Girls gone gravel: A look inside a new solution to youth cycling development

The US gravel season will kick off on Saturday with the first of the Grasshopper Adventure Series of off-road races in northern California. The series, which began in 1997, will once again attract the best racers in California, starting at the Low Gap Hopper, which offers racers a dynamic 48-mile course with 6,164 feet of climbing.

The startlist on both the men’s and women’s side is sparkling as always but with one small yet significant note: most of the pro women are there without competition on their minds.

For the second year in a row, the race is hosting a large group of U19 women from local high school mountain bike programmes to introduce them to the sport of gravel. Most of the pro women are there simply to help get those girls to the finish line.

“I’ve been involved with juniors in cycling since I've been riding,” Helena Gilbert-Snyder, the programme’s creator, told GCN. “I kind of know what they think, I kind of know how they act and last year I realised we had a bunch of boys on the high school team who were getting into gravel and getting into other disciplines of cycling. Girls weren't.

“I asked myself,’ Why aren’t they doing this?’ What stood out to me is that it is scary! No matter how competitive you are or driven you are, if you feel like you won't know what to do, or people are going to be mean to you, you’re not going to do those things.”

To help reduce that fear, each of those young women is paired with an experienced cyclist. That mentor, as they are called, walks them through race prep ahead of the event and rides the whole race with them, riding by their side throughout all the ups and downs of the day.

“[The mentor] will help them with questions, they’ll help with mechanical, with pacing,” Gilbert-Snyder said. “Let’s take the fear and concern out of it and just let them feel the excitement of racing.”

Successful first year leads to scaling of programme

For Gilbert-Snyder, the Low Gap Hopper was the logical place to start with her familiarity with the long-standing race series and its proximity to the cycling-rich Bay Area. With the full backing of the race, and willing athletes from the local NICA teams (NICA being the national league of high school mountain bike clubs), the first year was a success with seven high schoolers completing their first gravel race.

This year, the programme has scaled up with more than double the number of mentors and mentees. The list of mentors includes both experienced youth coaches and some of the most illustrious names in off-road cycling: former mountain bike world champion Kate Courtney; former Unbound winners Amity Rockwell and Alison Tetrick; and a young up-and-coming gravel talent, Anna Yamauchi.

“I see this as the perfect opportunity for young women to get into gravel, because mass starts are already such an intimidating thing, even for me as a pro,” Yamauchi, a second-year Life Time Grand Prix rider, told GCN.

“It's so special to have this perfect atmosphere with a mentor riding next to each athlete guiding them through this whole pretty scary process. NICA races are just an hour and a half long and there is nothing to bridge the gap to get into gravel at a young age.”

Breaking down gravel barriers

Yet Gilbert-Snyder sees the U19 mentor program as something that helps the cycling community by lowering the barriers between those who are curious about adventure cycling and those who are professionals in the discipline.

“It's hard these days because there is this push for social media impact,” she said. “There is pressure for good cyclists to use social media as a marketing platform, but, realistically, social media is not going to do anything to grow the sport because it doesn't translate to real-world experience.”

“To have this program where both famous and not famous cyclists can come in and have an actual impact in the world that they can see in front of them, to improve the sport and grow the sport, means a lot to everyone.”

“It's kind of cathartic to me because I get frustrated seeing the social media stuff, because what does that actually do? How are they improving and growing the sport? But to do this in person and to have this impact feels good for everyone involved.”

Yamauchi certainly agrees. As a rider herself, Yamauchi came into the world of top-level gravel racing with very little bike racing experience. With skill and strength that came from other sports like surfing and skiing, cycling came naturally and she excelled.

Even still, at 23 years old, Yamauchi is not too far removed from the girls she is mentoring and is excited for the opportunity to help shepherd her high schooler around the gravel roads of Mendocino County, California.

“I just met the girl I'm riding with,” she said of her partner for the weekend ahead. “She is in tenth grade, she goes to Berkeley High, she loves mountain biking and it's her first gravel race.”

In their pre-race meeting, Yamauchi and her mentee talked all things gravel as the elder rider tried to give her a crash course in all the intricacies of the discipline to build her confidence for the race ahead. One of the big points of discussion was what bike to ride since her mentee did not have a gravel-specific bike.

“She has a hard-tail mountain bike and a cyclo-cross bike that only can fit 35[mm tyres]. It’s either we go slower on the pavement or slower on the dirt, but I was like,’ Look, if you were on your 'cross bike we can practice drafting and working with groups on the pavement,’ and she was like, ‘that's sounds so cool!’”

That kind of discussion, for a 15-year-old who might not have the people around them who know the intricacies of the sport, is all they need to feel the excitement outweigh the dread of the unknown.