Lauren De Crescenzo hits the reset button in a big way this weekend to begin a fourth season dedicated to gravel. She’s raced for 13 years, most recently with a multiple-discipline programme with Cinch Rise, but the 2021 Unbound Gravel 200 champion now proudly declares herself as a professional gravel cyclist with ‘a side of road’.
De Crescenzo left Cinch over the winter to pursue a solo privateer career. It’s not unfamiliar territory for the 33-year-old, who excels in time trials and hits the gas for solo efforts in just about any type of race.
“Starting a new phase of my career as an independent athlete has brought a whole new set of challenges as well as a new excitement and freedom to racing my bike,” she told Cyclingnews.
“Over the past two to three years, the fields have gotten much deeper and more stacked than they were only a few short years ago. Gravel feels like the Super Bowl of cycling, with all the best athletes from every cycling discipline coming together to battle it out.”
De Crescenzo tests her legs this Saturday at the Border Wars gravel race, where the start-finish in Franklin, Georgia is within driving distance to her winter base in Atlanta she shares with her husband Jim Snitzer. The 100-mile event is limited to 200 entries and traverses steeply rutted terrain across sections of both Georgia and Alabama with 8,000 feet of elevation gain. Then she’ll turn her focus to Nebraska for a third title at The Mid South, having won twice before by 12 minutes or more.
“My first few targets this season are defending Mid South and then putting it all out there at Unbound! I’m aiming for podium finishes in the Life Time events and improving upon my fifth-place finish overall in 2023. I’ll also be targeting some other classic gravel races such as SBT GRVL and The Rift. I’d like to return to the UCI World Championships as I feel I have unfinished business over in Europe. And who knows if you’ll find me dabbling back a little into the road, [like] US Pro . . . maybe.”
This season signals a third, or maybe fourth, restart for De Crescenzo, a resume which includes a professional career on the bike, a professional career at the Centers for Disease Control and a mission to survive and promote traumatic brain injury (TBI).
In 2016 while racing in a California criterium with her first pro road team, she crashed and suffered a severe traumatic brain injury which left her in the ICU of a local hospital for three weeks. Then she was airlifted to Craig…
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