This article was produced in association with Pas Normal Studios
There aren’t many cycling teams who launch their new bikes and kit from a laundromat in southwest Virginia, just a few days before their first race of the season. But as Raylyn Nuss, founder of the Steve Tilford Foundation Racing (STF Racing) cyclocross team tells Rouleur: “I hate doing what everybody else is doing.”
It’s pretty clear that Nuss isn’t like most people. The 32-year-old’s journey into cycling is far from the usual tale many professional cyclists reel off about doing their first race as soon as they could get off stabilisers. In fact, Nuss didn’t compete in cyclocross until she was 26 years old after an impressive career playing collegiate basketball and then triathlon.
“Everyone told me I should do cyclocross in my off-season to get better on the bike, I did one race and was instantly hooked,” she says. “I was like, I’m done with triathlon, I’m going to go all in with this and see where ‘cross takes me. I quit my job as a full time employee at Pfizer where I’d worked for six years as a scientist, and just wanted to dive in.”
Nuss is too modest to mention it, but her talent for cyclocross was clear from the offset. In just her first few years riding on the American ‘cross scene, she was securing podiums at domestic races and top-10 positions at the US National Championships.
“It’s like this chaotic, weird discipline, but you have to have finesse for it,” Nuss explains. “You’re hopping off and on the bike, you’ve got to be athletic, you’ve got to have agility. I think it translated better coming from a ball sport. You have to have power to race cross, but there’s more technical skills that go into it. It wasn’t a boring sport. Some of the few big races that I went to I was like, wow, there’s a party going on around this event too, it’s rad.”
In the last two seasons, Nuss has secured some of her most impressive results yet, including becoming PanAmerican Cyclocross Champion, finishing 15th in the 2022 World Championships in Fayetteville and coming second in the US National Championships a few months ago. For someone so new to the sport, her rapid progression has been impressive. But racing has always been about more than just results for the American, and she explains she isn’t fulfilled by only focusing on her own performance. It’s for this very reason that she launched her own team, STF Racing, in 2020.
“In America,…