Story of Molly, trans cyclist who beats Evenepoel

   First molested by the women against whom she raced, then also expelled from the men's competitions and, finally, accepted. Molly Cameron's is a story of struggle and effort, not just about the pedals. Since the day he was born a man, he decided to put the cross on the 'she' box in the request for a 'license' to race in cycling. Now the victory over riders of the caliber of Remco Evenepoel and Mattia Cattaneo, in the Belgian Waffle Ride, a cyclocross race held in Kansas, rekindles the spotlight on its history. And on the transgender issue in sport.

    A topic on which the International Olympic Committee itself struggles to find a synthesis, so much so that the publication of the new guidelines on the subject is expected not before the Beijing Winter Olympics: three years after the forecast.

    In Tokyo, New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard had risen to prominence - albeit without obtaining medals - as the first transgender athlete to compete in the Games, a result achieved after lowering her testosterone levels below the threshold required by the IOC. The story of the 45-year-old American is, if possible, more complex.

    Athlete, activist, runs a bike shop and a team (pro Point S Auto-Nokian Tire Cameron). Molly feels like a woman, physically looks like a man and has a girlfriend ("we're going to be wives," she wrote on Instagram three months ago).

    At the beginning of her career, in the early 2000s, she had raced in the women's categories, after taking estrogen. The complaints of colleagues had come with the first victories.

    "At a competition an old woman screamed at me: 'You are not a woman!'.

    Then I had e-mails full of wickedness and I had lost some friends," Molly had reconstructed years later in an interview with a local newspaper. At the end of a long debate, the Oregon cycling federation had decided: a male athlete could compete with women only after changing sex. A choice that Cameron did not want to make, however, only if dictated by the new rules. Thus was born the idea of ​​the passage between men. Having crossed the 'female' box on her driving license years earlier, however, cost her another odyssey: her cycling license says the same and so the US cycling federation (Usac) had decided, at some point. point,to no longer admit transgressions to the rules.

    If in 2013 Cameron had finished second in the men's category 30-39 years at the cross national championships, at the end of 2015 she had not been able to register at those in North Carolina at first. And to think that it was she who had urged Usac to reinstate her as a woman, after the federation, autonomously, had decided to indicate her as a man.

    Then, luckily for her, Usac retraced her steps and Molly continued to collect a series of excellent results, up to first place in Kansas the other day.

    At the end of the 111-kilometer race, "some talents of the world tour", in a period far from the peak of their competitive season, attempted a "listless chase", Cameron acknowledges, explaining the origin of his victory in front of the athletes of the Deceuninck team. -Quick Step, which were their debut in gravel, a cyclocross discipline. In the shortest race, the 58 km one, a certain Valtteri Bottas finished in ninth position. The Mercedes driver, together with his partner, the Australian cyclist Tiffany Cromwell, in Kansas has embraced Molly's cause, wearing the cuffs of her organization, the Ride (Riders inspiring diversity and equality). The group that wants to affirm the rights of LGBTQ + people in sport,last spring she led a protest against the Arkansas law that prohibits trans people under the age of 18 from competing in the women's categories. In short, Cameron's battle continues, not only on cyclocross dirt roads.