Sofía Gómez Villafañe is a leading American gravel cyclist who broke through with a win at Unbound Gravel 2022 on her first attempt. The result cemented her place among the top gravel racers in the United States after a nontraditional start that began with a used bike her brother found on Craigslist. Sofía shares how her success is driven by clear goal setting, small process driven steps, and a systematic approach to long term performance.
Sofía Gómez Villafañe is a leading American gravel cyclist who broke through with a win at Unbound Gravel 2022 on her first attempt. The result cemented her place among the top gravel racers in the United States after a nontraditional start that began with a used bike her brother found on Craigslist. Sofía shares how her success is driven by clear goal setting, small process driven steps, and a systematic approach to long term performance.
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Shelby Stanger:
Over the past two decades, gravel cycling has exploded in popularity and competitiveness. In 2022, Sofía Gómez Villafañe made a splash when she won a prestigious race called Unbound on her very first attempt. Every year, thousands of cyclists convene for this event in the Flint Hills of eastern Kansas. The dry soil and rocky terrain there make an ideal proving ground for gravel cycling. Winning Unbound positioned Sofía as one of the best gravel racers in the US, but her journey to the top has been a little unconventional. She started competing as a teenager with a bike her brother found on Craigslist. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. Sofía Gómez Villafañe, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. It's really good to have you here. You've raced and won some of the hardest gravel courses on Earth, and I think we should start with the Craigslist story. Tell me the day you got a bike on Craigslist and how you got into it.
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
Yeah, well, first of all, thanks for having me on. Excited to be on the podcast. Yeah, so I grew up in Argentina and then I moved Stateside, my mom's American, so it was a pretty easy transition to move to the U.S. And I have a bajillion siblings, so I'm the fifth of sixth. And one of my older brothers, he was always super into outdoor activities, where it was skiing, kayaking, rock climbing, cycling, anything outdoors he was all about.
And he discovered this program that was basically these group of kids from each high school would get together and train, and then every weekend they would go somewhere and compete against each other. It was a way of having cycling as a high school sport, which is not a normal thing. Normally it's soccer, lacrosse, swimming, track, football, all those things. He got my sister to race, I was always going to the races because my parents weren't going to leave me home alone. So it wasn't necessarily a, "Hey, are you going to race or not?" I was like, well, I'm going to these events anyway, so might as well participate. And yeah, my brother found me this bike from Craigslist, and it was super light and it was really cool, but it wasn't anything too fancy. But yeah, that was my first race bike.
Shelby Stanger:
How old were you when you actually came to the States, and then how old were you when you got that first bike?
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
When we moved to the States, I was 12, so I got to do middle school and high school, and then I started cycling right when I got into high school.
Shelby Stanger:
Was that a pretty big transition for you, coming from Argentina to the United States?
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
Huge. And I think that transition really formed me who I am as a person because it's not necessarily that you have to grow up so quickly, but you just learn a lot of life lessons and there's certain things that I kick myself for. My understanding of America was everything that I saw in movies and I thought it was like the mean girls, the popular girls, the jockeys and all that stuff. It wasn't quite like that, but I also didn't really enjoy having an accent, so I worked really, really hard to get rid of it, and now I wish I would've kept it, because I think it just adds... I just think it's cool to be different and to be honest, that was one of the things that really attracted me to cycling was the fact that it was a sport that not a lot of people did and not a lot of girls did as well. So it kind of just, yeah, it really appealed to me the idea of this is something different and something that not a lot of people are doing. And yeah, you get to be outdoors all day.
Shelby Stanger:
Sofía started competing at an elite level when she was just a teenager and her early success sparked a dream of turning the sport into a career. By her junior year in high school, she was already racing in the Mountain Bike World Cup.
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
I went to go race a World Cup, which happened to be on the east coast of the US and I finished dead last and I was like, oh man, maybe I'm not cut out to do this as a job. I am not that good.
Shelby Stanger:
After that race, Sofía put her professional cycling dreams on hold and focused on school. She enrolled at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, where she studied exercise science and led the school's bike team. In her spare time, she participated in local cyclo-cross races. That's where she met her coach Carmen, who helped her rekindle her dream of going pro.
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
Within cycling, there's all these different disciplines, and then there's this one called cyclo-cross that it's done in the late fall, early winter to late winter I would say. And it's a really small circuit and you do a bunch of laps and your race is no longer than like 45 minutes to an hour. And this woman, Carmen Small, who lived in Durango where I was going to school, she was a professional road racer. She won a world championship title and team time trial. And then I think one year she got a bronze medal at the individual time trial. So super badass lady, and she would jump into these cross races just for fun and to train, and I would get to race her.
