Over the previous 4 years, the 30-year-old Argentine has confirmed herself a drive to be reckoned with anytime tyres hit the filth whereas additionally changing into an outspoken advocate for higher racing circumstances and separate begin occasions for elite ladies rivals.
Because the elite gravel season winds down, research up on Gómez Villafañe with 15 issues chances are you’ll not have recognized about her. She’s positive to be one other scorching matter when the season will get going once more subsequent spring.
15 stuff you did not find out about Sofía Gómez Villafañe
Gómez Villafañe is Argentinian. She was raised in Esquel, Patagonia, till she was 12. In 2005, she moved to Los Gatos, California, together with her household, and he or she holds twin citizenship within the U.S. and Argentina.
Along with her two Life Time Grand Prix sequence wins, Gómez Villafañe is an Olympian. In 2021, she grew to become the primary feminine mountain biker to compete within the Olympics for Argentina since 2004. She raced on the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Video games and got here in twenty third.
Gómez Villafañe is the fourth of six kids. Her mom is American and was a college principal; her father was a veterinarian for Argentine army horses.
Gómez Villafañe’s older brother, Matias, bought her into mountain biking. He and Gómez Villafañe’s older sister took up the game by buying bikes off Craigslist. Matias then bought one for Gómez Villafañe.
Because of that first $500 Craigslist mountain bike, Gómez Villafañe started competing within the hyper-competitive NorCal Excessive College Biking League at age 15.
Regardless of struggling to search out the enjoyable in sport as a excessive schooler, she did develop into a adequate bicycle owner to earn a cycling-related scholarship to using hotspot Fort Lewis School in Durango, Colorado. Her older brother and sister additionally went there.
Sofia Gómez Villafañe gained gravel’s premier occasion, the 200-mile Unbound Gravel, in 2022 and completed second in 2023.
(Picture credit score: Life Time)
Her main course of research at Fort Lewis School was train science, however she additionally earned a minor in enterprise administration.
In 2014, she completed second on the Collegiate Cyclocross Nationwide Championship. The subsequent yr, she gained the Collegiate Nationwide Title.
Gómez Villafañe and Keegan Swenson grew to become a pair in 2012, after they met by mountain biking. The pair skilled collectively in Durango till Gómez Villafañe completed school, at which level they moved to Park Metropolis, Utah.
She is a two-time Argentine nationwide cross-country MTB champion (2018 and 2019).
For almost a decade earlier than she grew to become a full-time skilled bicycle owner, she labored within the chocolate trade, together with for Utah-based artisan chocolatier Ritual Chocolate.
She’s been an outspoken advocate for separating the lads’s and girls’s races, arguing that racing blended with the lads’s subject impacts the race dynamics and supreme end result.
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