Bad Pony Racing Are Uplifting Queer and Non-binary Athletes. It Looks Fun As Hell.
I spoke with the team’s co-founder about fixed gear bicycles, building a gender-inclusive racing team in New York City, their new bike sponsor, and the rampant misogyny in cycling.
Leg Day is a newsletter about the pursuit of joy as a city cyclist. Today, a profile of Bad Pony Racing, a fixed gear racing team created to uplift the voices of Women, Trans, and Femmme (WTF) athletes, and one of its co-founders, Lana Pochiro.
Some people choose that fixie life, others have it thrust upon them. Such was the fate of Lana Pochiro, who was doored about four years ago. The accident totaled the relatively flimsy hybrid commuter they had gotten from Walmart, leaving them bikeless. So when a pal offered to lend them the spare fixed gear bike they weren’t using, Lana accepted. And just like that, a new fixie fanatic was minted.
There are a few elements that make fixed gear bikes odd choices for life in a city. Definitionally, a fixed gear bike lacks the freewheel or freehub that allows its rider to coast—if a fixie is moving, so are its pedals. Fixies also lack gearing, which means if you find yourself huffing up a hill, there’s no cog to shift down to that will make the effort a little easier. More eye-brow raising: many fixed gear bikes do not have brakes.
When I first started riding in the city, I couldn’t understand why anyone in their right mind would choose to ride a bike without these basic technologies. But as I’ve learned more about fixies and actually met people who ride them, I’ve come to understand that there is a higher question above my basic safety concerns. When you strip a bike of its gears and brakes, what do you gain?
When we spoke earlier this year, Lana told me they grew up riding horses. A fixed gear bike, they said, requires of its rider the same kind of active relationship a jockey has to a horse. “You have to work with it, It’s not just a tool you’re using to get the job done like a road bike. A fixed gear bike manipulates you as much as you manipulate it.”
It also helps that fixed gear bikes are far easier to work on than road bikes, especially when you compare the highest-tier offerings. Free of internal cabling, derailleurs that can bend (or run out of battery), and integrated seat posts, a fixed gear bike is actually quite simple to maintain. “I’ve built all my fixed gear bikes myself,” Lana said.
This at least in part explains why the fixed gear bike has long been the preferred ride of the bike messenger—they are both more affordable and more reliable. They’re also plenty fast. For decades, fixie riders have been proving this time and time during community organized alley cat races, which both test a riders ability to quickly find fast routes between provided checkpoints and the amount of power they can put into their pedals. As someone who recently entered an alley cat on a very fancy road bike and still only managed to come in 51st place, I can confirm that there is only so much speed you can buy.
Pochiro got their first taste of racing a few years ago in the New York alley cat scene. Soon after, another cyclist asked whether they had heard of the Kissena Velodrome. Built in 1962 in part to host the 1964 Olympic Trials, the track has gone through several cycles of boom and bust, but has been the site of regular races for much of recent history.
Lana’s first experience entering the adjacent world of track cycling proved a bit frustrating. The bike they had been borrowing was a road bike that had been converted into a fixie, which meant it wasn’t technically track legal. After they were allowed to race anyway, Lana fully caught the bug. “I hopped on Craigslist, found a frame, and used the rest of my savings to build a bike to go racing,” they said.
“The culture of fixed gear racing is really cool,” Lana said. “It doesn’t feel as pay to play as other road bike races feel.” You can certainly spend a lot of money on a fixed gear bike, and upgrade it with ultralight components and high performance wheels and tires, but these alterations don’t feel as much like a differentiator on repeated laps of a short track as they might over a 150 mile road race with 11,000 ft of elevation gain. “That’s a big deal for me,” Lana said. “I want to know that when I win, it’s because I worked hard and trained well and made the right decisions, not because I was able to drop more money on a bike.”
During Lana’s first season of racing at the Kissena Velodrome in 2023, the UCI, cycling’s global governing body, decided to adapt its rules about transgender women. Going forward trans women that went through puberty before transitioning would be barred from competing in the women’s categories. The change sent a chill through the entire New York racing community, making Lana and their friends more actively aware of how many sanctioned events felt like “unfriendly territory” where they’d experience a lot of misogyny.
Cycling certainly has a misogyny problem. Nearly all female and non-binary cyclists have a story about being harassed by pedestrians for their lycra, run off the road by aggressive drivers, or even followed home by other cyclists. Female cyclists that do decide to try and turn pro will discover a far less robust development pipeline than that available to their male counterparts. As Alex Showerman wrote in Outside after the UCI decision, young talented female cyclists do not currently get the same opportunities to experience professional courses, ride equipment designed for their bodies, or train with programs designed for their needs.
