Gibson to represent USA at world championships
For Ramona resident Gwendalyn Gibson, mountain bike racing has proven to be a spectacular adventure.
After winning the state championship as a high school junior and making the USA Cycling Team her senior year, she competed in races in Canada and Europe this summer and learned Monday that the USA team has selected her to represent the United States at the
“I can't thank everyone enough who has helped me get this far,” she said on her Facebook page Monday. “It truly takes a village. I have started a GoFundMe to help fundraise getting me there to race. I hope you will check it out. Anything helps.”
Gibson, a 2017 graduate of Ramona High School, is the daughter of Sarah and Kyle Grosse. She began racing 4 years ago when she joined the RHS Cycle Dawgs. Since then, she advanced rapidly.
“The mountain bike coach at the high school (Robert Grace) has been a family friend of ours for a really long time,” Gibson said. “For the team, girls generally get more points and he was just trying to get more girls on the team, so when I was in eighth grade he was like, ‘Just come watch one of the races and see if it’s something you want to try.’ And then after that he got me on a bike and then after that it just became something I really enjoyed.”
Gibson raced within the freshman category her first year. She placed sixth overall and earned third in the state competition. Encouraged by her success, she decided to dedicate even more time to the sport.
“After I saw the progress of the year, I was just like ‘I want to be better next year,’” she said. “So I put in a lot more miles and all the coaches just helped me do that, so the goal was just to improve at first. The next year things got a bit bigger.”
Her second year, Gibson skipped the sophomore category and raced in the junior varsity category.
“I won every race, including state,” she said. “It was kind of incredible to me. I was not expecting that at all. My goal was to be in the top five and I wanted to win, but I didn’t know where I was really, and so, it was just a shock at the first race and then (to have) the rest of the season just to go so well was really exciting.”
Gibson became part of the varsity squad her junior year and competed at that level until the end of her senior year. This past year she also began competing for the USA Cycling Team — and made the team.
“There’s U.S. Cup races that are not related to high school,” she said. “They rank you in the nation, and then, out of those, some are UCI, which rank you in the world.”
Gibson’s cycling has given her the opportunity to travel the world. Some of her most memorable races have been outside the United States.
“Just after school got out we went to Europe and we did two races in Switzerland,” Gibson said. “That was my first time ever going to Europe, too, so the whole trip was pretty amazing — and just to be there with the team. I had two really good races. I placed third both races and so that was super exciting and then I was the first U.S. finisher in both those races, too. So it was exciting. It was a good week.”
Gibson also raced multiple times in Canada, allowing representatives of the company that sponsors her, Norco bicycles, to watch her compete.
“It was one of the first times they actually watched me race,” she said. “I was so surprised because I won it and nobody expected me to and so it was just an exciting day because my family was there, Norco was there, and it was my first trip with the national team. It was just an exciting day.”
Starting this fall Gibson will be attending Colorado Mesa University, where she earned both cycling and academic scholarships. She will major in exercise science and will race for the university. The university has multiple accommodations and training facilities that will help Gibson train and compete at her best.
“My junior year, I got a Facebook message from the Colorado Mesa coach and it basically asked me if I was interested or if I wanted to talk to them about possibly going there,” she said. “I talked to them a little bit, and I wasn’t that sure about it and I looked at a few other schools. Then during the summer I went and visited and then after I visited I was like, ‘OK, this is where I’m going. For sure.’ It was literally the only school I even applied to.”
The campus has VO2 max testing to indicate cardiovascular fitness and aerobic endurance, and it also has bike fitting machines that can help cyclists ensure that their bike fits them and their needs perfectly.
Gibson said that Colorado’s naturally high elevation would help her during training and that the U.S. Olympic training center for cycling is only about four hours from where she will be living.
“The Olympic training center that they took the U.S. team to was in Colorado Springs, because that’s where USA cycling is based out of,” Gibson said. “And, also, it’s at higher altitude. So I think that’ll help me a lot, too, instead of training at sea level.”
After university, Gibson plans to continue racing, and is considering a career in coaching or working at the Olympic training center.
“With the exercise science major I can look into possibly coaching or I’ve also thought about working at the Olympic training center,” she said. “If I can get an internship there and find a way to make that work, I thought that would be really cool because while we were there we talked to sports nutritionists, we did VO2 mask testing and there was just a lot of different things that go on there. I just think it would be a really cool place to work and be around athletes. That’s what I like now.”
When choosing racers for the UCI World Championships, the whole season is considered, she said — “The U.S. Cup races and then obviously if you’ve been on the national team and you went to the European races and the races in Canada.”
Gibson said she was nervous about what people would think when she first started mountain biking, but she has come to enjoy it immensely and encourages others to give it a chance.
“When I first started I was like, ‘What are people going to think? It’s not a normal sport, not a lot of people do it, are people going to make fun of me?’ And obviously people joke around because if they don’t know about it they don’t know what it’s really about,” she said. “If you give it a chance, you’ll find out that it’s totally worth it. You have to be really tough. My first year I crashed a bunch of times and you just got to keep going with it and it’s worth it in the end. I’ve never been involved with anything like it. I love it so much.”
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