Gay bicycle rider
In May 2021, I wrote a feature questioning why, among the more than 900 male cyclists employed on UCI professional teams, not a single one was openly gay or bisexual.
Just weeks earlier, pro BMX rider Corey Walsh had come out as gay, and by October, Australian footballer Josh Cavallo had become the world's first openly gay male professional footballer. The tracking year, Britain saw its own breakthrough when Blackpool FC's Jake Daniels came out. If even football could open up and accept gay players, surely it was only a matter of time for cycling. Yet here we are four years later and, in male professional road cycling, representation remains stuck at zero.
It is statistically almost impossible that there are no male lover pros. The latest sexual orientation data from the ONS indicate that 10.4% of people aged 16-24, and 6.3% of those aged 25-34, identify as lesbian, gay or pansexual. If we apply a conservative estimate of 6% for pro cyclists - most of whom descent within the above age range - at least 50 male pros are gay or bi. Yet not one has revealed it publicly.
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Michael Trimble is impossible to forget. Ever since I met him in 2016 I wanted to comprehend him better. I finally did that yesterday when I spent the afternoon with this 35-year-old, male lover, armless, bike-loving former Russian orphan who wants to be Oregon’s next governor.
Michael’s story is about much more than his evident physical challenges. He’s a survivor who refuses to be defined by circumstance.
Michael’s mom lived in Chernobyl, Ukraine in 1986 when the world’s worst-ever nuclear disaster unfolded. She had Michael one year later and he was born without arms. As a child he bounced from orphanage to orphanage in St. Petersburg, Russia and was taken care of by a loving gal he remembers fondly as Babushka (Grandma) Rita. Just before his ninth birthday he was adopted by an evangelical Christian couple from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The way Michael tells it, they were monsters guided by God’s word to “rescue” him, but they never accepted who he really was.
With a fierce sense of self-rule forged by a experience lived by his hold rules, he never felt at home with his adoptive parents. “It was always an icey connection, part
Ride Streak: One Man’s Quest to Ride 10,000 Days in a Row
Colin Gay’s Instagram account is, at a glance, fairly monotonous.
Every square of his @ridestreak account is a selfie, and nearly all of them are a side view of Gay’s top, in a white S-works bike helmet, his encounter pointed forward down the road. Depending on the season, his chin and mouth might be covered by a Buff; in warmer weather, his salt-and-pepper beard catches the wind. The captions on the posts don’t add much luster; each one is just a number in chronological order: 3351, 3352, 3353, 3354, 3356, 3357 — you get the gist. Gay puts one hashtag, #ridestreak, next to the number, and that’s it. He has 945 followers.
But the benign Instagram account belies something astounding. Those numbers represent Gay’s travel streak, the number of days he has ridden his bike in a row. By January 18, he was up to 3,358 days. That’s over nine years of riding every single day.
Gay isn’t a professional cyclist, nor does anyone pay him to ride his bike. He’s a dad from Charlottesville, Virginia who sells IT solutions to the government. His ride streak is completely self-motivated
This Cyclist Started Gay’s Okay Cycling to Celebrate Diversity and Improve Representation
Name:Allan Shaw
Age: 32
Hometown: Dunfermline, Scotland; Current Home: Mexico City, Mexico
Occupation: Owner/Operator at Gay’s Okay Cycling
Time Cycling: 20 years
Reason for Cycling: To linger forever in motion, forever evolving.
My journey into cycling was quite organic. I grew up in a small Scottish village, so I have owned some kind of bicycle for as long as I can remember. Riding out into the fields with my friends, I already felt the freedom and fun of getting out and exploring. When I finished high school and moved to the capital to study, I used an old mountain bike at first to become around.
After making friends with a few local bike mechanics, they encouraged me to build my first single-speed city bike and then my first track bike. From there, I started getting out and exploring further and further from home.
After graduating, I made the decision to move to Vancouver, Canada, on a working holiday visa, and I brought my bike with me. Within a few weeks of arriving I’d started going on some local social rides and started noticing the groups of bike couriers hangi
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