Emma White

By Liz Newsom

Age: 24
Degree: Bachelors in Computer Science / Science, Medicine & Technology in Culture, an interdisciplinary major from Union College
Family: Parents, Tom and Chris White; Siblings, Curtis, Anna, Sarah and Harrison
Significant Other: Tommy
Home: Bouncing between Duanesburg and Morristown, NJ
Professional Teams: Rally Cycling 2016-2021, US National Team (Track) 2018-2021

Heading west along NY Route 20 you’ll see a new addition under the sign for the town of Duanesburg. In white letters against a green background, it reads: “Home of Emma White; 2020 Summer Olympics Bronze Medal Winner in Cycling.” Road cyclists are known for enjoying a competitive sprint to the next town, county or state line. It’s called a town-line sprint. It’s a perfect tribute to a cyclist and no one in the Capital Region is more worthy of this honor than Emma White!

Adirondack Sports last caught up with Emma (Athlete Profile, October 2012) when she was in high school and still racing bikes as an amateur: adksports.com. In many ways she was a normal teenager, stuck between being a kid and an adult, but not in the average ways. She already had national championship wins in several cycling disciplines and was a rising star in the cyclocross circuit. She was more than just a kid playing on bikes, but not quite a professional yet. Now, nine years later she has several World Championship medals and a coveted Olympic medal from the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Still a junior racer in 2013 she joined the Hot Tubes Development Team. Emma was the only girl on an eight-person roster of talented juniors. During the two years on the team, she won three silver medals at Junior World Championships. When she was 18, Emma signed a professional contract with the road cycling team Rally Cycling. She was still racing a full cyclocross season with the Cannondale CX World team and had started her studies at Union College. In true Emma style, she wasn’t daunted by her full schedule, “The balance between road, cyclocross and college was something I really loved.”

Then in 2018, after the cyclocross world championships at Valkenburg in the Netherlands, she was invited to a USA Cycling Talent ID Track Camp in Colorado Springs. Emma had never raced track, nor had she ever been on a track bike. At the camp she quickly got acquainted with riding a track bike which she says felt like “learning how to ride a bike all over again.”

In the airport on the way home from that camp she received a call from Gary Sutton, the US track coach who told her that he believed she could be on the next Olympic team if she fully committed. The commitment would mean putting her burgeoning cyclocross career on hold, but it was the opportunity of a lifetime and she felt she just couldn’t say no. In her first year on the US National team, Emma raced her first Track World Championships (her team finished seventh in the Team Pursuit). A year later, the team won gold at the World Championships and Emma was a World Champion!

In 2019 Emma was named a member of the US Cycling Track team headed to the Olympics in Tokyo. Of course, no one saw the pandemic coming. Emma was aware that the lead-in to an Olympic Games was a huge challenge in a normal year, now the wait was extended and uncertain. Emma and her teammates spent the extra year training at the Olympic campus in Colorado Springs. She believes the camaraderie built during that time helped to make them a stronger team in the end.  

In Tokyo, Emma and her three teammates would race in the discipline called Team Pursuit, which consists of 16 laps (4K) raced against the clock. Riders must work perfectly together to share the work of being at the front, in the wind. Precision and timing are essential to use the full strength of each rider, and keep the speed as high as possible throughout the effort. To add to the drama, in the medal rounds, there are two teams on opposite sides of the track, and instead of focusing on time, the goal is to beat or catch the other team.

“The sound of disk wheels on wooden boards is a satisfying and surprisingly loud sound,” Emma says. “Generally, the velodromes are newly sanded by the time we get there, so the smell is fresh and it can be dry and dusty which causes a sore throat and coughing most of the time right after an effort! The infield is packed with teams from all countries. It is always pretty loud between athletes and teams in the infield, fans in the stands, and announcers over the speakers.” 

The US team had a great first round and they were seeded against Team Great Britain for the second round. If they won this round, they would be guaranteed a medal and advance to the gold medal round. They rode the fastest they ever had, but it wasn’t quite enough. Great Britain was less than a second faster. The competition was fierce, world records were falling nearly every round.

Emma recounts the range of emotions. “That was our shot to win and it’s gone.” She wondered, “Was it something I did wrong?” But the US team had good reason to be optimistic. “We just rode the fastest we ever have, what would have been a World Record 24 hours before” she said.

Their last race was only an hour after the loss to Great Britain. Team US would be racing for Bronze or they would go home without a medal. “As a team, we needed to collectively put that race behind us and go into the next one ready to win. During a race like that, there is so much pressure to not mess up for the team. The whole time I was thinking about my breathing and trying to go as hard as I possibly could… Every lap, we saw my coach at the finish line, and he informed us where we were against Team Canada and I knew we were up on them.” The US team crossed the line before Canada and earned their Olympic Bronze! Among the next set of Emma’s emotions were, as she puts it, “Elatedness, relief, shock, excitement, and some more sadness.” 

Team US had done it, they had raced their hardest and they had the medal to prove it. Emma White was now an Olympic medalist, and her hometown fans especially (myself one of the biggest), were as proud as they could be! 

So, what do you do after you win an Olympic medal halfway across the world after the longest, most stressful lead-up to the games imaginable? You go home, you take a few weeks off and then you get back out there. Emma will be finishing off her season with Rally Cycling at the Sea Otter Classic in Monterey, Calif. in mid-October. Then Emma has some new ventures in the works and I for one can’t wait to see what she does next!

This just in… 

Emma White announces retirement

On October 7, Emma White (Rally Cycling) called her solo win at the Sea Otter Classic circuit race in California “so darn special.” It turned out to be her final victory as a professional cyclist, Emma took to social media October 12 to announce she would retire from professional racing. The Olympic medalist, world champion and American track, road, ‘cross star will hang up her wheels at 24 years old, after a relatively short but prolific career.

“It is with great pride, excitement and sadness that I announce I am stepping away from professional cycling,” Emma wrote on Instagram on October 11. “In the last 15 years, I have gone from the junior ranks as a kid, to a professional with Rally, on to a world champion and then an Olympian. If you would have told me at 10 years old that any of this would have happened, I never would have believed it! The years have flown by, filled with some of the greatest memories and also some of the most painful heartaches. I’m grateful for all of it.”

Emma has a long list of important races she has won, highlighted by her achievements with the U.S. pursuit team at the Tokyo Olympics this summer. She also has a slate of top cyclocross and road results, including a win at the Sea Otter Classic this weekend in what was her last race with Rally Cycling. Emma thanked Rally, who she spent her whole career with, and Olympic legend Kristin Armstrong Savola, who was her coach. 

“I’ve been so incredibly fortunate to work with the best coach in the business Kristin Armstrong Savola for the last eight years,” Emma said. “I don’t know how my career would have looked without her, but I’m certain it wouldn’t have led me as far as it has. She’s shared with me what it takes to be my best on the bike, but more importantly, so many life lessons that I will carry with me forever. A true leader, mentor and friend that I will never be able to adequately thank.”

Emma did not indicate where the future lies, only suggesting a desire to pursue other goals. “This isn’t goodbye. I’ll be around,” she wrote. “Cycling will always be a huge part of my life but I have so many goals off the bike and I feel it’s time to conquer them.”

–Courtesy Capital Bicycle Racing Club (cbrc.cc) and Velo News (velonews.com)

Liz (Lukowski) Newsom (elizabeth.b.newsom@gmail.com) is a Capital Region native, living in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. She runs an industrial design business, ATNDesign, specializing in 3D printing and CNC manufacturing, with her husband Andy. She spends her free time racing mountain bikes, exploring with her dog Frida, and tending her high-altitude container garden.