And anytime it was a technical course or there was mud, I would beat her pretty good, but then if it was a fast fitness race, then she would beat me. So we kind of had this kind of rivalry going on and one day she just approached me and she was like, "Hey, who's coaching you?" And I was like, "Oh, I'm not being coached by anybody. I am going to school full time. I am financially independent, so I have a 20 hour a week job that I have to do, and if I'm paying a coach 100 to $300 a month, that's more hours I have to work and those are the hours that I currently have to ride my bike."
So she was like, well, she's like, "I'd be interested in just coaching you for free. I had so many people through my career help me out, and I think you're talented, so let's talk about it." And I was like, she wants to coach me so I stopped beating her at these races. And then another race week goes by and she nudges me again and she's like, "Come over for coffee. Let's just come over, sit down, let's have a conversation." So I went over to her house and she kind of sat me down and that's when she was like, "I think you have all the talent to go to the Olympics. You just have to train, because you're not really training. All your results that you have are running on pure talent."
So I was like, "Sure, I'll give it a try". And yeah, that fall I won collegiate cyclo-cross nationals and then I got second in the U23, went to the world championships and I was like, oh, let's keep this going for the spring season and see how it goes. And every year we just kept working together and by now she's one of my best friends. She was a bridesmaid at my wedding recently. And yeah, it's kind of crazy to just have somebody see talent and be willing to invest their time into seeing that person succeed. And to this day, there's a lot of people that got me to ride a bike and helped me in the early stages, but she's the one that created me into the cyclist that I am today.
Shelby Stanger:
Under Carmen's guidance, Sofía qualified for the 2021 Tokyo Olympics where she represented Argentina and cross-country mountain biking. But despite competing on the world's biggest stage, she found the experience less fulfilling than she'd expected, and afterward she felt ready for a new challenge. The following year, Sofía discovered gravel racing, a discipline that was a perfect mix of strength, agility, and endurance. Gravel races can stretch anywhere from 50 to 200 miles, often lasting over 10 hours. They usually take place in the countryside, jumping between paved dirt and gravel roads. In her very first season of the sport, Sofía won Unbound, the premier race in gravel cycling.
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
2022, I won Unbound for the first time. First time doing the event to win it was a pretty big statement, and I had gone from racing 90-minute races to now I won a race in 10 and a half hours, that was 200 miles.
Shelby Stanger:
Finishing in the top 10 at Unbound can be a career defining moment. The fact that she won on her first attempt put Sofía on the map, and it drew a lot of attention from the cycling industry. Since then, Sofía has also won three first place titles at the Lifetime Grand Prix, a prestigious series that spans both mountain and gravel cycling.
What have you learned about yourself over the course of this big career in cycling?
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
That's a good question. I think what I've learned about myself is I put my full trust in the people that I choose to be a part of my team. So where that's my cycling coach, my strength coach, nutritionist, whatever it is, I never think I'm the smartest person in the room. I like to surround myself with people that are smarter than me, and when they're telling me, "Okay, you should try this, you should try that," I am willing to try it and see if I like it or not, rather than just make the assumption of like, oh no, that's not for me. I'm just willing to trust that my coach knows what's best, and if she tells me today I'm taking it off, I'm taking it off, and she tells me today I'm riding four hours, I will ride four hours. I won't ride five.
Shelby Stanger:
That's amazing. You are a good listener. I was never that good of a listener. If like someone told me to ride only four hours, I would ride five or three. That's amazing.
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
And I think especially in our little bubble of cycling, there's this trend of doing more. Obviously our biggest race of the year is Unbound 200, 200 mile race in Emporia, Kansas, and it takes us 10 and a half plus hours. It could be up to like 12 if it's a muddy year. And a lot of the girls are going out and training eight, nine, 10 hours on the bike a day, and my longest ride is six hours. I'll race for longer, but I don't train more than six hours. But yeah, I don't care to compare my training with what other people are doing, because each athlete is so different and we're so individual that what works for me isn't going to necessarily work for you.
Shelby Stanger:
Well, that's interesting. I mean, there is a big theory that you're training less but harder will help you win longer races. I mean, you've won on down gravel, which is the 200-mile race, which probably took you what, 10 hours or?
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
10 and a half that year.
Shelby Stanger:
10 and a half. So how does that work?
