evelyn stevens
Is she Cinderella on a cycle?
Little more than a year ago, Evelyn Stevens was working 50 hour weeks on Wall Street, trying to stay in shape by running when she could squeeze it in.
Then she bought a bike.
On Sunday, August 9th, the 26-year-old former college tennis player began the Route de France, a six-day race that draws some of the world's top female cyclists. And here's the part nobody, not even Stevens, could have imagined just a few months ago: She might just win!
How can that happen?
I suspect that Evelyn Stevens is blessed with a high VO2 max, that determining factor in how well her lungs and heart work to get oxygen to her working muscles. Being a virtual newcomer she hasn’t been submitted to a lot of testing but the ones she has done show she has an unusual amount of leg power for someone so small(120 pounds) and so inexperienced.Her light weight and high power output allow her to climb uphill faster than anyone she's faced so far.
She has been involved in athletics for some time. After playing college tennis at Dartmouth and landing a job at investment bank Lehman Brothers in New York, Stevens says she was content to leave sports behind. Her exhausting schedule left her with barely enough time for that occasional run.
But in November of 2007 her sister and brother-in-law persuaded her to try a cyclocross race, an muddy hybrid between mountain and road biking. After numerous falls, she ended the race dirty and sore. "But I had so much fun," she says.
For the next four months, Stevens contemplated buying a bike, finally settling on a low-end Cannondale with an extra "granny" gear to help beginners push themselves uphill. At the end of May, she got her first taste of racing at a clinic in Central Park organized by the Century Road Club Association. There, she found the experience "addictive." Within a month, she'd won the Union Vale road race, a gruelingly hilly jaunt in upstate New York. She capped the season with a victory over some of the top amateurs in the Northeast at the four-day Green Mountain Stage Race in Vermont.
This April, after hiring a coach and training hard all winter, she won the country's largest sanctioned one-day bike race (in participation), the Tour of the Battenkill in upstate New York. Last month, she won her biggest race yet — the Cascade Cycling Classic stage race in Oregon.
A big obstacle to success for female professional cyclists is the pay: Top women's professionals make about $30,000 a year, a figure that makes it almost impossible to train without working a “real job”.Most people agree Stevens could be one of the next great American women cyclists, but there's no guarantee that she will conquer the world. Connie Carpenter, an Olympic gold medalist in cycling in 1984, calls her ascent "remarkable," but adds she still has work to do. "The difficult part will be to go from being good to being great," she says. To become world-class, Miller says, Stevens will have to bump up her power anywhere from 6% to 13%.
Stevens is willing to put in the work. At the end of June, Stevens left Wall Street and devoted herself to cycling full-time. The sport's governing body, USA Cycling, sent her to do training sessions on a velodrome with competitors who are almost 10 years younger. She's now in Italy, training with the U.S.A. Cycling National Development Team, living the life of a professional athlete; working out, eating, and resting up for that next workout. "I just feel fresher when I get on the bike," she says. Instead of going to the office, she says, "Today, I came back from a ride, ate, surfed the Web, wrote emails, read books, hung out. It's really nice, actually."
Stevens pulled off her first major European road stage race victory with a win in stage four of La Route de France on Thursday.
Can you imagine what she will be able to do with some proper training? Remember the name! You'll be hearing more about this special athlete with the Cinderella story.
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