Green and gold and rainbow stripes | Courtney Sherwell’s path to racing dual off-road World Championships

The first time I came across Courtney Sherwell wasn’t a bike race or even in person. It was former Australian Mountain Bike Editor-in-Chief Mike Blewitt’s living room. He and his wife Imogen had commissioned a portrait of their Blue Cattle Dog Norbert, and the pencil drawing had just arrived.

A side hustle of the current XC Marathon and Gravel National Champion, these extraordinary photo-realistic pencil drawings started as a Covid hobby.

“I’ve always loved arts and crafts from a kid — always doing something from colour books. I’ve dabbled in knitting and crocheting. I just love creating things. My partner had some Derwent pencils his grandma had bought him and I just started doodling,” she says. “He looked over my shoulder and was like, oh wow, they are actually pretty good.

Related:

• Racing Garmin Unbound 200 | They say you shouldn’t meet your hero
• 2023 Santa Cruz Stigmata Review | A versatile gravel racer with a wild side
• 2024 Cervelo Aspero Review | Cervelo’s new gravel racer is just peachy

It’s sort of evolved from something I was doing bored, to now something I’m absolutely loving as a pastime when I’m not on the bike, to destress and for a bit of mindfulness,” she says.

While Sherwell undoubtedly has an eye for the visual medium, her true stripes are in producing watts. Now back at her home base in Bendigo, in the last year, Sherwell has won a pair of National Championships and one of the two UCI Gravel World Series qualifiers in Australia — coming third in the other. She also left a mark on the burgeoning gravel scene in the US with two podiums and a top ten in the Belgian Waffle ride series among others.

Gearing up for the first of two World Championships, she’s planning to race in the coming months with some big changes afoot; we caught up with Sherwell to see how her prep was coming along.

It all started in BendiFlow

Hailing Ararat, Victoria, Sherwell and her partner John moved to Bendigo six years ago, aiming to make riding bikes a more significant part of their lives.

“We’d always been dabbling in riding and racing,” she says. “We were reshuffling our lives and wondering what we were doing. The work-life balance wasn’t really tipping the scales in the right way, so we decided to sell our house and move to Bendigo, primarily for riding,” she says.

While Sherwell has now built her life around bikes it wasn’t always that way. Her first race was the 50km Brackenbury Challenge in Creswick and it didn’t go so well.

“I had a pretty big crash in that race. I went off an A-line that wasn’t marked correctly and the rest of that (25km) lap was all tears and not wanting to do my second lap. But my partner rode with me that day and pushed me through,” says Sherwell

As an apology for the course marking mishap, the race promoter gave Sherwell a 12-week training program on Today’s Plan, which had been organised as a race prize. Sherwell tells Flow that she has just recently been diagnosed with inattentive ADHD and looking back, had she not received that structure to guide her riding and training early on, she might not be riding at such a high level.

After following the training plan Sherwell decided to try her hand at the Otway Odyssey and had a ball, cementing that this is in fact something she wanted to keep up.

Bendigo is a bit of a hotbed for strong bike riders with the likes of Lifetime Grand Prix athletes like Tasman Nankervis to World Tour Roadies like Chris Hamilton — and Flow’s own super-fast Technical Editor Wil Barret — there is some serious firepower pedalling around town at any given time.

And with so many fast folks around, Sherwell had the opportunity to test herself against these fast riders. As time went on she was keeping up with the fast bunch rides and pulling turns.

“My partner would always call me a diesel because I would just ride in a high gear and tick away up the hills while everyone else was struggling. I knew I had the engine, but I lacked a bit of confidence on the skills side of things,” she says.

Having tried her hand at XCO, she chased the national series around for a few years, but that wasn’t really her strength. Identifying as a mountain biker who dabbled in road for training, an opportunity with the Roxsolt Liv SRAM racing squad pushed her focus to racing curly bars and slick tyres.

Returning to the dirt

The Roxsolt squad allowed Sherwell to front up in the European peloton, but the experience left her with a bad taste in her mouth. Taking another ride with the Knights of Suburbia Women’s team which folded part way through the 2023 season Sherwell tells us that well and truly closed the door on road racing for her.

In that time, Sherwell never stopped riding on the dirt. Especially during Covid, gravel and mountain bikes allowed her to escape. So when restrictions were lifted, and the local club started putting on gravel races, she signed up, and the spark for racing once again found dry tinder.

