“Then I started racing four years ago and I fell in love with it,” said Clemons, a Category 2 racer in a women’s road and track racing field where grouping starts at Cat. 4 and work up to Cat. 1.
Co-founded in recent months by Clemons, Women’s Racing Project consists of six Category 1 and Category 2 cyclists: Clemons and Lauren Bair of West Chester Twp., Tate Devlin of Oxford, Christine Robbins and Erika Bohn of Cincinnati and Karla Labbe of Covington, Ky.
The team also includes two junior women guest racers — Mackenzie Green and Rachel Dobroszi — both of whom are already committed to other teams but compete with WRP in its races, Clemons said.
WRP members wanted “take it to the next level” because there are elite men’s teams in Ohio for a Category 1 and Category 2 racer, but no elite women-only cycling team for women of the same skill-set, she said.
Bair, Clemons and Labbe have competed on the same team before and against Robbins and Bohn, “so we’re excited to work on how to strategize with all of our positives and negatives,” Clemons said.
Women’s cycling is “booming” and WRP is a step up for those who want to get into either racing on a pro or semi-pro level, Clemons said.
“This way you’re around people with common goals for racing,” she said. “We wanted to have a team that we could race with on a competitive basis so that we can have strategy just like men are able to do.”
Once the racing season starts, WRP plans to scout out and recruit the top Category 1 and Category 2 racers in Ohio and possibly parts of northern Kentucky to grow the team.
“The way we have it now, it being an elite team, I think 12, maybe 15, would be our maximum number of racers,” Clemons said.
Clemons said racing is comparable to “playing chess on a bike.”
“If you ever watch Tour de France or any of the big stage races, you have certain people who have jobs on any given day and we wanted to create that because before, women in Cincinnati, it was just kind of one on one,” she said. “This team had a strong rider, that team had a stronger rider, but there was none of that team presence.”
Part of having a team presence also means being able to focus on creating and executing strategies, Clemons said.
“The strongest rider loses if they don’t know strategy,” she said. “You could be the strongest one out there, but if somebody has a team and they have a plan, they’re going to win.”
Visit www.womensracingproject.com to learn more about WRP team members and see the team's race calendar.
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