This time in 2016, Lauren De Crescenzo was in a rehab center learning how to walk and talk again after suffering a major crash. Now she has pulled away from her rivals on the final stage of the Tour of the Gila, Pinos Altos, to take the overall win.

"Winning in the Gila means a lot to me, I couldn't have imagined this six years ago. I was in a rehab center learning how to walk and talk. If someone had said to me, 'Don't worry Lauren, you'll win the Gila in six years,' I would have said, 'You're out of your mind! I'm in rehab. So mentally, to be able to win a five-day stage race like this is huge," de Crescenzo said.

Six years ago, Cinch Rise Racer fell during a sprint in the San Dimas stage race when his handlebars caught a roadside fence. She suffered a concussion, bleeding from her brain, fell into a coma, and fractured her T1 vertebra, occipital condyle, and wrist.

Her family started an online fundraiser to offset her medical bills, and after a long recovery, she returned to racing. Two years after the accident, she made the podium at the collegiate championships while racing for the University of Colorado Denver and won the collegiate time trial title in 2019.

Over the past two years, the 31-year-old de Crescenzo has established herself as one of the top gravel racers in the country, winning Gravel Worlds and last year's Unbound Gravel, and this season winning Mid-South Gravel.

He won the overall at the Tour of the Gila, his first UCI win. A mechanical problem on the final climb of the opening stage left her 2:48 behind stage winner Krista Dobel-Hickok (EF Education-TIBCO-SVB), but she made up for it all with a daring solo attack on the second stage.

However, he lost another 2:18 in the individual time trial and suffered mechanical problems at the turnaround point, leaving him only 14 seconds behind Dobel-Hickok heading into the final stage. On the final stage, however, he made up enough time on the tough uphill finish to win the Tour of the Gila by one minute.

"On the first really steep section, I was on the fifth wheel and had a bit of a gap, but I was pulling away from them. I knew I could close the gap on the downhill, so that's where I did. Out of the five of us (Krista, Emily Marcolini, Austin Killips, and Marcella Prieto), two of us, Austin and Emily Marcolini, went. They went, but I stayed with Krista. I stayed close to her

"When I started running some rollers, I like rollers. My goal was to minimize watts for the big climbs. I assumed this was unbound! I think it took me about an hour to get here from where I was at the end of the climb."