Introducing the 2023 DTE Pursuit Awards Riders
In our second year of this grassroots experiment to give back to the cycling community, we had more than four times the applicants we had in our inaugural year. While it’s super exciting that the DTE Pursuit Awards program has struck a nerve with the Colorado dirt cycling community, it also made our job of selecting four new riders for 2023 far more difficult. To be as transparent as possible, our process goes like this:
1) We let all applications come in, and don’t read any of them until the end of the application window.
2) We then independently review each application, make individual notes on each, and individually rank the applicants we’re in favor of bringing into the program. We do our best to weigh the rider’s need based on answers to the questions in the application, as well as what impact we think we can have on their goals, and what impact we think each rider can have on raising awareness of our program as a DTE ambassador. And selfishly, we think about what positivity and energy each rider can bring to us! Running DTE is a lot of work, and we need it to be energy-giving.
3) We then come together and compare notes. In the cases where we’ve picked the same women, the job is easy and we high five. In the cases where we don’t overlap, we then compare notes and discuss where we differed and why, and work from there on making the final selections. That’s the hard stuff. It isn’t a science, for sure, but that said, our 2022 roster ended up being absolutely amazing. Speaking of the ‘22 crew, at the end of last year we decided to bring them back for the ‘23 season because things didn’t go as planned last year, and we wanted to do our best to provide the full experience this year. If you haven’t watched our season wrap video from last year, you can do that here.
Hopefully this gives you an idea of how we approach making rider selections for the Pursuit Awards. And with that, we’d like to introduce you to the 2023 Distance to Empty Pursuit Award squad, which is seven strong - head straight to the Pursuit Awards page to get the full scoop on the whole team.
