Melisa Rollins Finally Won the Race That Shaped Her Pro Cycling Career

Certain bike races can change riders’ lives. But usually it’s the result—a yellow jersey, a gold medal, a set of rainbow stripes—that persists. The race itself blurs into the background.

For Melisa Rollins, one particular race has always been in sharp focus. Now, she has a result to make it even brighter.

Rollins won the Leadville Trail 100 MTB race on Saturday, August 10, 2024, after lining up at the 105-mile race for the seventh time. For years, her goal was simply to better her previous year’s time.

In 2021, she achieved that, and more. After finishing sixth she signed her first pro contract with Virginia’s Blue Ridge Twenty24.

It was for all of these reasons—not to mention the 12,000 feet of climbing in Colorado’s dry, oxygen-starved air—that Rollins couldn’t contain her emotions at the finish line on Saturday.

“Leadville is much more than a race to me,” she said. “It’s my cycling origin story, my purpose when I don’t feel like training. It’s my why.”

Now, with her Twenty24 contract up at the end of the season, Rollins hopes that the shiny result at the race that has changed her life will keep the momentum going.

Road Racing En Route to the Dirt

Rollins’ Leadville story begins well before she ever did the race. Her parents, mom Lisa Nelson and stepdad Elden, have now finished the Leadville 100 18 and 26 times, respectively. When Rollins first signed up for the race in 2016, “a 20-year-old college student who wanted to pick up an outdoorsy hobby,” they became her training partners.

“We’d go on long rides on the weekends and I would do nothing during the week,” Rollins said laughing. “That was training then.”

Her first year, Rollins finished in 10:12:14, well outside of the sub-nine hour threshold needed to receive the race’s iconic ‘big’ sterling silver belt buckle.

Nevertheless, she was hooked.

Rollins raced Leadville again in 2017, and in 2018 she completed the Lead Challenge, which consists of doing five of the race series’ running and riding events, including the monster 100-mile running race.

In 2021, she had her best result to date, finishing sixth. The next day, she completed SBT GRVL, a 144-mile gravel race in Steamboat Springs. That put her second overall in the LeadBoat Challenge, a one-off competition for riders doing both the Leadville 100 and SBT GRVL.

Then, Nicola Cranmer of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Twenty24 called.

Rollins signed a two-year contract with the squad and dove into the deep end. Twenty24 has always been a women’s development team with an Olympics focus. Most of its riders focus on road and track cycling, but Rollins joined with an understanding that she’d race across disciplines. In 2022, she was accepted into the Life Time Grand Prix, a seven-race mixed gravel and mountain-bike series that includes the Leadville 100.

Rollins had two standout results in the series that year—fifth at Unbound Gravel and 10th at Leadville, but otherwise placed “around 15th, sometimes better, sometimes worse,” she said. “I wanted to be at the front end, but I didn’t know what that took.

Enter Cranmer, who has helmed the Twenty24 squad since its inception in 2005.

“Nicola said, ‘you signed onto this road team, let’s see if road racing will do that for you,” Rollins said.

Before Rollins joined Twenty24, she’d never raced on the road. “My background was … Leadville,” she said. Over the past three years she has logged thousands of hours on the road, racing one-days, crits, and stage races. This year, she even skipped Unbound Gravel to do the 11-day Tour of America’s Dairyland.

In the process, Rollins’ chipped away at all of the skills necessary to become a good bike racer. She built up her aerobic capacity, learned how to hold a wheel, ride in a paceline, and attack. And despite her initial hesitation to spend so much time racing on the road with her sights set on mountain bike and gravel, after Saturday’s result Rollins knows it was well worth it.

“I think I won Leadville because I know how to road race,” she said. “I think it was imperative. Making the winning selection was about being in a good position going down Powerline and then being able to descend well.”

Sofia Gomez Villafañe, who was second on the day in Leadville, is Rollins’ friend and training partner back home in Utah. She has watched the 28-year-old go from a strong rider “who has put me in the box plenty of times,” to a well-rounded racer with a keen eye for tactics.

“Being on the team taught her to look at a race from different angles,” Gomez Villafañe said. “On a team your job isn’t always to win, it’s to protect a rider, to chase down breaks. So she’s put herself in different roles in a race in pursuit of team goal. It gives you a better understanding of racing, how attacking works, and what tips and tricks you an have up your sleeve.

“It’s pretty special for her to then have the opportunity to go for a result for herself and show, ‘I am good and I deserve to be here.’”

It was on the climb up to Columbine, the race’s high point, on Saturday, that Rollins started realize what was possible. She started the climb with Gomez Villafañe and Michaela Thompson (who would later finish third), telling herself “just follow wheels, don’t overdo it.” Eventually, she went off the front of the group.

“It wasn’t a pointed move, I just wanted to see what would happen if I upped the pace,” she said.

Rollins continued to climb strongly, moving through the back of the elite men’s field. Ultimately, it was the Life Time helicopter, hovering over and then whizzing away, that keyed her in to what was happening in the race behind her.

“I could hear the helicopter doubling back really far, so I could kind of assess from that that it was pretty good,” she said.

Rollins went on to win the race solo, four minutes ahead of Gomez Villafañe and 43 minutes better than her previous best finish. She said that she never let her guard down, convinced that the two other woman were going to catch her on the Powerline climb.

Even days after the race, she was having trouble believing what had happened, despite the fact that she’d dedicated her entire year to achieving such a goal. In April, she quit her full-time job as a chemist at a research lab, taking a “leap of faith and a massive pay cut.”

“It’s almost like I had to win because I wanted it so badly,” she said.

Rollins only has a few days to let the victory sink in before she toes the line again at SBT GRVL on August 18. Initially, she’d planned the race as sort-of a back-up plan, in case things didn’t go well at Leadville. Now, while she’ll race to win, it’s must more of a joy ride than a back-up plan.

As for what lies beyond, Rollins said she’s been in touch with some other teams and sponsors but hasn’t solidified anything yet. She hopes to do more mountain bike racing but also doesn’t want to lose the edge she’s gained on the road. Mainly, she wants to keep the momentum going.

After all, Leadville the race changed her life. Now, Leadville the result may as well.