A single donation of $2.5 million from the Hellman Foundation was awarded to USA Cycling Foundation earlier this month to bolster ladies’s biking programmes. This grant will improve sources to the governing physique for operations of ladies’s high-performance Olympic Games disciplines – highway, mountain bike, monitor, BMX racing and BMX freestyle, in addition to the Paralympic biking disciplines of highway and monitor.
“Transformative” was the phrase used to explain the inflow of financial help by the Hellman Foundation, based mostly in San Francisco, California with a legacy of Warren and Chris Hellman and a broad mission that features constructing fairness and alternative by way of philanthropy.
“The Hellman Family has been a longtime supporter of USA Cycling, and so they have been particularly supportive of our Women’s Track Endurance program. Today’s announcement marks their extremely bold and beneficiant strategy to ladies’s biking and girls’s sport normally,” mentioned USA Cycling’s CEO Brendan Quirk.
In a press launch, USA Cycling famous that $1 million of the “transformative $2.5 million grant” could be “particularly supposed to help ladies’s packages delivered within the years 2025-2028 to maximise success on the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games”.
While The Hellman Foundation was established in 2011, the Hellman Family has been a serious supporter of the USA Cycling Foundation since 2000. Their beneficiant help culminated in a record-breaking summer time on the Paris 2024 Olympic Games the place US ladies claimed a file six medals throughout 4 biking disciplines, together with three gold medals – Kristen Faulkner within the highway race, Jennifer Valente in ladies’s Omnium and the identical duo alongside Lily Williams, Chloe Dygert within the ladies’s Team Pursuit.
A second a part of the brand new grant will set up an endowment, the Women’s Cycling Fund, to develop and maintain multi-disciplinary, high-performance programmes for ladies by way of 2043. USA Cycling mentioned it aimed to double the impression by asking for one-to-one matching donations, with a aim of making a $3 million fund “to empower ladies athletes within the sport for generations to come back”.
“This provides USA Cycling an enormous increase in momentum as we finalize our plan to earn 10 medals on the LA28 Olympics, and we’re desperate to kick off the Women’s Cycling Fund matching marketing campaign to make sure energy and stability for our ladies’s program for many years to come back,” Quirk added.
At the Paris Olympics, US ladies accounted for 2 medals on the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines National Velodrome by dominating the ladies’s Omnium and Team Pursuit.
Faulkner added a gold medal within the ladies’s highway race, changing into the primary US bicycle owner to race to gold medals in each monitor and highway biking at a single Olympics. Dygert went third within the particular person time trial in Paris for a bronze medal.
Two silver medals on the Paris Olympic Games have been earned by Perris Benegas in BMX Freestyle and by Haley Batten in cross-country mountain bike.
“We’ve been placing collectively completely different mixes of riders for years [at the world level]. To be capable to pull collectively a very sturdy experience and have it really repay is, it is a feeling that I’m not going to neglect,” mentioned Valente, who now has 5 medals in her profession from three Olympic Games, and is the most-decorated feminine bicycle owner from the US in Olympic competitions.
