It’s early when I speak to Ayesha McGowan, but you couldn’t tell. She’s bright and full of energy as the day’s heat sets in over her Girona home, despite the late-night training sessions she’s been fitting in when the temperature drops at dusk.
The American is deep in training for her Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift challenge, which will see her complete the route four days before the peloton sets off from Lille.
Mostly self-supported, McGowan will be joined by ultra-endurance cyclist Emily Chappell between stages 2 to 9 in a challenge aiming to raise $30,000 for Thee Abundance Project, an initiative providing pathways into professional cycling for women of colour.
“This isn’t just about riding hard, it’s about riding for change,” McGowan says.
“Every kilometre is a statement that women of colour belong in this sport at every level.”
McGowan hopes that money she raises will be enough to bring a squad of elite riders to Europe to race – following in McGowan’s own footsteps – to help cement their progression from beginner to pro.
For Ayesha McGowan, cycling and activism have always gone hand in hand. She first picked up a bike to commute to music school in Boston, a fixie to fly back and forth on. After university, McGowan moved to Brooklyn and rode tandem bikes with people with additional needs (In Tandem), juggling time on the bike with work at an empowerment organisation for women and marginalised genders, We Bike NYC.
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And then she got a taste for racing.
Her weekends soon filled with street racing at Alleycats (a fixed gear city race) and in dramatic, head-to-head ‘Gold Sprints’ on rollers in front of throngs of spectators. Then the Red Hook Crit came her way. The fixed-gear criterium was an annual race held in Red Hook, Brooklyn and in 2014, hosted the first of its women’s races.
“That was the link from me transitioning from being a fixie kid commuter advocate into competitive racing,” she remembers.
McGowan entered the Red Hook Crit, and, she said: “It went terribly. But it was somehow still something I wanted to do and get better at
“And so I kept going, and got better at it really quickly. And I started winning pretty fast and so that felt really nice – of course, winning feels good, and you want to keep winning. And I was looking around, doing research, and realised that there had never been an African American woman to go pro.”
And so a new dream was born.
Even in the short amount of time I spent with McGowan, it is clear she is someone intent to carry her community with her on her inevitable rise. McGowan’s dream to become the first African-American professional cyclist wasn’t a standalone record to hold, but one that could inspire other women and girls who didn’t see themselves represented in bike races – one that could platform other women’s dreams, too.
Because, for anyone watching professional cycling, there is a clear demographic composing the peloton, and with it a prevailing myth: cycling is only for men – more specifically, white men. Even in this year’s Tour de France, there is only rider of colour – Intermarché-Wanty rider, Biniam Girmay, who recently finished second in the first stage of the 2025 Tour. Over in women’s racing, the peloton still remains overwhelmingly White and European, too. McGowan wants to change this.
In 2021, McGowan got her first bike contract with Liv Cycling’s WorldTour team as a satellite rider. It came at a whirlwind moment. Amongst continued global Covid induced anxiety, continued lockdowns, and the ramifications of the the brutal, racially motivated murder of George Floyd by White police officer Derek Chauvin, McGowan was building her professional cycling career.
“I found that the narratives about black people and people of colour in general was [at this time] really pain oriented, and I really wanted to see something focussed on Black joy,” she said.
“So I created the Abundance Summit. It was this virtual conference where people hosted workshops that circled around Black and BIPOC joy in cycling and the outdoors. And it was really fun.”
Joy – and the pursuit of it – drives McGowan’s work. First, she got hooked on cycling and built a life around it, then she began connecting communities through bikes, and now helps ignite the joy of riding with more women who are excluded from it.
(Image credit: Ayesha McGowan)
“And so the first year [of doing the Abundance Project] in 2021, I used it as a fundraiser for this project that I had in mind to send women of colour to the Tour of America’s Dairyland in Wisconsin, to race bikes,” McGowan explained.
Described as “a bike race surrounded by a block party”, the criterium race is a short 1km looping course that travels throughout Southeast Wisconsin over 11 consecutive days of racing. McGowan wanted to get women to this race in particular, because the crit format offered riders the chance to get back in the saddle day after day, regardless of finishing times or setbacks during the race.
“I wanted to eliminate as many of the barriers as possible to just get them to try it.
“I personally didn’t know you could race bikes even after I became a commuter – it took me seven years to get from starting to ride into racing. So I think it’s an access and information thing, as well as [the lack of] resources being a barrier. So I figured if I could trick people into trying it, then they’ll know if they want to keep going.
“We cover housing, transportation, on-the-ground transportation, food and people support.”
Now almost four years into this work, McGowan is cycling the Tour de France avec Zwift course from Tuesday, 22 July to raise money to continue inspiring – and facilitating the possibility of getting – more women of colour onto bikes and into racing.
“If I’m being honest, I feel like the interest in Black and BIPOC initiatives has dwindled quite a bit since 2020,” she told me.
“It’s harder to get the signal out, and reach a larger audience.”
“I feel like the world has made me feel like the things I have to say are less important than the things that are happening. So that’s something that I’m struggling with right now, [and] maybe this is the thing that I want to emphasise: we can care about more than one thing, and we can find a way to prioritise joy in this chaotic world.”
You can follow McGowan’s tour on Instagram at @ayesuppose and donate to her fund here.
Emily and Ayesha training for their Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift challenge
(Image credit: Ayesha McGowan)
