JO­VAN RAV­EL­LO

Se­nior Mul­ti­me­dia

Re­porter/Pro­duc­er

Alexi Cos­ta-Ramirez first de­cid­ed to jump in­to the sad­dle to meet her fit­ness goals, how­ev­er, sev­en years lat­er, those goals have evolved in­to Olympic Games as­pi­ra­tions.

Now, a mul­ti­ple-time na­tion­al cham­pi­on that in­cludes the 2023 Cri­teri­um and Road race ti­tles, and a Pan Amer­i­can Games medal, she’s cre­at­ing her two-wheeled lega­cy.

“I would say that I have worked pret­ty hard for it,” Ramirez told Guardian Me­dia Sports be­tween train­ing ses­sions.

She con­tin­ued, “It’s pret­ty cool that I have it be­cause I’m able to wear my na­tion­al cham­pi­on jer­sey while I race in the USA but it’s been a jour­ney, and I’m en­joy­ing it.”

Fun’s im­por­tance isn’t lost on her. It fea­tures promi­nent­ly in her ad­vice to the next gen­er­a­tion

“I will al­ways say just to make sure you work as hard as you can, but al­ways make sure that you’re still en­joy­ing the sport and en­joy­ing the beau­ty that cy­cling brings to you,” Cos­ta-Ramirez ad­vised, adding, “You have to train all the time, you don’t want it to be­come like a feel­ing of a chore.”

Un­like most ca­reer cy­clists, Cos­ta-Ramirez made a late en­try in­to the sport; “I start­ed when I was 21 and my dad was a big cy­clist so I got it through him.”

Me­te­oric doesn’t be­gin to de­scribe her tra­jec­to­ry as she ex­plained, “I trained like about two years in Trinidad and To­ba­go, and I got on­to the na­tion­al team, and then I got an op­por­tu­ni­ty to go to the USA to race and I’ve been rac­ing in the USA for about four years now.”

Cos­ta-Ramirez, a mem­ber of the Mi­a­mi Blaz­ers pro team, de­scribes the op­por­tu­ni­ty as noth­ing short of amaz­ing, and de­spite the sig­nif­i­cant out­lay from her cur­rent em­ploy­ers, her on­ly re­al stress orig­i­nates in­ter­nal­ly.

“The on­ly re­al pres­sure that I have would be more like per­son­al pres­sure of me per­form­ing. But, you know, the team is sup­port­ive whether we fail or we achieve what the team goal is,” she re­vealed.

In re­sponse to a ques­tion about the in­flu­ence of her par­ents, in par­tic­u­lar her fa­ther, she said, “Oh, that ‘big cy­clist’ of a par­ent”, Team Heat­wave’s Guy Cos­ta, a fix­ture on the lo­cal scene but even that re­la­tion­ship didn’t ex­ert any re­al oblig­a­tion to the sport.

“I think is cool be­cause he used to be on the na­tion­al team so I kind of just fol­lowed his foot­steps,” she in­ti­mates “It’s kind of just come nat­u­ral­ly to me but I think it kind of just some­thing that end­ed up in its own time.”

Re­cent­ly, the tim­ing seems to be spot on. Cos­ta-Ramirez is cur­rent­ly at home train­ing for the next stop in the US Cri­teri­um Cham­pi­onship tour on Oc­to­ber 21. It’ll serve as a warm-up for the next ma­jor item on her vi­sion board.

“My next big goal for the year will be to try and medal at the Pan Amer­i­can Games which starts on Oc­to­ber 20 in San­ti­a­go, Chile. It kind of works out per­fect­ly for me be­cause I’ve been train­ing su­per hard for the Pan Amer­i­can Games, which is just about a week af­ter the Cri­teri­um Cham­pi­onships,” she points out.

But she’s not on­ly fo­cused on her progress, but Cos­ta-Ramirez is al­so a cham­pi­on of hav­ing more girls en­rolled in the sport. “I think if we can get more girls on bikes that’ll be a goal. Af­ter me and Te­nille (Camp­bell) there’s a gap for elite women cy­clists,” she ob­served, “Right now, there’s a cou­ple of ju­niors but then there is no one in be­tween. So we must try to get more girls in­to the sport be­cause then there’s go­ing to be a point where there may not be any fe­males rep­re­sent­ing the coun­try. I think it’s su­per im­por­tant to have the rep­re­sen­ta­tion at the big events.”

For now, she is do­ing her part in the in­ter­im, by as­sist­ing with equip­ment and gear specif­i­cal­ly for the next class of elite woman cy­clists when­ev­er she can.

Cos­ta-Ramirez, a res­i­dent of Cas­cade, just missed out on qual­i­fy­ing for the World Cham­pi­onships in Au­gust and faces chal­lenges in her ef­forts to qual­i­fy for the 2024 Paris Olympic Games due to the dif­fi­cul­ties of try­ing to qual­i­fy as an in­di­vid­ual rid­er. She still holds hope though and the Olympics re­main at the top of the list to achieve.

She de­scribes her sup­port sys­tem as top-tier. She’d, how­ev­er, like to see wider na­tion­al sup­port for the na­tion’s two-wheeled war­riors.

Con­cern­ing road safe­ty for cy­clists, she says, “Yes, we have this amaz­ing fa­cil­i­ty but we need to train on the road as well. It’s hard. It’s scary. For the most part, dri­vers some­times are just pret­ty reck­less. They don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly take in­to ac­count that cy­clists are per­sons on the road. So I think that’s what I would like to see more in Trinidad and To­ba­go, aware­ness of peo­ple on the road on bikes.”