Whether on the Bike or the Dance Floor, Alison Jackson’s Performances Speak for Themselves
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Winning a race like Paris-Roubaix can change a bike rider’s life and few people exemplify that more than Alison Jackson, the 35-year-old from Vermilion, Alberta, Canada who rides for EF-Education-TIBCO-SVB.
After winning the women’s iteration of the French Monument in a sprint finish after leading the charge throughout much of the day’s breakaway, Jackson went from someone who enjoyed a good bit of success over the course of her nearly decade-long career to someone whose name was on the tips of everyone’s tongues last season.
And though her Paris-Roubaix win put her immediately in elite company, Alison Jackson’s name had been gaining more and more recognition over the past few years for something quite unlike anything she could do on the bike (which includes multiple Canadian national championships and wins at the Tour de l’Ardèche, the Tour of California, and Oudenaarde-GP de President).
In 2019, Jackson began posting videos of herself dancing on her social media channels that quickly became popular within the peloton. Thier popularity grew beyond her fellow racers, however, making Jackson something of an accidental social media influencer.
“I never wanted to be known as the TikTok cyclist,” she recently told Cycling Weekly. “I want to be known as a great athlete, and I have always felt that I could back that up with results.”
Her online profile came to a head earlier this year, just a few weeks before Paris-Roubaix, when Canadian Cycling Magazine published an article saying Jackson was quitting cycling to become a full-time influencer. Of course, the article was published on April 1, an obvious April Fool’s Day joke for those in the know. But still, the article confused plenty of people.
“That article has haunted me since,” Jackson said in her recent interview with Cycling Weekly. “People took it seriously. At one time, there was a whole podcast about it, like, ‘We will miss Alison Jackson in the peloton, but won’t all the new content be great?’”
A week after the April Fool’s joke, Jackson took victory at the line in the Roubaix velodrome. Immediately after the win, Jackson dropped her bike and broke into one of her now-trademark impromptu dances. It was hardly contrived, never intended to be a callback to her dance-routine videos.
“That’s just how I genuinely express myself and my excitement; with jazz hands,” she told Cycling Weekly.
However, according to Jackson, whereas many people used to know her more as the bike racer who makes the dancing videos, after her historical Paris-Roubaix win, she’s now known more as the first Canadian to ever win one of cycling’s most important races.
“(People) tell me where they were when they watched the race,” Jackson told Cycling Weekly. “I mean, it’s my experience, it’s my life, I won the race, and it’s my achievement, but it’s bigger than me. It meant a lot to a lot of different people who watched it and were inspired by it.”
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