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American Evelyn Stevens breaks UCI hour record

Riding at the Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center Velodrome, on her home country’s soil, the 32-year-old athlete made good on her plans to beat Bridie O'Donnell's January record.

On Saturday, Feb. 27, American rider Evelyn Stevens rolled out in Colorado Springs, Colorado with plans to break the women’s UCI hour record, hoping to eclipse the standard set on Jan. 22 by Australian cyclist Bridie O’Donnell. Riding at the Colorado Springs Olympic Training Center Velodrome, on her home country’s soil, the 32-year-old athlete made good.

Her performance, topping O’Donnell’s distance of 46.882 km, took her an officially-declared 47.980 km—making her the second American female cyclist to hold the record.

From the beginning of her ride to the end, Stevens held down a steady, sustained speed of 48 km/h, impressing observers and officials with her unflagging power. Starting conservatively, her first lap was clocked at 31.4 seconds. Within 15 minutes of her start, she had dropped that number to 25 seconds—a time that, despite a couple of wobbly moments near the halfway mark of the hour, she’d maintain until the finish.

Notably, her decisive achievement also makes her the first female challenger of the UCI hour record to break through a ceiling of 47 kilometers for the ride. In 2003, Leontien van Moorsel set a long-enduring record of 46.065 km, which was finally broken by U.S. cyclist Molly Shaffer Van Houweling in September 2015 with a record of 46.273 km, twelve years later. That record was broken by O’Donnell last month.

Watching Evelyn Stevens become the new record-holder made Saturday a “fantastic day for women’s cycling,” observers said. Stevens, meanwhile, said that “the coolest thing about today is all of the support.”