Having raced the Melbourne to Warrnambool road race in early 2022, the 246km Dirty Warny gravel race loomed in November.

“There wasn’t really much on the calendar in terms of gravel racing, but I heard about this Dirty Warny thing, and I thought, well, that sounds pretty hard. I’ll give it a go,” she says.

Sherwell would go on to win that inaugural edition of the Dirty Warny by 40 minutes! Oh, and did we mention that was the first time she’d ever ridden that far in a single session? A few weeks later, she’d go on to win the Cattleman’s 100, 175km XCM race by twenty minutes.

“When everything happened, with the second road team ceasing to be in operation mid-year in 2023, I sort of refocused myself in terms of what I wanted to do. Racing on the road had not been very successful in terms of being sustainable and something that I enjoyed. I really enjoyed gravel, so I’m like, this is something I am going to focus on now,” she says.

Racing in the land of the free | Entering the US gravel scene

Coming into 2024, quite a lot had changed for Sherwell. She’d qualified for the UCI Gravel World Series, winning the event in Beechworth, coming third at SEVEN in Nannup, WA, and coming fourth at the Otway Odyssey and Devils Cardigan. Now racing as a privateer she’d more or less exhausted all of the avenues an off-road pro can, racing domestically in Australia.

“Everyone says you can’t make a career out of riding in Australia (especially off-road)‚ it’s just not possible, and I think that’s why a lot of people are venturing out overseas to try and get support on teams overseas or events where the prize money is a bit more desirable,” she says.

For gravel racing and long distance XC, the scene in North America is thriving. There’s bike racing series like the Life Time Grand Prix, Belgian Waffle Ride and a host of massive individual events offering substantial prize purses like the Sea Otter Classic Fuego XL, The Downieville Classic, Breck Epic, Singletrack Six and the BC Bike Race among others. More importantly, extensive exposure to potential sponsors and there is a whole niche of riders who have built professional careers just off these events. For an athlete like Sherwell, it was time to work out how many freedoms per eagle it was going to take to get over there.

So, aiming to follow in the footsteps of Brendan Trekky Johnston, Ella Bloor and Tasman Nankervis, she applied to the Lifetime Grand Prix. Missing out of the 2024 class, that wasn’t the end of the story.

“After I found out I hadn’t been accepted, a few nights later, we had some friends over, and I had to run to get dinner. When I came back (my partner), John was like, “I’ve booked our tickets and entered it into the BWR Triple Crown series,” she says. “I think I needed him to pull that band-aid off and make that decision for me. Otherwise, I probably would have procrastinated a lot more and maybe wouldn’t have had the success I did.”

That snap decision by her partner, who is also her coach, led her to a pair of second places in the Utah and California BWR events and eighth in Arizona. This put her in second place in the overall series standings behind Sofia Gomez Villafañe, who also won the Lifetime Grand Prix in 2023 and currently sits at the top of the 2024 standings.

It wasn’t all rainbows and unicorns for Sherwell’s first US racing campaign. A last-minute decision to race the Fuego XL XCM at the Sea Otter Classic — which is also one of the Life Time GP events — saw her scrambling to find a mountain bike to race in the days before the event.

“I entered the road race and the gravel race at Sea Otter with no intention of doing the mountain bike race. But there’s just something, you know, that little person on my shoulder saying you should do the mountain bike event. All those girls you’ve been racing are doing it. It would be better than doing the road race,” she says.

Sending up the bat signal, one of her fellow BWR competitors offered to bring a spare bike down to the festival so she could race.

“I thought that was a done deal. It was supposed to arrive a week before the race, plenty of time to get familiar with the bike and recon the course. But then the bike never arrived. It never got on the plane. She was watching the AirTag in this bike bag, and it was just sitting somewhere in the airport,” she recounts.

So Sherwell hit the festival, and in the end, the kind folks at Pivot Cycles let her commandeer a demo bike for the race.

“All of the signs were pointing towards that I shouldn’t do that race, and it didn’t turn out very well. I crashed hard,” she says. “I was following someone’s wheel and following a little too close. She moved, and my front wheel got pushed into a rut.”

“Lesson learned. I just need to listen to all the signs. But it was definitely an experience I’ll never forget,” she says.

Living the privateer life

While the road teams Sherwell was racing on allowed her the freedom to chase off-road events, no longer being in that system and building her own race calendar, she found herself needing sponsors for equipment and help to get to these events.

