Late-bloomer athlete Dodge carves unique path through cycling world
Aug. 11—At the center of the Venn diagram between registered dietitians, band kids and, somehow, current collegiate athletes sits Lauren Dodge.
The Bakersfield native was named the Most Valuable Performer for Savannah College of Arts and Design women's cycling, helped turn SCAD into a sort of feeder program for her own cycling team Automatic Racing and secured a third year of eligibility as she works toward her master's degree in service design.
Not bad for someone who grew up as a marching band kid, a self-described non-athlete, and started training seriously at 23 — and quickly found she was cut out for it.
"I've always been really competitive," Dodge said. "I especially like racing. I just like that it's a pretty black-and-white form of competition."
Dodge, now 29, came to cycling as a senior dietetics major at the University of Georgia in 2015, joining the club team there, and spent some time playing at an amateur level. The following year she met cyclist Tom Gibbons, her eventual Automatic co-founder, on her way to a race in Athens, Ga. Gibbons had spent years competing in Belgium and helped her get deeper into cycling.
"From the time that I first met her, it didn't really feel like she needed improvement," Gibbons said. "She's always been really good at taking information from a wide variety of sources and organizing that to create a plan."
Dodge and Gibbons spent a year together in Belgium, where Dodge earned a podium spot at a race in Vrasene that she counts among her proudest moments, and when they came back they co-founded Automatic. Dodge found that she almost immediately started facing many of the top athletes in the sport, including Olympians.
"Cycling is rather unique in that, as a woman, almost any level that you start in, when you get started, it doesn't take long to hit a level where you are competing against everyone else within the sport," she said.
Automatic is registered as a Domestic Elite team, "a stepping stone to the professional level," as USA Cycling calls it. The team picks a slate of criterium races — basically urban, tightly looped road races — around the country to compete in. Gibbons previously won the now-defunct USA Crits circuit in 2019 and 2021. Dodge helped lead the creation of a new National Association of Cycling Teams in 2021, serving as its interim president.
Dodge found another way to compete a year earlier, when she joined SCAD as a graduate student. She had submitted an athlete-interest form the prior season, and new coach Alec Hoover picked her out of a list in late 2019. She moved to Georgia just 10 days later.
Dodge was able to join the team for its first two races of the spring road season and excelled immediately. She won a 46-mile Women's A race at NC State.
"I was going really, really well that year," she said. "I had aspirations to win collegiate nationals. I was more fit than I had ever been."
Two weeks later, the season was canceled due to COVID-19. Adding insult to injury, Dodge came back from Birmingham for what was supposed to be the opening race of the 2020 USA Crits and was asked to move out of the house where she was living to make room for family coming down from New York. Collegiate cycling went on hold for over a year.
When SCAD finally returned to competition in the fall of 2021, Dodge picked up where she left off. She was the team's top performer at cyclocross (outdoor mixed-surface) nationals in December, then earned her Most Valuable Performer nod with 12th place at the criterium nationals in May.
Along the way, she impressed her teammates. Andrew Sparks, a grad transfer from Lees McRae originally from South Africa, called her "very extroverted and very inclusive."
Hoover recalled several ways Dodge supported team spirit.
"She is the one to always say yes to opportunity, to make the most of something," he said.
Dodge parlayed her internship with Snap-on Tools into a sponsorship for the team. At Halloween, she made the team bee costumes, painted their nails yellow and black and, appropriately, dressed up Hoover as a beekeeper. Also in the fall, Dodge went on a game show called the All Terrain Bicycle Challenge, won, got a bike as her prize that she rode in cyclocross nationals, and then the team watched the show together when it aired during crit nationals in the spring.
She also helped her team build connections in the cycling world. Sparks knew she was part of Automatic Racing and wanted to learn more. She responded by asking him, "Do you wanna join?"
Though Sparks was a mountain biker by trade, Dodge believed he could excel on the crit circuit. And he became one of several Bees to join Automatic this summer.
Gibbons said Dodge's SCAD connection helps Automatic expand its pool of cyclists: "The two biggest teams in the country can obviously pay anybody what they need to be paid, but for us we need to mine talent before anybody realizes it."
"Right now there isn't a really clear line from amateur cycling to professional cycling in the United States," Dodge added. "I think collegiate cycling is something that can provide that route."
Dodge has finagled her way into a third season with the Bees, after Hoover spent much of the season asking her if she knew any women who might be interested.
"At one point early in the season," she said, "I just joked with my coach, 'Hey, you should bring me back an extra year,' — 'No, you've been here long enough,'" he joked back.
It took until mid-April, but Dodge got approved to return. She'll be part of a much larger team next year, which will allow SCAD to better control the pace of races and increase its point totals at conference championships.
"If you give her other teammates who are as equally fast or faster ... she'll work with them, help direct them, and it increases our odds of winning," Hoover said.
Dodge and her team will control their own destiny during the 2022-23 season.
"I think the biggest thing's gonna be confidence," Gibbons said. "She's extremely capable to go out and do anything that she wants right now."
Reporter Henry Greenstein can be reached at 661-395-7374. Follow him on Twitter: @HenryGreenstein.