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
I think with my coach, we have this theory that you need to be able to train half of the time that your race is. So if you're doing a 12-hour day for your peak race, as long as you can sustain half of that and you do six hours in training, you're good for a single session. But we just don't care to match the training hour to the race hour.
Shelby Stanger:
Cycling is one of the hardest sports in the world. You have to be so fit and precise, so disciplined. It's also like it takes you places. You get to see cool things. Is there a place where you just love riding because the landscape is so stunning?
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
Trying to figure out how to answer that question. Because I don't say I ride my bike, I train on my bike. It's very rare that I have these epic adventures, just go ride your bike. The majority of my time on the bike is very specifically focused on achieving something.
That being said, my sister got married last year in Argentina and we flew down and kind of extended our time there to do a bit of a training camp, and it was in my hometown, and I got to discover the place that I grew up in through the means of the way that I live my life now. So it was really cool to go back to my hometown and ride all of these roads and go to these lakes and experience the place that I grew up, that I have so many memories that weren't of the bike and get to connect them now of like, oh, that epic mountain that we used to go up to go ski, I can now ride my bike to the top of that hill, or I can do this really big loop that used to be a pretty big adventure when I would go in the car with my dad to go fish at a certain spot.
So that was probably the best, most unique experience I've had of just kind of getting to go back to the place that shaped me into the person that I am today and experience it through cycling.
Shelby Stanger:
When gravel cyclist Sofía Gómez Villafañe lines up for a race, she's preparing to cover hundreds of miles over dusty roads and rocky trails. These events can be hot, muddy, and physically punishing, with long mountain climbs and fast technical descents. But Sofía thrives in those conditions. They're part of what she loves about the sport. She's more concerned with the big picture of how these races are structured. Because her husband is also a professional gravel cyclist, Sofía has had a front row seat to the disparities in how men and women are treated in the sport.
You've been really outspoken about separating men's and women's races. Why does that matter to you?
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
I think the biggest reason why I was the loudest voice in advocating for separate starts for men and women is because at the end of the day, I would do a race and I would come home and talk to my now husband about his race, and we were in the same race, yet the way that our races unfolded were completely different.
Shelby Stanger:
For many years, men and women started these races together in massive packs. As the miles wore on and the terrain grew tougher, the pack would splinter into smaller groups known as selections.
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
A selection is like, let's say there's 100 of you and then you go up this five minute climb, and obviously some people are faster, some people are slower, and then the group kind of tends to break into two, three, four, whatever groups.
Shelby Stanger:
Selections matter because of a technique called drafting. When you're racing behind someone, they block the wind, allowing you to conserve a significant amount of energy. Because men generally ride at faster speeds, a woman who can draft behind the right group of male riders can gain an advantage over her competitors.
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
I just wanted to have fair racing with the women, and I wanted it to be like, no, I won this race because I was the strongest female and not because I got lucky on making this group of men, and then they kind of towed me around for another 100 miles or whatnot. And I also really understand a lot of the business side of the sport, and a lot of the women were struggling to get coverage because when you're starting in the mass pack 1st through 10th place, women could really be separated by 20 or 30 minutes because we're making all these selections with the men. Where the men's racing, the top 20, 30 are a lot closer together. So as a sponsor, why would I sponsor a 10th place in the women when I'm not going to get much coverage when I can sponsor a 10th place in the men and actually get some visibility? So I think it was just having such a clear view of the inequality from race experience to earning potentia,l really.
Shelby Stanger:
That makes sense. Is that changing or is it-
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
Yeah, it definitely has changed. The big series that we do in the US called the Lifetime Grand Prix, all of those events, women have their own start. And then they also implemented drafting rules, which was part two of my advocacy because I'm like, okay, you give a separate start, but once we start to get mingled with really fast amateurs or slower pro men, we're back to the same thing. So they introduced that this year and they had a lot of success with it and their biggest thing was how do we enforce this? And they were always thinking, okay, worst case scenario, but they actually never really had any problems with people from different groups drafting each other. So it kept the racing super nice and fair.
But yeah, it's been crazy. At first, since my very first gravel race, I really advocated for separate starts, no drafting rules. And a lot of the girls that were already racing, they were like, "No, it's the ethos of the event is you have to keep it together." And a year or two go by, and those same women that wanted to keep it together were just as vocal as I was about needing to have a separate race because they finally understood just how unequal our experience is to that of the pro men. And some of those girls went up to far to say, "I'm not racing a race unless we have a separate start." So it's been cool to see all the things that I thought would be really crucial, get introduced and just be so successful.