Bringing SRAM, Hammerhead, Schwalbe, Ekoi and Squirt on board was a start, however she still needed a bike. Her previous two teams were pedalling Livs; however, she was keen to start anew.

That fresh start came in a somewhat unorthodox form: a custom titanium rig from Melbourne builder Prova, who put together a bespoke Mostro Integrale gravel bike for her.

“Mark and Kelly (Hester) were absolutely amazing and helped me achieve the results I did over the last year. I raced that bike pretty hard in America and I won the Gravel National Champs on that bike, which is awesome,” she says.

A testament to the titanium bikes that Prova makes, but they weren’t in the position to produce an XC race machine.

“What they do is quite unique and I wasn’t expecting them to just make a custom titanium (MTB) frame for me out of the blue,” she says. “It was a really hard decision to make (to move on from Prova) and Mark and Kelly are amazing and fully supportive. They understood what I’m doing and what I need (for racing),” she says.

With that, Sherwell has just come on board with Santa Cruz, a relationship that was forged oddly enough at the Spoken Handmade Bike Show in Melbourne. She says part of the reason for approaching Santa Cruz was the connection with the US and some of the support that can bring while she’s racing in North America.

“All of the athletes I was racing against over there were paid to race, professional athletes. I’m competing with people that have a mechanic on board, a coach, a management team, and all of that sort of thing. Whereas it’s just me and my partner, and we’re living out of a car — it’s really hard,” she says.

Back home and winning a double to race for double rainbows

Returning from the US in mid 2024, Sherwell would hang onto the form she was in to beat a stacked field at both the XCM National Championships in Wagga Wagga, NSW and also the Devil’s Cardigan in Derby, bringing home a sack of potatoes and a second green and gold jersey.

Beyond just being able to wear a fancy jumper at races that calendar year, winning a national title also brings automatic selection to the World Champs team for that specific event. However, as Sherwell would learn, you still need to submit an expression of interest to AusCycling — an important fact she says was never communicated to her.

A few months on, when AusCycling announced the team headed to XCM worlds in Snowshoe, West Virginia, Sherwell’s name was noticeably absent from the list — which started a bit of a wildfire on social media.

“It wasn’t until July that a friend mentioned that the applications had closed, but the appeals period was still open and that I should get in contact. So, I sent my email apologising for not knowing the process and how to go about it.

It turned into a bit of a drawn-out process. Especially once they released the team on social media, it was probably the worst thing that could have happened. People already have their own opinions of AusCycling. A lot of people thought that I just wasn’t selected, that they haven’t even considered me and that AusCycling was doing the wrong thing. But I’m partly to blame because I didn’t know the process,” she says.

At the time of writing, Sherwell says that AusCycling hasn’t opened the expressions of interest for Gravel just yet, but she is watching and waiting for that link to go live.

In only a couple of years, Sherwell has gone from rethinking whether she wanted to keep racing to having the World Championships in two disciplines marked on the calendar in the same year.

With XCM Worlds in September, she tells Flow that her mindset going in is to treat it like another race.

“I’m trying not to think of it as a World Championships and psych myself out thinking about the competition. That’s something that worked for me when I was going to America (the first time),” she says. “I don’t look at the entries or anything like that to see who’s racing. I don’t focus on the competitors. I think if I can try and break things down and focus on what I can control and what I’m doing, that helps me a lot.”

Likely to be seeded towards the back of the field, Sherwell tells us she’ll be fighting hard, but her goal of the race reflects that she’ll be battling traffic the entire day. But that doesn’t mean she’s not excited.

“Getting to the start line and being around all of those other athletes. They’re all in their country’s colours, and the Americans are really good at putting on events — so the vibes are just amazing. No matter if you have a bad day, the vibes are always so good, and you can just destress and get excited for the next race,” she says.

Provided there isn’t another issue with the EOI process, that next race will be the Gravel World Championships. And Shrewell thinks that race will have quite a different tone.

“I think the gravel race is going to be way more hectic. The roads in Belgium are quite narrow and with a large amount of riders can be pretty sketchy,” she says.

I think I know what I’m getting into, but it’s going to be a whole other level in terms of race effort and getting through the field — I think it’s going to be really tough. But again, I’m just going to focus on what I can control,” she says.

For the moment, Sherwell hasn’t looked too far past her upcoming World Champs campaign, though she’ll tells us she will definitely be donning the green and gold stripes back at the big US events, hoping to put down more big results.

Photos: Justin Castles / @justincastles