Mara Abbott has won the Giro as many times as Vincenzo Nibali, but most cycling fans have not heard of her. The 30-year-old American won her second edition of the women’s race in 2013, the same year Nibali triumphed for the first time in his home country. But while he went on to earn millions, Abbott makes so little money from cycling that she works at a farmers’ market in her home town of Boulder, Colorado, in the off-season.

On Friday the two-times US national champion will line up as one of the favourites for the 2016 Giro Rosa, having come second to Anna van der Breggen last year. A climbing specialist, she has also been selected to race for the USA at the Rio Olympics, competing on the hilly course against the current world champion, Britain’s Lizzie Armitstead.

I first met Abbott in February at a training camp in Mallorca organised by her team, Wiggle High5. We sat down for a chat after a ride into the Tramuntana mountains, and I admitted with shame that her name was new to me until Rochelle Gilmore, her team manager, pushed me up the peloton to meet her, saying: “Talk to Mara: she’s won the Giro twice.”

If you were a man I would know all about you, I told her. Does that hurt? She looked a little put out. “There are three ways of looking at it. On one level, yes it’s sad, it’s kind of depressing,” she said. “On another level, I think maybe the sadder one, is that after 10 years in the sport you get used to it and it stops hurting.” But as a former economics major, she said she gets it: “There’s a part of me that understands the economics of it, which is that in terms of sponsorship more people are watching men’s cycling so more people put more money into it, and there’s a cycle there we haven’t achieved yet in women’s cycling.”

Asked how different her life would be if she were a man with the same palmarès, her answer speaks volumes about the gulf between men’s and women’s sport. “Well,” she said, sipping an americano, “I would have an easier time paying my mortgage, and I would have enough money to go out for dinner, maybe once a month.”

In 2014, the men’s Giro d’Italia held a prize fund purse totalling €1,378,000. Each stage win was worth €11,000 and a day in the pink jersey was worth €1,000. The final overall winner received €200,000. In comparison, the Giro Rosa held a purse of €17,666 with the eventual winner, Abbott’s Wiggle High5 team-mate, Giorgia Bronzini, taking home just over €500. This year there has been a moderate improvement: the overall women’s race winner will earn €1,050, compared to the €115,000 for the overall winner of the men’s Giro d’Italia.

Abbott, thoughtful and articulate, does not want to criticise the salary paid to her by Wiggle High5. She singles out Gilmore, a Commonwealth gold medallist, as one of the key people trying to improve women’s cycling. But she admits that in order to make ends meet over the winter she worked three days a week on an organic farm and two days selling vegetables at Boulder farmers’ market. She also taught yoga classes and was an intern at her local paper, the Daily Camera (she hopes to become an investigative environmental journalist after her retirement).

The farm work was “awesome”, she said, and she appreciated the unlimited free vegetables. But it is not much fun worrying about money and how you are going to pay for your retirement when you are trying to be an elite athlete. Plus if she was a guy she feels she would have a platform to make a difference outside sport, particularly in relation to environmental issues close to her heart.

It is not so much the money as the lack of recognition which can hurt, she said: “When nobody knows what you’re doing and you go off to races in the middle of nowhere and nobody’s there, at first it doesn’t bother you and you think it’s kind of funny, but after a certain amount of time it becomes depressing. You don’t want to complain, and I do want to say there are a lot of people devoting themselves to improving women’s cycling and I don’t want to demean their work at all. But you can only keep putting your whole heart into something for so long when you feel it doesn’t matter to anybody else.

“You don’t need to have adoring fans but sometimes when your friends want to find out how you did in a race ... and they can’t, that’s hard and I think that it’s more hard on a mental level because we all want to feel that we matter, more than on a monetary level. But so often money represents significance.”

Mara Abbott leads a breakaway during a race in Santa Rosa, California, earlier this year. Photograph: Chris Graythen/Getty Images

Abbott, who turned professional in 2007, quit cycling in 2011 after an unhappy season with the Italian pro team, Diadora-Pasta Zara. She was suffering from an eating disorder and did not know how to handle the pressure. “I felt I wasn’t in control of the situation and I felt uncomfortable,” she said. “I was getting better and people were expecting more of me and I was saying I don’t know if I’m worth it. And as an American in a European culture it was hard for me to assimilate.

Things were going fast and things were expected of me. I didn't think I was worthy of them Mara Abbott

“It was particularly hard for me because I grew up in hippy-ville where people are like: ‘You’re great just the way you are,’ and that’s not actually the way you are looked on in the European peloton. It was just a growing-up experience and it was my first real job, things were going fast and things were expected of me. I didn’t think I was worthy of them and I needed my brain to catch up with the experience.”

She got so thin that she now refuses to sign photographs of herself taken during the Diadora season. The eating disorder was more about control than weight, she said. “It was never about weight for me. When people tell me: ‘Oh you’re so thin, you’re so amazing, you look so fit,’ I get so upset about it. For me, the eating disorder was my way out. It was my way of saying: ‘I’m not in control. This is how I can take control because if nothing else I can control everything that I eat. If I don’t feel good about myself in the world, I can at least perfect what I’m eating and make myself feel that I’m winning with food.’

“For me it wasn’t that I was trying to become thinner. I knew it was making me a worse cyclist, I was too thin. I didn’t have the power. I was just weak. But at that point I didn’t want to be doing cycling and I didn’t know how to say out loud that I didn’t want to be doing it. So what I was trying to do was take myself out of it but my body was quite stubborn in that and nothing broke. So in the end I did have to take myself out of it.”

There is no escaping the fact that Abbott is still very thin, and during the Mallorcan training camp would turn up to meals with vials of supplements and her own special flask. Does she have a handle on the eating disorder? “Yes and no,” she said. “Because the problem with eating disorders is that they are something of an addiction. So I can still get positive feedback from controlling everything I eat. That still makes me feel good about myself, and that’s crazy and it doesn’t make you happy.”

Anorexics never really recover, she believes, partly because they cannot avoid food forever. “You can tell an alcoholic to go cold turkey and that helps with the addiction. You can’t tell someone just don’t eat any more, so it’s really hard in terms of addictive habits. Food’s going to come up at least three times a day. People say you’re always recovering from an eating disorder but at the same time I know my limits and I know how to keep myself as healthy as I can. I think I know that if I were to get into it really bad I would know how to reach out and help. But at the same time you still have your weird disordered eating habits and like to control your diet and eat specific things.”

She is not optimistic about the future of women’s cycling, despite the introduction of the women’s world tour this year, and the increased prize money in certain races, such as RideLondon, and the Aviva Women’s Tour. “Since I’ve started cycling, and I started racing professionally in 2007, we’ve lost races and there have been fewer races to participate in and a lot of races have had less prize money,” she said.

“There are changes that may bring better things and when you meet people who are doing so much for women’s cycling it really lifts your heart. But on the whole, it does not feel like women’s cycling is in a better place than it was 10 years ago, so it’s a little bit hard to feel optimistic when that has been my entire career.”