Old Friends and Teammates Share Memories of a Young Sepp Kuss
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Unlike many WorldTour riders who seem to have road racing and road racing only on their minds from the time they can reach the handlebars, Sepp Kuss, who just won the 2023 Vuelta a España, did things a little differently. His obsession was always bikes, but he tried a little bit of everything, and his first love was mountain biking.
Kuss was on one of the earliest Durango Devo teams, a youth cycling development program in his hometown of Durango, Colorado. The program was founded by Chad Cheeney and Sarah Tescher, and their goal was to not emphasize racing, but instead focus on developing each individual, in a traditional team setting, into life-long cyclists.
Kuss joined the first middle school team, which his parents pushed for when they saw how much fun the high school kids were having. By the second year the middle school Devo team jumped from 4 or 5 kids to more than 20. Today there are over 600 kids in the program.
It’s supposed to be fun
Cheeney, who worked with Kuss early on, said he was always very low-key. Through Devo they created an elite team for high-schoolers and college kids, Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory Devo Sweet Elite. They traveled all over the world, and often camped or crashed wherever they could along the way in order to race. Kuss always had a way of reminding everyone that it was supposed to be fun.
“He would show up to practice with a Taco Bell bag, just grinning and listening to people talk in our circle,” Cheeney told Bicycling. “Pounding burritos and tacos. High school friends would make fun of him for how silly he was, and he would just giggle and think it was cute.”
“But he was like that on the race course, too,” Cheeney said. “He would have a good day [in a race], and everybody would be like, ‘Holy sh—, Sepp is fast!’ and he’d just giggle and smile like he was having a good time. He’d never get cocky about it or anything, he’d just give this cute little smile. And of course he was fast, he’d go out and ride all the time, before and after practice.”
Sweet Elite teammate and current Red Bull off-road endurance cyclist Payson McElveen remembers that even at 16 and 17-years-old, Kuss would be out riding the mountains, connecting different passes for hours outside of practice.
“He loved to go on massive solo adventure rides even in his early teens,” McElveen said. “While the rest of us usually kept to the town trails of Durango, Sepp would often regale us about an epic loop he pieced together on ridge lines I didn't have the confidence to explore at the time. He was just doing what was fun for him.”
McElveen remembers that, maybe because of Devo, or maybe just Kuss’ nature, it was always about having a good time more than results. “When I moved from Texas to Durango, I was an extremely focused, and at times high strung young racer without much perspective. Most of my athletic development had happened through lots of hard solo training. The riders that grew up in the Durango Devo program are often the opposite, and that program was exactly what I needed. Sepp was a ‘Devo kid’ to a T. Happy, talented, positive, and just stoked to be there.
“I gravitated toward riding and hanging out with him because he made the sport so fun. One of my most vivid memories was our first mountain bike ride together, in the Horse Gulch trail system in town. On every little water bar or bump, he’d jump and do a little tailwhip. I remember thinking ‘why would you do that constantly? Aren't we just trying to go fast?’ Within a few minutes, I tried it a couple times, and realized it felt pretty fun. Twelve years later, that’s how I still ride. If the terrain has a fun feature, you play on it. Bikes should be fun first. Sepp, and several other riders from the Durango Devo program changed my relationship with the bike.”
Never one for the spotlight
Cheeney said that for Kuss, it was never about being the star. “Even when we had one-on-one coaching conversations, and I’d bring a former pro like Todd Wells, or Travis Brown in to talk to Sepp about training and his future, it wasn’t about being a star. It was more about how to improve his skills and pointing him in the right direction. But it was always mountain biking back then. It wasn’t until his later years with Sweet Elite and riding in Boulder [where he went to college] that he thought about riding in the pro road peloton.”
McElveen remembers a trip with the team where it seemed like things clicked for Kuss. “Sepp had an appreciation for the epic, traditional road races in Europe. He’d often spend spare time watching old replays from the Giro, and I got the sense that while he was enjoying racing mountain bikes, he had serious curiosity about the road. This was really confirmed for me at a U23 World Cup in Italy in 2013. We were racing in Val di Sole with USA Cycling, and a few days before the race Sepp mentioned this famous climb used in the Giro, ‘Madonna di Campiglio,’ I think.”
