A single donation of $2.5 million from the Hellman Basis was awarded to USA Biking Basis earlier this month to bolster ladies’s biking programmes. This grant will enhance sources to the governing physique for operations of girls’s high-performance Olympic Video games disciplines – highway, mountain bike, monitor, BMX racing and BMX freestyle, in addition to the Paralympic biking disciplines of highway and monitor.
“Transformative” was the phrase used to explain the inflow of financial assist by the Hellman Basis, based mostly in San Francisco, California with a legacy of Warren and Chris Hellman and a broad mission that features constructing fairness and alternative by way of philanthropy.
“The Hellman Household has been a longtime supporter of USA Biking, and so they have been particularly supportive of our Girls’s Monitor Endurance program. At the moment’s announcement marks their extremely bold and beneficiant method to ladies’s biking and ladies’s sport typically,” mentioned USA Biking’s CEO Brendan Quirk.
In a press launch, USA Biking famous that $1 million of the “transformative $2.5 million grant” can be “particularly meant to assist ladies’s applications delivered within the years 2025-2028 to maximise success on the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Video games”.
Whereas The Hellman Basis was established in 2011, the Hellman Household has been a serious supporter of the USA Biking Basis since 2000. Their beneficiant assist culminated in a record-breaking summer time on the Paris 2024 Olympic Video games the place US ladies claimed a file six medals throughout 4 biking disciplines, together with three gold medals – Kristen Faulkner within the highway race, Jennifer Valente in ladies’s Omnium and the identical duo alongside Lily Williams, Chloe Dygert within the ladies’s Workforce Pursuit.
A second a part of the brand new grant will set up an endowment, the Girls’s Biking Fund, to develop and maintain multi-disciplinary, high-performance programmes for girls by way of 2043. USA Biking mentioned it aimed to double the impression by asking for one-to-one matching donations, with a purpose of making a $3 million fund “to empower ladies athletes within the sport for generations to return”.
“This provides USA Biking an enormous enhance in momentum as we finalize our plan to earn 10 medals on the LA28 Olympics, and we’re wanting to kick off the Girls’s Biking Fund matching marketing campaign to make sure power and stability for our ladies’s program for many years to return,” Quirk added.
On the Paris Olympics, US ladies accounted for 2 medals on the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Nationwide Velodrome by dominating the ladies’s Omnium and Workforce Pursuit.
Faulkner added a gold medal within the ladies’s highway race, turning into the primary US bike owner to race to gold medals in each monitor and highway biking at a single Olympics. Dygert went third within the particular person time trial in Paris for a bronze medal.
Two silver medals on the Paris Olympic Video games have been earned by Perris Benegas in BMX Freestyle and by Haley Batten in cross-country mountain bike.
“We have been placing collectively completely different mixes of riders for years [at the world level]. To have the ability to pull collectively a extremely robust experience and have it truly repay is, it is a feeling that I’m not going to overlook,” mentioned Valente, who now has 5 medals in her profession from three Olympic Video games, and is the most-decorated feminine bike owner from the US in Olympic competitions.