The situation doesn’t improve much for the few that make it to the women’s World Tour, which was only officially established in 19981. Women in the pro peloton get paid on average less than a fifth the salaries of their male counterparts. As more evidence there are larger barriers to fairness in women’s sports than biology, the organizers of the Tour de France didn’t bother to establish an equivalent stage race for the women until 2022.2 And it’s still less than half as long!3
Those who seek to bar trans women from competing in women’s sports often say they are doing so to make the sport more fair for cis women. Many ostensibly liberal folks in the United States accept this, even though, as journalist Erin Reed points out, it is a concession to the social conservative desire that trans women not be treated as women. In a piece from 2024, Erin quotes Terry Schilling, the leader of the American Principles Project, which has long advocated for anti-trans policies. From Erin:
The “sports issue,” [Schilling] explained, was merely a gateway to making broader anti-trans policies more acceptable to both policymakers and the public. “The women’s sports issue was really the beginning point in helping expose all this because what it did was, it got opponents of the LGBT movement comfortable with talking about transgender issue [sic],” said Schilling, confirming that the bans were never about sports but rather about setting the stage for a larger fear campaign that continues to grip the Republican Party.
By the end of 2022, 18 Republican-controlled states had passed bans on transgender sports participation. By the end of the next year, Erin says, each has gone on to “enact some of the most draconian anti-trans laws in history. These include bans on gender-affirming care for trans youth, laws prohibiting drag and shutting down Pride parades, bathroom bans, restrictions forcing trans teachers to go by incorrect pronouns, and even measures to deny transgender people accurate driver’s licenses and birth certificates … the sports bans ignited a wildfire, emboldening lawmakers to escalate their attacks.”
At a certain point, Lana and their friends decided something had to be done to fight back against further attempts to push trans women out of the sport. Late in the 2023 season, they joined with Mia Guthart and Lido Baldwin to form Bad Pony Racing, a fixed gear racing team that would center Women, Trans, and Femme4 cyclists. “Our primary goal is to get more people out there, and do it with an eye for inclusion,” Lana said. There aren’t currently any trans women on the team, but all of the members are committed to the same idea that all women should be able to participate in sport without facing harassment and discrimination.
The team is one of the few in the New York City area that regularly post messages expressing its support of trans athletes. This simple act puts them in a shockingly small group. I could only find historic evidence of similar support from three other local teams: All.Ways Cycling Club, Continental Ostroy, and BeCyclocross. I am sure there are others that I don’t know of (alert me to your favorites, please!), but I am disappointed to see very little explicit allyship from many of the men’s teams5. Given how few trans adults there actually are in the country (the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law estimates they make up about 0.5% of the population), and how aggressively they are being targeted by discriminatory policies, cis folks like me simply have to speak up for them. And honestly, that’s the bare minimum!
Last year, Lana and the rest of the Bad Pony squad focused their energy on establishing a roster of racers and getting a kit sponsor, so that everyone could race in appropriate and matching garb. “It was important to us that everybody who wanted to be on the team didn’t have to put in a huge amount of money in order to actually feel like a part of it,” Lana said. In its first year, the team managed to get an initial investment from non-local sponsors, which gave them money to hold two free community events, including a clinic in the Kissena Velodrome. They have since found more long-term support from Williamsburg bike shop Two Seas Cyclery and vegan banana bread brand Dank Brooklyn.
Then, this February, the team announced it had a new sponsor in Priority Bicycles. Priority is mainly known as the loudest proponent of bikes that employ belt-drives and integrated rear wheel hubs instead of traditional chains and cassettes. The shifting systems tend to be a bit heavier on the former bikes, but require a lot less daily maintenance.
The partnership came organically, after Lana met Priority co-founder Connor Swegle at the Harlem Skyscraper criterium race last year. “I reached out to him and asked if they would be interested in sponsoring kits and putting some funds toward events.”
Connor responded quickly. “It was an easy decision to work with them and it has been a treat to get to learn more about them. They have a team-first environment, celebrate each other’s progress, and invite more riders into a cycling community that can be intimidating from the outside.” In addition to helping with sponsorship, Connor offered to get each member of the team a Joker, its relatively new (and only) fixed gear track bicycle. The alloy bike, with a carbon fork, wheels, and Gates CDX belt drive Connor says is efficient and offers great control.
