will allow patients to live longer and better lives.

Last year the team visited the ICR labs to meet Professor Victoria Sanz-Moreno, whose research has shaped the jersey design for two years running, and this time Santi Roig Dinares — Rapha's Senior Apparel Graphic Designer — brought the finished jersey back to show Dr Josh Martin from Professor Sanz-Moreno's team, reinterpreting the lab's cellular imagery as graphic artwork woven into the One More City jersey's flower motif. As Dr Martin put it, the images were never meant to be art, but their beauty struck the team immediately, daunting science rendered strangely gorgeous and for Santi, that's exactly the power of design: turning something complex into something wearable, something that sparks a conversation.