Sarah Gigante

16 December 2021
Imagen de la noticia ‛Sarah Gigante’

RACING AHEAD OF EXPECTATIONS. She’s as tremendously mature, intelligent, affable and talkative off the roads as she’s promising and powerful on her bike in all terrains. Sarah Gigante is one of the strongest up-and-coming talents in the world, yet she’s also much more than that. A perfect scorer in the VCE, the exams giving access to university in Australia’s Victoria state, she earned a Chancellor’s excellence scholarship from the Melbourne University, where she’s currently studying a double major in Linguistics and Geography. She’s got the right mentality, and more importantly the right environment, to become one of the greats. Her mum, Kerry, and her brother, Scott -who also enjoyed a scholarship like hers and went to study a PhD in Bioinformatics at no less than Yale University- are two of her biggest pieces of support.

TAKING BARRIERS DOWN. After becoming a national, and Oceanic, junior champion in 2018, Sarah did not ‘wait’ for a moment to repeat such feats within the pros: on 6th January 2019, her first official day as an under-23, she claimed the green-and-gold bands in the road race, ahead of all WorldTour competitors. In the two following years, she would claim back-to-back victories in the Time Trial -a title she still holds in the beginning of 2022-, and built, from her home races, a strong starting point and palmarès. She went on to take up European racing in 2021 and opened her victory account there last year, no less than at Irurtzun, the village where the Movistar Team has its origins, on the mountainous first trophy of the Navarra Classics. This was actually her first ever top-ten result in the continent, a further proof she breaks barriers even faster than she climbs.

WASN’T EASY AT ALL. A series of hard crashes and injuries have hampered her performance over the last few years, most notably three: elbow, shoulder and opposite wrist fractures in 2018, when she was still a junior; collarbone, fibula and elbow fractures at a crash in the 2021 Flèche Wallonne, just as she broke through as a pro; and a concussion she took several weeks to recover from at the same race she won, the Emakumeen Nafarroako Klasikoa in 2022. Another hurdle came as she suffered from myopericarditis right after the Olympic Games in Tokyo, a condition that hampered most of her last season. The biggest challenge for her will again be to fully recover in time to enjoy her 2023.