For Lana, the bike sponsorship has allowed the team to more fully pursue its mission of improving access to fixed gear racing. Many of the original members of the team have really nice bikes they’ve been able to build up over the last few years, but the Priority bikes represented a huge upgrade for some of the newer Ponies. “One of my teammates had gotten his wheel set off the street out of a dumpster … the sponsorship was really helpful to get people a little boost in their racing career” they said.
The team has employed the new bikes to great success in the early part of the season. Even though a few race days have been rained out, both Mia and new team member Youngin Lim have managed to podium a race on the Velodrome in their respective fields. Maybe more important, several members of the team took the bikes to Monstertrack, the New York City alley cat equivalent of Paris Roubaix, and finished unscathed.
Before any of that, however, I had the chance to join the team for one of its practice sessions. On a gloomy Saturday morning, I made the trek from Crown Heights over Newtown Creek into Queens. I hastily housed a bagel sandwich, then made my way to Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. I took a brief, unexpected detour back onto the streets before finally arriving at Kissena Park. It took me far longer than I would like to admit to find the actual entrance of the Velodrome, but after walking through some extremely muddy trails and making my way around a baseball diamond, I made it to the promised land.
I arrived to find a small squad of Ponies already assembled. I watched as they executed a typical practice session, beginning with laps at smooth steady tempos that eventually erupted into raucous, gleeful one-versus-one sprints. Throughout their practice, I took note of how the more experienced members of the team shared feedback, gently helping the more fresh racers attain a more aerodynamic position, encouraging everyone to take breaks for water, hollering at the top of their lungs as people emptied their tanks into arbitrary finish lines.
There was really only one contentious moment: when the group was trying to decide where to go for a post-workout lunch. It felt like a contest to see who could be the most deferential, with everyone trying to be considerate of disparate dietary restrictions, commutes home, and cuisine preferences.
As I rode home myself, admittedly a bit cooked from trying to keep up with team member Tarsis on my aging Schwinn, I tried to remember why I had been so perplexed by fixed gear culture. It had become clear that I had gotten so stuck on thinking about the bike, that I had forgotten to consider the way that experiencing the simplicity and elegance of the fixed gear bike could affect its rider. Those who ride fixed cannot simply slam their brakes when an obstacle emerges or change their gears as terrain changes. They have to be more perceptive of what’s happening all around them. They have to be more adaptive too, more aware of how hard they’ll have to push to keep their pedaling cadence up as they climb a hill.
I am sure maintaining this level of attention can be taxing. And I assume there are some fixed gear riders who become jaded towards drivers, pedestrians, and other cyclists that they view to be obstacles to their flow. But most of the fixed gear riders I’ve met seem more than capable of letting all of this wash over their backs. They do not end their rides with tales of all the drivers that cut them off, or pedestrians that let their dogs wait in the bike lanes, or e-bike messengers ripping it in the opposite direction of traffic. They just seem like they’re having a good time.
I finally got back to my apartment and propped my bike against the wall in our office. As usual, I checked to make sure I didn’t unknowingly pop a tire or trek in something unsavory. But for the first time I can remember, I found myself staring at the bike’s derailleur and thinking “What would it look like if I ripped all this stuff out?”
Further context here, because the UCI’s naming conventions are really confusing. The “UCI Women’s World Tour” as we know it today was established in 2016, but it’s effectively built off the structure of the “Women’s Road World Cup” which began in 1998. Interestingly, the first women’s world championship road race was held back in 1959. This might seem impressively early, until you learn that the men’s first world championship was held nearly 40 years before that in 1921. (The men got their World Tour precursor established in 1989, 10 years before the women.)
Last year’s women’s TDF, officially Le Tour de France Femme avec Zwift, was truly great. Plenty of surprise stage winners, behind-the-scenes team drama, and a stunning conclusion. The final gap between first and second place in the general classification after nearly 1,000 kilometers of racing over eight stages was FOUR SECONDS. If you are the kind of person who cheered for Lance Armstrong, but can’t name the race favorite who was almost literally crashed out of the race by her teammate and still managed to come in second last year, you simply need to check your priorities!
I also must point you to this video of an absolute chud cutting into the women’s edition of Liège–Bastogne–Liège last month. This is obviously a dangerous thing for someone to do—his actions are akin to cutting into a lane of traffic on the highway with a wimpy go-cart—but I wasn’t surprised to see that a male cycling fan would think he could keep up with the women’s peloton. Of course, even after 120 km of extremely hard racing, Pauliena Rooijakkers and Antonia Niedermaier dropped the dingus pretty easily.
If you’ve seen the WTF acronym in race entries and been unsure what it means, now you know!
Worth noting: the Century Road Club Association, which runs regular races in Central Park and clinics for interested racers, explicitly says its women’s field is open to trans women.