Talent ID Camp Begins a Four-Year Buildup Toward LA 2028 Paralympic Games

After winning a gold medal in her Paralympic debut in Paris and adding two more golds a few weeks later at the world championships in Zurich, Switzerland, handcyclist Kate Brim was still not quite done.

Brim headed to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where she met with up-and-coming Para-cyclists in a Talent ID camp hosted by U.S. Paralympics Cycling at the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Training Center in early October.

“It was great for some of our new athletes to meet her and ride with her,” said Ian Lawless, director of U.S. Paralympics Cycling. “She’s a newly crowned Paralympic champion, and that was really an exciting thing to do as a part of the camp, and have her do some mentoring and all of that.”

The Talent ID camp came after a summer in which U.S. riders won eight medals at the Paralympics, and then nine more at the world championships.

“The Talent ID camp was amazing,” Lawless said. “We had a new crop of younger athletes who were all excited and wanted to talk about Paris and the team.”

Since the Paralympics ended in Paris in early September, interest in joining the U.S. cycling program has been high, Lawless said.

“Since we got back from Paris,” Lawless said, “we’ve had a flood of interest and emails and people contacting us about wanting to get into the sport. Hopefully, that’s all along the back of our success in Paris. Hopefully, we can kind of ride that wave and get some new and undiscovered talent into our pipeline.”

One of those new talents, Elouan Gardon, joined the program as an 18-year-old earlier this year and became the first U.S. cyclist to win a Paralympic medal at this year’s Games when he captured a bronze medal in the men’s 4,000-meter individual pursuit MC5.

“He handled himself years beyond his 18 years age,” Lawless said of the teen from Acme, Washington. “He was awesome. To win a medal on the track, our only track medal, but also in what was really one of the hardest classes in Para-cycling, was huge. And he represented himself pretty well on the road, as well. Really proud of Elouan.”

Interest in the cycling programs could rise even more as the 2028 Paralympic Games in Los Angeles get closer. It will be the first U.S. Summer Games since Atlanta 1996.

“We hope to have every competitive advantage we can in it being a home Games,” Lawless said. “What I see already, just from talking to our athletes who had success in Paris, I think it will prolong the careers of some of our athletes, who, maybe if we weren’t hosting a home Games in four years, would be retiring.”

The LA Games, Lawless said, “is an opportunity for them to race at home.”

Among those athletes is two-time Paralympian Samantha Bosco, a Southern Californian who won her first Paralympic gold medal in the time trial WC4 in Paris and then added gold and silver medals at the world championships.

“It’s my own backyard,” Bosco said. “It would kind of be foolish to not want to go to LA, or to not try to go to LA.”

That’ll make Lawless happy.

“I expect she will continue because she will race right there in her backyard,” he said.

Bosco, who lives in Claremont, California, and has already marched as a “Hometown Hero” in a parade there, has cycled on the roads that go past the famed Hollywood sign in Los Angeles and the Queen Mary in Long Beach. On the track, she has trained and competed at the VELO Sports Center in Carson, which is located south of Los Angeles and will be the venue used for the track cycling events at the Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2028.

“It is home,” she said. “I’ve ridden these streets.”

Other returning Paralympians could include Jamie Whitmore, Shawn Morelli, Clara Brown and 19-time Paralympic medalist Oksana Masters, who has won double gold medals in cycling at the last two Paralympic Games.

“I think we’ve got opportunities for our strongest athletes to continue their careers,” Lawless said, “but also some opportunities to showcase our new and up-and-coming athletes, and some new athletes we may not even be aware of yet. And that’s the other thing, we’re really hoping that the awareness and the exposure that Paris created for the Paralympic Games will start to bring out some of the next generation of Para-cyclists.”

The beginning of the four-year quad toward the LA Games is, for now, a mystery. The UCI World Cup tour for road cycling, which usually consists of three competitions, has not yet been announced. What is known is that Belgium will host the 2024 road world championships in August and Huntsville, Alabama, will host the 2026 road world championships.

In the meantime, some time off is welcomed.

“It was certainly a long summer and a long year for us,” Lawless said. “Our team of Para-cycling athletes, we’ve been sort of going full tilt since Pan Am Games in Santiago, which was November of last year. We pretty much had competition either here in the U.S. or abroad every month since then, culminating in Paris.”

Paul D. Bowker has been writing about Olympic 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.