On the trip the team had a Belgian mechanic who joked that if Kuss could ride that climb and get the KOM, he’d give him a WorldTour contract. “Obviously this mechanic didn't have the ability to do that,” McElveen said, “and we all knew it, but nevertheless Sepp had this growing interest in the big, famous climbs of the Grand Tours. While the rest of us focused and stressed over the little 5k World Cup course, Sepp went out on his mountain bike, just a few days before our XCO race, and ripped up this epic climb in the Dolomites. He came back triumphant...KOM.”
Pro mountain bike racer Christopher Blevins said Kuss got fast almost by accident, or default, from being part of such a solid community that made results so secondary. “Our Devo days were pretty loose and based on adventure,” Blevins said. “No structured training at all. We’d show up to practice and not know if it was going to be a day of only playing foot down in the park or going full gas chasing each other up climbs.” So many days of having a great time riding bikes imprinted on Kuss the simplicity of riding no matter how big the stage.
A team of happy misfits
Pro bike racer Sarah Strum came to bikes and bike racing later than most of her peers. She arrived in Durango to attend Fort Lewis College and play soccer, but when she saw the mountain bike team, she decided to give that a go. And eventually, she made her way onto the Sweet Elite team. “It was a pretty exciting team, for all of us,” Sturm said. “None of us had really done anything yet with our cycling careers. And it was the first big team in a very competitive town. We got really great support. Free bikes, free kits, a full race calendar for the summer, food, lodging. It was a big deal, at least for me, but I was very new to racing.”
Sturm is 4-years older than Kuss, and was one of the only young women on the team. “I first met Sepp and he was just this little kid. The guys were all so fast. And such good mountain bikers. I was so new and so much older. They were really nice, but also kind of classic sh—head boys.”
Every week was like going camping with a quirky family. “I remember we went to the Whiskey 50, a mountain bike race—with the team,” Sturm said. “It was one of our first team races and we were driving home in the dark, and we stopped at In-N-Out. Sepp got so many hamburgers, multiple milkshakes, fries. I had never really been around athletes like that before. I was just looking at this skinny kid thinking, where does this go? And then like 10-minutes later Sepp asked if we could stop again because he was hungry.”
A crew of success stories
One thing that makes rooting for Kuss so easy for all of the riders he grew up with, is that in a lot of ways, Devo worked. It created life-long cyclists, and many of them are also living the life of professional athletes. So where some might say Kuss is going to be the spark that really ignites American cycling again, Chad Cheeney, Payson McElveen, Sarah Sturm, Christopher Blevins, and so many others who spent time in Durango, would say that it’s very much happening now.
“I encourage young people to try so many different things,” Sturm said. She finds it validating that someone like Kuss is succeeding—someone who got his college degree, and tried all different kinds of racing before he found his fit. Sturm also tried a lot of different things before signing her pro contract, including interests outside of biking entirely. “I’m really grateful for the fact that I had a full career as a graphic designer before I signed my pro contract as a racer. I think it’s really important to have other experiences and other things to lean on, because there are inevitably really challenging moments in racing, like devastating results, and it’s good to not have your entire self worth tied up in the sport.”
Cheeney thinks that if Kuss were in Devo now, with 600 other kids and all kinds of routes to choose from—gravel racing, privateering, enduro—that he would still end up right where he is now. “The key is that he would still try everything, and he would still rise to the top. I don't think he’s one to create a sponsor group around himself, or be a self-supported one-man show. I don’t think he’s like that at all. He shines in the team environment.”
So just like Kuss continues to shine, so too does his community, former teammates, and coaches. “We’re all so busy these days,” Cheeney said. “It seems like there’s so much biking to do now. Even last weekend, there was World Cup racing, gravel racing, collegiate racing, high school racing. A pro race at Apex. Underground racing. We’re all just doing our passion stronger than ever. And this little sideshow, the Vuelta? Yeah. It’s just inspiring us all.”
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