One of Durango’s own has found a new home with Zambia’s first professional mountain bike team.
Nora Richards is an alumna of the Durango DEVO cycling program who also competed at Fort Lewis College in 2009 before continuing her race career at the University of Colorado.
After finishing college, she moved to Zambia with her boyfriend, Ryan Ellis, who is from Lusaka, the capital of Zambia. Both Ellis and Richards wanted to pursue cycling careers, and Ellis’ parents sponsored a season of racing in South Africa in the couple’s first year out of college.
After a year, a call from the First Quantum Minerals Cycling Team in Zambia to Ellis with an invite to the team’s big mountain and road bike races helped spark an opportunity for both riders to join the team full time.
Ellis won the 2016 Kansanshi Mine mountain bike and road race and told the team’s director, who is the assistant general manager of the Kansanshi Copper Mine – the largest copper mine in Africa – that he wanted to represent Zambia in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.
With Ellis on the team, Richards began training with the team and won several local races. As the team recognized her ability and desire, it offered Richards a sponsorship as its only elite woman rider on the team. “Before all this happened, I’d been pursuing cycling with a grain of salt, knowing that it would be really hard to get on a pro team and make a living at it,” Richards said. “When this opportunity came, it meant that I could race and train as a full-time athlete, and pursue much loftier goals than I could have hoped. The team pays for all of our expenses and gives us a salary, which is something that not many cyclists – especially female – get.”
Richards first visited Zambia four years ago and initially struggled to adjust to the culture. She visited each summer and became comfortable with the idea of living in the African country. But a white woman riding a bicycle is not an everyday sight to many in her new country. “Being a white person in Zambia makes you extremely conspicuous, and that probably attributed to most of my initial struggles with the move,” she said.
“It is a spectacle for most villagers to see a white person out riding, so you’ll often be bombarded with kids – and sometimes adults – yelling or running after you. I once rode past a group of school kids and ended up with a crowd of 30 sprinting behind me. Since I’d be out training, wanting to be by myself and focus on what I was doing, I used to find it hard to not get really annoyed. Eventually, I learned to either ignore it or play along with them.”
Richards has found some similarities between Durango and her new home, though it doesn’t come on trails.
“Most of the trails in Zambia are village paths, created by people and livestock walking through the bush,” she said.
“For the most part, they’re pretty flowy, and they have amazing rock gardens and really steep climbs and descents. Riding here, there’s a large element of creativity because you can’t rely on a standard line to get through something. You always have to look ahead, have good navigation skills and stay on your toes. You never know if there’s going to be a drop-off or a cow around the next corner.”
There are trails right outside her door, a strong mountain bike culture that provides plenty of people to ride with and many like-minded individuals always in search of a good time.
The wildlife is different, though, as Richards now rides among giraffes, impala, warthogs and many more African animals.
All of the men on the team are in their teens and 20s, and Richards connects well with her teammates. But the men are surprised to see her out building trails.
“Part of our job on the team is building new trails around Solwezi, and currently, we probably have about 35 miles of hand-built singletrack in the area,” Richards said.
“I think I still sometimes surprise them when I show up to slash trails or do other grunt work. Zambians generally do have very clear gender roles, so the idea of a woman being able to do the same work as them is still pretty novel.”
Richards, daughter of Elizabeth and Joel Richards, comes from a big cycling family in Durango. Her sister Lucy rode to Washington, D.C., to advocate for alternative fuels and climate change in 2009, and mother Elizabeth, better known as Betsy, is a member of the Durango Wheel Club and founded the Bucket List Bicycle Tours before she was severely injured in a 2012 crash when a truck ran her over while she was on her road bike.
Richards hopes to once again live in Durango some day but plans to spend at least another year or two in Africa.
For now, she hopes to continue her life in cycling in and out of competition. She plans on racing her first World Cup event next year and will spend the next six months preparing. She also has Olympic dreams, though she knows she has a lot of work to do to reach that level. She also hopes to build the sport of women’s cycling within Zambia.
“This is only my second year as a pro, and in the past year, I’ve improved my riding exponentially,” she said.
“In the next three years, I want to improve my UCI ranking as much as I can, and just stay on the trajectory that I’m on.
“I’m coaching a couple of girls here and often do skills clinics in the hope that it will get new women interested and involved in the sport and help those who already are. There’s a lot of young talent here and a few girls who have the drive to succeed, and I hope that with continued attention, they’ll be able to accomplish their goals.”
jlivingston@ durangoherald.com