Shelby Stanger:
What made Sofía's advocacy notable was that it didn't necessarily benefit her personally. She thrives in fast, aggressive racing, and she can often hold her own alongside male competitors, but Sofía understood that for women's gravel racing to grow both as a sport and in sponsorship opportunities, the athletes needed the chance to compete on their own terms. Taking a stand meant pushing back against the status quo and at times risking unpopularity. It's a different kind of battle, but one that uses the same mental toughness she's developed throughout her athletic career. What's your mentality when things get hard or aren't going well?
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
Yeah, I'm lucky enough that I don't get to have that many bad days on the bike. I don't know how my coach has quite sorted that out for me. But yeah, I mean, there's certain days that you have high hopes for a performance and maybe the body isn't there. And that's when I turned to like, well, let's do the best that I can on today. And maybe it's not going for the win and it's let's be more conservative and try to salvage a 5th place or a 6th place or whatever the best will be on that day. But then I also often need to remind myself that if I am suffering, everybody else is suffering. And I don't think I often give myself the credit of just how good of an athlete I am, and I just think everybody else is better than me, even though my resume says otherwise.
I definitely don't race with the confidence that I probably should all the time having the resume that I do. But I also am the type of individual that always thrives in that underdog mentality. Yeah, I don't know. I'm a very honest person and I have such a good relationship with my coach. She's my coach, and I joke that she's also part-time therapist, just because we have such a good relationship and I can really open up and tell her on the things that I'm going through my head. That being said, I've gone through not having the best public image on social just because I was part of this series that they kind of made me the villain. And I've been working really hard to show people the true Sofía of like, yeah, I am a cutthroat racer when I'm within the tape, but that is a very different Sofía. That is the Sofía that's doing her job, fulfilling what she needs to her sponsors, and it's not the same as off the bike Sofía.
Shelby Stanger:
How do you deal with that? The athletes 20 years ago didn't have to deal with social media, they just could be athletes. Now you have to be all these things.
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
Yes.
Shelby Stanger:
And as a woman who's trying to win, you're doing everything you can to win. And sometimes that perception isn't like... I don't know, it's kind of a double standard. It's kind of lame.
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
Oh, without a doubt. And I think, again, going back to me really seeing the inequality between my husband and I, like for all the things that he's praised for, I do the same and I'm criticized. So it's like he works really hard and I don't know how to have fun, or I take it too serious. So it definitely gets me all fired up because I'm like, "Well, this is not fair."
And I think you don't often get female personalities that are strong, and I've been a very confident person. And confidence in women, there's a very fine line between that is a confident woman and perceived as that is a [inaudible 00:22:04] woman. So yeah, I've definitely felt the double standard a lot. And now I've done things, like you can limit who can comment on your social. So that's one of the most recent things I did. I've limited that. So it's like if you want to go and bully me on social media, at least follow me and you have to wait a week. So yeah, social media can be really fulfilling in a lot of ways, but it can also crush a lot of people.
Shelby Stanger:
Balancing criticism and double standards while showing up to race at the highest level isn't easy. But Sofía refuses to let any of it dull her ambition or shake her confidence.
You're kind of a woman that goes after wild ideas and gets them no matter what, you're just going to make it happen.
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
Yeah. And I have this quote that I often say, it's like, I'm not a dreamer. I don't have dreams, because I find dreams to not really be real and achievable, but a goal. If you set a goal, you can set processes and baby goals to get you to that big goal. And it's like, okay, if then if you do this, then you do that. And then once you do that, you can do this. And kind of that systematic approach is something that I thrive in and very much my type of personality. So I am a big fan of setting big goals and kind of getting after them.
Shelby Stanger:
What's your big goal for next year?
Sofía Gómez Villafañe:
I really want to win Unbound again, mainly because I put an asterisk on the year that I won it because it wasn't a separate start, no drafting rules, and I really want to win it from a women's only race experience. And yeah, I'm really hungry for another one of those titles.
Shelby Stanger:
To follow Sofía's Adventures and upcoming race season, find her on Instagram at @sofithevilla, that's S-O-F-I-T-H-E-V-I-L-L-A. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI podcast network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Piers Nitzberg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Motila and Joe Crosby. Thanks again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard. As always, we love it when you follow the show, take time to rate it and write a review wherever you listen. And remember, some of the best adventures happen when you follow your wildest ideas.