Paralympic Champ Allison Jones Is Biking Toward Glasgow, Then Paris

The emotions and the aura of Allison Jones’ first Paralympic Games remain strong more than 20 years later.

“I remember kind of that, the excitement of walking into the stadium,” Jones says.

The stadium was in Salt Lake City, host to the Paralympic and Olympic Winter Games in 2002.

“To walk into a stadium that’s filled for you, you can’t replace that,” said Jones, then an alpine skier for Team USA. “We’re not NFL players. We’re not Major League Baseball players. This is a venue where the entire population is out to root for you, and you should take advantage of it.”

Jones won two silver medals in Utah, beginning a remarkable career that has produced eight medals in eight Paralympic Games in two sports: alpine skiing and cycling. In 2012 in London, Jones won her first Paralympic cycling medal, a gold in the time trial WC1-3, to become just the second American woman to win Paralympic medals in both the Summer and Winter Games.

And believe this: the journey is not over.

Jones, now a 39-year-old design engineer, won five medals in road cycling in three world cup stops this year and is determined to make it to Paris next year for her ninth Paralympic Games. In August, she’ll compete in her 14th world championships in cycling.

Jones actually retired from competitive cycling in 2018. And then she didn’t.

“I was bored,” she said.

So she got back on the bike.

“I was looking to get more activity and outside,” Jones said. “So I started picking cycling back up and realized I was still competitive and still had the edge to compete.”

When the Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020 were held in 2021 following a one-year delay because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Jones, who was then working 60-hour weeks installing automation systems, watched a Summer Games on TV for the first time in 20 years.

“Kind of painfully watching,” she said. “Excited for the team to be there, but also the lack of what I thought we could be doing. So the only way to change that is by doing something about it.”

She got in touch with her coach, Ben Sharp.

And by summer 2022, she was back on the world cup road cycling circuit. At the 2022 world championships in Baie-Comeau, Quebec, she finished fourth in the road race and fifth in the time trial, both in the WC2 classification.

“I knew I’d be behind and I knew I was still trying to get better, get my strength back,” Jones said. “Finishing top five in every event was a good relief. I was still way off my mark as far as time goes and had room for improvement there, for sure.”

Improvement arrived in 2023 on the world cup tour. She had five consecutive third-place finishes in three time trials and two road races, including the time trial at the World Cup Final in late May in Huntsville, Alabama. In her only non-podium finish of the season, she finished fourth in the road race in Huntsville, but even that was with the same time (1:51.27) as the top three finishers in the race.

Less than a month after the World Cup Final, the 22-time world medalist was named to her 14th world championship cycling team.

“Just really excited to be a part of the team,” Jones said. “It’s a really good team. … It was really cool to see the team coming together. Meeting new folks and getting to really know them.

“I think worlds is going to be a great highlight of what USA has to put forward come Paris. A lot of athletes are focused on the worlds. I think it’ll be a good showing.”

The UCI Cycling World Championships will be held Aug. 3-13 in Glasgow, Scotland, featuring a unique format in which all of the Para-cycling and able-bodied cycling championship races will be held at the same venue at the same time for the first time.

“It’s fantastic. Absolutely fantastic,” Jones said. “Kind of seeing the inclusion across not only the different sports and men’s, women’s, juniors, but then also Para getting thrown into that mix as well. Really good feeling to have and really good to see that progression happening.”

And then, it’s Paris.

Paris is the driving force for Jones, who has won Paralympic gold medals in both cycling and skiing and just missed the podium with a fourth-place finish in the road race at the Paralympic Games Rio 2016.

“Getting back into Paris has been the number one trajectory of my purpose of training,” Jones said, “but being realistic what can happen between now and then.”

When Jones is not working as a rear-shock design engineer for SRAM, a global bicycling company with one of its locations in her hometown of Colorado Springs, Colorado, she is finalizing adjustments on her two new competitive bikes.

“I’m a seasoned racer,” she said. “It’s all the same. … You show up for race day, you’re prepared or you’re not. You’re ready or you’re not. You just let the execution of the event happen.”

Paul D. Bowker has been writing about Olympic and Paralympic sports since 1996, when he was an assistant bureau chief in Atlanta. He is a freelance contributor to USParaCycling.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.