Star Sebastopol cyclist’s 2024 haul: 2 national titles plus a shared world championship

Vida Lopez de San Roman of Sebastopol first started racing bikes at Wednesday Night Dirt Crits in Santa Rosa’s Howarth Park.

While the venues have changed, the results remain the same for the 18-year-old from Sebastopol. In the course of the year now coming to a close, she won national titles in two separate disciplines: cyclocross and mountain biking.

Her 2024 highlight, however, came in late August in Andorra, at the World Mountain Bike Championships. Lopez was a member of the six-person USA squad that won a gold medal in the team relay event.

“Standing on the podium in the rainbow jersey” — awarded to world champions — “listening to the national anthem, that was pretty surreal,” she recalled.

Competing with added confidence in her second season on the European World Cup racing circuit, Lopez de San Roman, who races for the prestigious Bear National Team, a California-based developmental squad, stood on plenty of podiums in 2024.

Gamble pays off

She turned in one of the most remarkable performances at the recent USA Cycling championships in the discipline of cyclocross, an often-muddy blend of road cycling, mountain biking and steeplechase.

After winning the Under-19 cyclocross national title in 2023, Lopez de San Roman would have been a heavy favorite to repeat in that age group this year. Instead, she made the bold decision to move up two categories and compete in the Elite Women’s race.

That gamble paid off on Dec. 14 at Jack Creason Park in Louisville, Kentucky. After trading attacks with two-time U23 national champion Katie Clouse, Lopez de San Roman was able build a one-minute gap, then ride solo to the finish line.

After a few laps of “getting a feel for things and all the riders in the field,” she told USA Cycling, “I started to notice the lines in places where I was maybe stronger and could make up time.

“It was a tough battle with Katie out there and it was really cool to race her,” said Lopez de San Roman, whose win in Louisville made her the youngest Elite National Champion in USA Cycling history.

Two days before that historic performance, rocking the kit of Milligan University in Tennessee, where she is a first-year student, she won the women’s varsity collegiate race — the first individual championship in Buffaloes’ program history.

Racing in ‘peanut butter’

At least some of the seeds of her superb 2024 were sown in the final days of 2023, at a challenging course on the Dutch-Belgian border.

On a cold, rainy day in Hulst, Netherlands, racing in thick mud — “they call it peanut butter in ’cross,” Lopez de San Roman told The Press Democrat — she applied lessons learned in her first year racing on the European circuit.

While riders at the World Cup level are generally fitter and faster than in the U.S., “there’s so much more to it than just where you are, physically,” she said.

“There are all these little things during the race, tactically, like saving energy by sitting a few wheels back” from the leaders, “or choosing a section to go easier on, to recover — or a section to go harder on, to gain more time.”

Situated amid scenic windmills, the Hulst course featured “this flying steep descent, straight down, then you’d go around a corner and there was the steepest run-up you’d ever seen.”

Many riders dislike deep mud, “and I kind of love it for that reason,” said Lopez de San Roman, who pulled away from the British rider Imogen Wolff to become the first American junior woman to win a cyclocross World Cup race.

Racing with renewed confidence, she placed sixth at the World Championships of cyclocross in the Czech Republic three weeks later.

Following her strong cyclocross season, something unexpected happened.

Breakthrough on mountain bike

Dating back to her Howarth Park Dirt Crit days, Lopez de San Roman had long been in love with mountain bike racing.

But that discipline hasn’t always loved her back.

She recalls the harsh disappointment she felt in the spring of 2023, after finishing 27th in a World Cup event at an iconic, forested course in the Czech Republic. “I had one of the worst races of my life” — a result that left her doubting her ability to compete at a World Cup level in mountain biking.

A year later — and a year wiser, and stronger — she battled to fourth place in that same Czech Republic race.

She was happy and proud, she said, “to go back the next year, not dwell on that, and create a completely new race for myself.”

This July, she won the USA junior women’s national mountain biking title. At the World Championships in Andorra six weeks later, she took a hard fall, remounted and clawed her way to a fourth-place finish. The sting of just missing the podium was soothed, slightly, by her gold medal in the team relay.

Julia Violich, coach of the Bear National Team, wasn’t surprised by her pupil’s breakout mountain biking season.

“Vida likes to race, race, race,” said Violich. “She doesn’t like to recover.”

By lining up for fewer races on the front end of the last cyclocross season, Lopez de San Roman had better results at the end of it — in Europe.

That success, in turn, carried over to her mountain biking, due in part to her steadily improving technical skills — tools that allow riders to navigate narrow, twisting, obstacle-strewn singletrack.

In mountain biking, said Violich, “you’re literally flying off boulders — lots of drop-offs, lots of rock gardens, lots of scary technical terrain.”

“Vida’s technical skills have definitely improved on the mountain.

“She’s a very promising talent, very versatile. I’m very excited to see what’s next for her,” Violich said.

“She’s a special one.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on X (Twitter) @ausmurph88.