Paralympians Allison Jones, Jamie Whitmore To Hit The Gravel Down Under

A love of gravel racing, and a longtime friendship, will keep Paralympic cyclists Jamie Whitmore and Allison Jones Down Under for a few extra summer days this month.

Whitmore and Jones are among 16 U.S. cyclists who took part in the first road world cup event of the season Jan. 13-17 in Adelaide, Australia.

When they discovered the RADL GRVL event beginning in Adelaide one day after the world cup finished up, choosing to stick around the coast of southern Australia in the midst of the summer season was an easy option.

“I’m staying longer so that I can spend more time riding a bike and actually enjoy 80-degree weather,” said Jones, an eight-time Paralympian in both alpine skiing and cycling. “Enjoy what it has to offer. We’re already traveling all the way there, may as well take advantage of it.”

The RADL GRVL event, which is three days long and starts out Thursday (Jan. 18), covers 130 kilometers of gravel and sealed roads in and around Adelaide — which is located about 850 miles west of Sydney, the 2000 Paralympic and Olympic host city. The race is the latest in the SBT GRVL tour of races, which began in 2019 as an annual event in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, and has grown to host 3,000 cyclists from 30 countries.

Jones previously biked in the GRVL races in Steamboat Springs.

Whitmore, who was an able-bodied mountain biker before she took on road Para-cycling, lives for these opportunities.

“To me, the appeal of gravel riding and gravel racing and even mountain biking is that you take cars out of the equation,” Whitmore said. “And you get to spread out. When we go do this, we get to ride next to each other and don’t have to worry about moving for another car. We can just ride.”

The GRVL is more of a ride than it is a race. Jones and Whitmore will likely bike along next to each other. In Para-cycling events, they compete in similar classes, Jones in WC2 and Whitmore in WC3.

“We work well together,” Jones said. “We ride at a similar enough pace that we’re not dragging each other around. We have a good time.”

The friendship developed before the Paralympic Games Rio 2016 when Whitmore, who had to learn to walk again following a number of surgeries and chemotherapy treatments to treat sarcoma, started to ride as a Para-cyclist. Prior to the cancer diagnosis, Whitmore was the most successful woman on the XTERRA mountain bike tour with six national championships and a world title.

“She (Jones) was definitely one of the first people, first teammate that I started racing with and really showed me the ropes of Para and what to expect come my first Paralympics,” Whitmore said. “We used to work a lot together in road racing because we do have similar riding styles.”

At Rio, Jones and Whitmore competed in both road and track cycling. Whitmore won a gold medal in the road race. Jones retired after the Rio Paralympics, but then returned to competitive cycling, and the two could be together later this year at the Paralympic Games Paris 2024.

The friendship is why spending a few more days in Australia was just so obvious.

“I was going to stay two days, then she convinced me to stay another two days,” Jones said.

“It was not hard to talk her into staying longer,” Whitmore said with a laugh.

Both have turned cycling into a way to see the world.

“It’s why we ride bikes, it’s why we race them,” Whitmore said. “We want to go see other countries and other cultures.”

The trip is Jones’ first trip to Australia since the U.S. Para-cycling team competed in Sydney in 2012.

Whitmore won silver medals in the road race and time trial at the 2023 Parapan American Games in November, but Jones took that time to prepare for the early world cup in Australia. Two more world cup events, all of them Paralympic Games qualifiers, follow in May in Europe.

“Every opportunity to race with the team and race under similar circumstances to the Games or to the big events is very important,” Jones said. “I may not go in physically as I might be peaking wise, say from May or selection events, because it’s not the right time of year. But at the same time I’m not going in there untrained. I’ve been training all year, ever since getting back from Scotland (for the 2023 world championships), only took one or two weeks of doing my own riding and my own schedule. Shortly after that, it was right back into the training plan and what we need to do to be ready for next year.”

And riding on gravel? That’s almost perfect for Jones, an eight-time Paralympic medalist who won a gold in both cycling and skiing, and Whitmore, the mountain biker who took up sit skiing in the past year.

“She comes from a skiing background and I come from a mountain biking background. There are still are very few athletes that can ride to the level that we can through technical stuff,” Whitmore said. “It translates really well into gravel and mountain bike, for sure.”

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.