Sotomayor’s life was picture-perfect on the outside, but she was drowning on the inside. Then, she started riding a bike, and everything changed.
Sotomayor at the Artistic Cycling World Cup in Langenselbold in 2025. Photo by Daniel Kratschmar-Hallenrad
Daniel Kratschmar-Hallenrad
Growing up with three brothers in a traditional Peruvian household, Gracia Sotomayor learned her place in the world early. While they got to go outside to play, she made their beds, cooked, and cleaned. As she grew up, she climbed the corporate ladder, found a partner to take care of her (something important to her parents), and lived each day as she’d been taught, but she wasn’t happy.
Within a few years, she’d given up everything and moved halfway around the world to a country where she couldn’t speak the language to compete in a sport most people have never heard of. She’s never felt freer. Sotomayor has a way of stringing words together to perfectly express how most people feel about riding a bike. Her explanation of why she loves to ride, the freedom a bicycle gives, is universal, but her story is far from it.
“I’m a normal person just daring to follow her dreams,” Sotomayor told Escape Collective. “If I can do it, I believe that anyone can.”
It all started with a photograph in a magazine. An image of an artistic cyclist, holding herself in a plank above a fixed gear bike. By the time Sotomayor saw the image, she had already “hit rock bottom” and was finding her will to live again through riding.
“My life was ‘perfect’, but I was so depressed, I was thinking, ‘Is this really life like? Is this what I’m supposed to do? Am I supposed to get married and have kids, and accumulate money? And for what?’ I was really depressed, and I was in this spiral of emotions, not understanding why I was feeling so miserable, if I had it all,” Sotomayor explained. “The feeling was so deep and so dark that I lost the will to live. That’s when I hit rock bottom. I started asking for some help, and my boss told me, ‘You should go to a psychiatrist and take some pills. You just have depression.”
Sotomayor didn’t think pills were for her, but she could no longer work. “I was crying, working, crying, working, crying, working. I was really, really sad and really depressed. It was really hard for me to get out of bed.”
So she stopped working, and because she was unemployed, she had to move out of her apartment to move in with an aunt. Not long after, her boyfriend broke up with her. Every pillar that her youth had taught her would hold up her perfect life crumbled.
“I had nothing. No job and no house, no partner. So the only thing that I could do was to start again, and the way that I did it was by riding my bike.”
Riding a bike cost her nothing, and she was outside.
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