A single donation of $2.5 million from the Hellman Basis was awarded to USA Biking Basis earlier this month to bolster girls’s biking programmes. This grant will improve sources to the governing physique for operations of ladies’s high-performance Olympic Video games disciplines – highway, mountain bike, observe, BMX racing and BMX freestyle, in addition to the Paralympic biking disciplines of highway and observe.
“Transformative” was the phrase used to explain the inflow of financial assist by the Hellman Basis, primarily based in San Francisco, California with a legacy of Warren and Chris Hellman and a broad mission that features constructing fairness and alternative by means of philanthropy.
“The Hellman Household has been a longtime supporter of USA Biking, they usually have been particularly supportive of our Girls’s Observe Endurance program. At this time’s announcement marks their extremely formidable and beneficiant method to girls’s biking and girls’s sport generally,” stated USA Biking’s CEO Brendan Quirk.
In a press launch, USA Biking famous that $1 million of the “transformative $2.5 million grant” could be “particularly meant to assist girls’s packages delivered within the years 2025-2028 to maximise success on the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Video games”.
Whereas The Hellman Basis was established in 2011, the Hellman Household has been a serious supporter of the USA Biking Basis since 2000. Their beneficiant assist culminated in a record-breaking summer season on the Paris 2024 Olympic Video games the place US girls claimed a file six medals throughout 4 biking disciplines, together with three gold medals – Kristen Faulkner within the highway race, Jennifer Valente in girls’s Omnium and the identical duo alongside Lily Williams, Chloe Dygert within the girls’s Crew Pursuit.
A second a part of the brand new grant will set up an endowment, the Girls’s Biking Fund, to develop and maintain multi-disciplinary, high-performance programmes for ladies by means of 2043. USA Biking stated 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 girls athletes within the sport for generations to return”.
“This provides USA Biking an enormous increase in momentum as we finalize our plan to earn 10 medals on the LA28 Olympics, and we’re wanting to kick off the Girls’s Biking Fund matching marketing campaign to make sure power and stability for our girls’s program for many years to return,” Quirk added.
On the Paris Olympics, US girls accounted for 2 medals on the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines Nationwide Velodrome by dominating the ladies’s Omnium and Crew Pursuit.
Faulkner added a gold medal within the girls’s highway race, changing into the primary US bike owner to race to gold medals in each observe 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 Video games had 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 have the ability to pull collectively a extremely sturdy journey and have it truly repay is, it’s a sense that I’m not going to overlook,” stated Valente, who now has 5 medals in her profession from three Olympic Video games, and is the most-decorated feminine bike owner from the US in Olympic competitions.
