THE ABUNDANT JOY OF AYESHA MCGOWAN

In 2021, she made history by becoming the first African-American woman to make the pro-road-racing ranks. The astonishing, heroic story of achieving a wildly ambitious dream-and all that comes after.

- CARVELL WALLACE

"I usually go into things without knowing what I'm getting into," Ayesha McGowan tells me as she dumps a pile of flour into a bowl without measuring it. "And I'm fine with that." She is in her apartment kitchen just outside Girona, Spain, attempting to make pancakes while converting imperial measurements to metric in her head. "Close enough," she says, eyeballing the mound. "If it was my grandma, she wouldn't do the math."

It is fall 2022 and I have made the trek from California to Spain to spend time with a person who is one of the only African American professional women cyclists on the planet. Which is amazing when you consider that 12 years ago, she was a commuter who just liked riding her bike around and found that she was good at it. Working as a preschool teacher in the Bed-Stuy neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, it began to occur to her that Black women were practically nonexistent in professional cycling.

Most people would have left it at that. That's stupid. I hope that changes one day. Perhaps some of us might have followed an Instagram account, or donated to a Black-girls-on-bikes type program. But Ayesha McGowan is not like most people. She decided ("overnight") to remedy the situation herself and set out to become the first African-American woman professional cyclist in modern history.

This morning, the 5-foot-3 McGowan is lounging at the apartment she shares with her husband, William Loyd, wearing a cycling cap, a sleeveless tee that reads "representation matters," and a pair of statement glasses of which she seems to have an endless supply (today's feature square rims with a rainbow pattern). She exudes an easygoing confidence.