MVHS alum ‘07 and 2021 Tokyo Olympian Leah Thomas never imagined that she’d take to the roads and tour the world as a professional cyclist for Team USA. She began her sports journey as a member of the MVHS club gymnastics team, then graduated from Northwestern University to start her career as a sixth grade science teacher. She only began cycling for fun after being introduced to the sport by a friend.
“I happened to just be really good at it, and I enjoyed it,” Thomas said. “I grew up riding my bike to school and to friends’ houses, but it wasn’t like I rode my bike in any competitive sense. I would just bike up and down the interstate, and then I started racing. It was really easy, and I did really well, so I was offered a contract on a domestic professional team.”
As a cyclist, Thomas turned professional in 2015 with the Twenty16 p/b Sho-Air team and competed in time trials as a last domestique, a role that provides support to the team’s cyclist who was being pushed forward to win the race. Thomas also played the role of a general classification rider, where her time across various stages in the race would be accumulated for the final prize, and soon found herself experiencing major success in difficult races. Participating in numerous races, such as the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, the U.S. National Time Trial Championships and the UCI Road World Championships, Thomas medalled at over 20 events during the course of her professional career.
“It was a feeling of, ‘I can’t believe I’m doing this,’” Thomas said. “It was also one of excitement, and one of, ‘If I don’t do this, I know it’s something I will regret.’ I was teaching at the time. I knew teaching would be there when I was old, and I knew cycling wouldn’t, and I really felt the need to see how I could improve and how I could get better.”
Thomas attributes her love for the sport to the experiences and new skills that cycling has brought her. She appreciates both the training and racing aspects of the sport, which she says constantly pushed her to improve her physical strength and endurance.
“I can be in a grassland with oak trees, and then I can be in the Redwood Forest, and it’s just so wonderful to be able to escape,” Thomas said. “I get a lot of joy from pushing my body and seeing what it can do, so I really liked the training aspect. You’re just so focused on what’s happening right now and what you need to do two minutes into the future, and being able to live that much in the present is something you almost can never do in just normal life.”
Lanier Benkard, who served as Thomas’s coach from 2020 to 2022, designed her workouts and training sequences every week. Benkard worked with Thomas to design race strategy and software to analyze potential positions to maximize her race performance.
“Every single day, I would tell Leah exactly what to do,” Benkard said. “We would pick a few races she really wanted to do well in, because as you can imagine, you can’t be in peak form all the time. You might want to peak at the beginning, end, or have a few peaks throughout the year. Based on that, I would give her her training.”
Drawing support from her fellow teammates and coaches throughout her cycling career, Thomas felt encouraged by those around her, with whom she endured countless tournaments and hotel nights. While Thomas says that she joined the sport “late,” having only begun after graduating from college, she specifically felt encouragement from other cyclists who came into the sport with careers outside of cycling, which helped her grow her own skill set.
“These people become your second family,” Thomas said. “You’re living with them in hotels, and at the beginning of my career, I was literally sleeping with my bed hanging out of my closet. It really forces you to bond as a family, and to see them push themselves was really rewarding. Being able to exercise my brain with the people around me and to be able to think about things and talk about our careers was really rewarding. You’re surrounded by people you never would have met in any other capacity.”
British cyclist Lizzy Banks, who was Thomas’s teammate on the Bigla professional cycling team, echoes the sentiment and says that Thomas’s drive to succeed was motivating when she first turned professional. Banks, whose favorite memory of being Thomas’s teammate was being on the podium of a 2019 Giro d’Italia race together, raced alongside Thomas from 2018 to 2020. Banks says that Thomas was a positive, grounding force during the times they traveled together around the world to compete in races.
“Leah knew exactly what she had to do and worked so hard, but was also so fun to be around,” Thomas said. “You spend a lot of time with each other at the dinner table in the evenings, on flights, and it’s really like you spend more time with them than your family. We were also on an American team that year, and she helped create a home for me there. We quickly became very good friends.”
While transitioning from a career in teaching to professional-level cycling may seem daunting to some, Thomas says that balancing club gymnastics with academics during her time as a MVHS student helped make the change easier.
“It’s a very high-pressure school and environment, but it forced me to learn discipline and organization and how to prioritize my time,” Thomas said. “So when I transitioned to a really competitive professional sports environment, it was a lot easier, because having those skills is what is expected of you, and I already had them, so I wasn’t playing catch-up.”
For students looking to pursue professional careers in cycling, Thomas encourages them to find a balance between overexertion and recovery by seeking out more experienced riders for a community. Thomas believes that finding true passion and love rather than forcing commitment is the crux of pursuing the sport professionally.
“Nothing is going to make or break you,” Thomas said. “Staying healthy, eating well and being well-rounded is the most important part. Surrounding yourself with the strong cycling community is important because there are so many people willing to help, and they would love to take others under their wing and share their knowledge. It’s really like, ‘ride your bike and have fun.’ Do what you enjoy on the bike, because if you end up hating it, you’re not going to get anywhere.”
Thomas retired from professional cycling in 2022 to start a family, and has since pursued a career in teaching at Palo Alto High School. While cycling and her former teammates like Banks are still integrated in her life, Thomas now hopes to branch out and experience other hobbies, such as running, which she began after retiring from cycling. Thomas believes that taking a break from cycling helped her fall in love again with the sport.
“Cycling and pushing my body will always be a part of me, but I don’t feel a need to ride my bike 25 hours a week,” Thomas said. “There’s still lots of other things in the world that I can learn from and help me grow as a person, and I’m taking advantage of those things while embracing my past and the things I love to do. For a while after I retired, I was kind of like, ‘This is pointless, I don’t want to ride my bike,’ and I started running instead. I needed to step away from the sport to look at it through enjoyment, to shed that ‘I’m a professional-level cyclist expectation and reenter it as a hobby, rather than the need to perform at a certain level.”
