Trail Rider Magazine

Korie Steede Korie Steede made over the course of the six days of the ISDE, and so many of them are wrong. But there is only one way to taste the figs at the top of the tree… so let's climb, shall we? The Trunk Before climbing a tree or doing much of anything worthwhile, it's good to make a plan about how you're going to go about it. For the ISDE, this is the selec on process, team camp, and walk week. Team Selec on: Team USA is lucky to have many of the fastest women in the world calling our country home. I think this is partly because women's professional racing gets more support and recogni on here than anywhere else in the world. Even though I'm s ll sleeping in a van, ea ng canned tuna, and spend as much me side-hustling as I do training, there's at least three pro women who make a full- me living, a few more like me that scrape along, and many more beneath us who get the same bike-discount- parts-budget sort of deals that are reserved for only the crème de le crème of women's racers elsewhere. I'm assuming anyone who is bothering to read this ar cle in Trail Rider pays enough a en on to already know that we u erly destroyed the compe on this year, so I don't feel bad pu ng in a spoiler this early. In the individual standings, Brandy, Korie, and I went 1, 2, and 4. And as a team, we won by a staggering, shocking, almost insul ng margin of thirty-seven minutes. There is no crying in baseball, and no mercy rule in Enduro. I cannot reasonably explain how large that number is. But what I can do is tell you that even if we replaced Brandy and Korie with Ava Silvestri and Ellie Winland, our top two Club women, we s ll would have won. By a safe and comfortable margin. Team selec on is important. But so is having a pool to select that team from, and that's something that most other countries just don't have, due to their small size and their failure to properly nurture their women racers' talents. There's a lesson, and a warning there, with the industry retrac ng and companies/teams having to decide where to ghten their belts…Do you cut your 7 th place XC1 rider, or put your 3 rd place WXC rider on starva on wages, if you keep them at all… I'm biased, but I think you all know where I fall, especially given that Team USA's Women have been the only reliable winners of all our ISDE teams in the last decade. So, I implore the industry – please don't ruin that for us.

• Cover