World Champion Cyclist Samantha Bosco Rides For Medals And For Family

The racing really started for Paralympic cyclist Samantha Bosco years ago on the picturesque Tony Knowles Coastal Trail in Anchorage, Alaska.

She’d race for quarters.

It was one of those motivating promises a dad makes for a daughter: Pass somebody on the trail and I’ll give you a quarter; if they come back and pass you, no quarter.

Bosco, a 21-time world championships medalist who won a pair of bronze medals in her Paralympic debut in 2016 and captured double gold medals at the last two world championships in the WC4 class, laughs heartily about that childhood memory now at age 36.

“I really had to work to keep that quarter because people would try to race me,” she said. “And I really wanted those quarters.”

Those bike rides along southern Alaska’s Coastal Trial, where moose sightings were common, began a lifelong cycling passion for a Paralympian whose drive for competition is so intense that it carries over to a family meal.

“It’s not just riding bikes that drives her competitive nature,” said her husband, Andrew Bosco. “At a potluck, if everybody doesn’t say they love her dish the most, then the day was a wash.”

Bosco’s cycling began with family and exists precisely that way now.

Samantha’s dad, John Heinrich, raced competitively.

Her mom, Tammie, rode bikes with Samantha on the Coastal Trail.

Samantha met her husband, BMX cyclist Andrew, at a national cycling event. They live in Claremont, California, which is located about 30 miles east of Los Angeles, and Andrew runs Bosco Bike Fits in Claremont.

The holidays mean not only traditions that include home-baked cookies for Santa, but likely a Southern California bike ride just for the fun of it.

“I am always working on traditions and finding ways to make my family smile and spend time with them,” Samantha Bosco said.

Both sides of the family are packed with bike riders, including Andrew’s sister, Angela, and 12-year-old Ryder Merki, a nephew of Andrew who has already competed at a world championships.

“We all grew up together racing BMX,” Angela Merki said. “It’s been a family sport since we were kids.”

The bond is solid.

“It takes people who understand what you’re going through and can help you because they get it is something that I can’t even articulate well enough how much it means to me,” Bosco said. “They get it on that level of understanding because they also ride bikes. They also race. They also know what it takes to be competitive. The amount of recovery. Go to a bike race instead of a family function.”

But it’s more than the competition.

“It’s awesome on that level,” Bosco said, “but it’s also more amazing because I get to spend time with the people I love because they also love doing the same thing I love doing. It makes it easier to get out on your bike and ride because you’re not only doing something you love, you’re doing it with people you love.”

At elementary school age, a potential bus ride to school for Samantha instead became a six-mile bike ride. Born with a posteromedial bow of the right tibia and a calcaneal valgus foot, conditions that caused surgeries at ages 4 and 11, she quickly gravitated toward bike riding.

“Bikes became something my family and I did together to spend time together and to have that fitness and race bikes and nurture that competitiveness in me,” Bosco said.

The Heinriches were a one-car family and John Heinrich was in the U.S. Army serving at Fort Richardson, Alaska, with a work shift that began in the afternoon. So, Samantha and dad would ride their bikes together to school in the morning.

“We made it fun,” John Heinrich said. “It just kind of went from there. We realized how much we love cycling.”

In Anchorage, where the sun doesn’t set until almost midnight in the summer, cycling is one of those common outdoor activities. It was the perfect setting for a future Paralympian.

“Where we lived, it was such a tight-knit community that it felt more like a cycling family,” Bosco said. “I would ride through the trails when I was racing because there weren’t a lot of girls my age racing. People that my dad or my mom always rode with would ride by me and encourage me and congratulate me on riding hard.”

“We all just looked out for each other,” she added. “It was something that was super fun to do because it felt bigger than just riding bikes.”

By the time she was 9 years old, Bosco was racing competitively.

Even after the Heinriches moved to Florida with Samantha and her brother, Samantha’s biking continued to a national level. Then, the biking family grew.

Samantha met Andrew during dinner with friends at a U23 and elite national bike event in 2013. Andrew popped the question one year later, and the two became engaged to be married during the 2014 Para-cycling Road World Championships in Greenville, South Carolina.

They married a year later in California. Bosco’s parents have moved to Claremont, where dad-and-daughter bike rides are happening again. Just maybe not for a 25-cent payoff this time.

“It’s been fun to start riding with my dad again because we haven’t ridden together since Florida,” Bosco said. “It’s been fun to have him here.”

“It’s nice being around Samantha and her husband,” Heinrich said. “I was always riding my bike, but it rekindles my desire to start training again.”

The lifestyle of cycling has found a way of connecting even when the physical separation covers thousands of miles.

When Bosco was in Santiago, Chile, in November for the first time in her life and winning three medals at the Parapan American Games, Andrew and Ryder were competing at the same time in a BMX event in Oklahoma.

Between races, they used online connections to see Bosco’s races in Santiago while Samantha’s parents and Andrew’s parents did the same back home in California. When she crashed in the road race, word spread around this bike family quickly.

“Our worst fears, you know?” Heinrich said.

A phone text soon arrived from Bosco to family members: “Got that out of the way.”

Bosco got up from that crash and battled back through mazes of riders to finish third and win a bronze medal. She also won a pair of gold medals in track and road.

The cheers rose up from Oklahoma, where Ryder, who has been riding since he was 3, checked on Samantha’s Parapan Ams races between his own BMX races alongside Uncle Andrew. They ride together every few weeks in California.

“Super fun,” Ryder said.

“I talk to him all the time when we’re at BMX races together,” Bosco said, “when he needs a little bit of motivation or somebody who understands the pressure of racing bikes.”

Now that the holidays are over, it’ll be back to training for Bosco. She is skipping the year’s first road world cup in Australia scheduled for January, but she’ll compete in the next two world cup events in May on the way toward chasing after a Paralympic Games berth for the Paris Games in 2024. She is one of a handful of U.S. riders who compete in both road and track.

For Bosco, it’ll be a long awaited moment after missing the Paralympic Games Tokyo 2020 due to a skull fracture following a crash in training.

For Andrew, it’ll be vacation time.

“She’s working and I’m on vacation,” Andrew said of his wife’s global biking trips. “It’s given us the chance to see a lot of cool things and go to a lot of amazing places that otherwise most people wouldn’t have had the opportunity to. And it’s all because of riding bikes.”

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.