In some countries, the federations and their athletes embrace cycling esports alongside traditional disciplines.
When she won the first of her back-to-back Swedish Road Race Championships in 2024, the then 24-year-old Mika Söderström attacked with 75 km to go on the 122 km course, finishing solo in Linköping with a margin of over eight minutes. The script was different the following year, but the result wasn’t – despite the need to change up her tactics as a solo rider while also being forced to chase everything that went up the road.
“I couldn’t pull off a 75 km solo break to win like I did last year because everyone knew I could do it,” Söderström explains. With 1,500 m to go, she launched an “all-out attack, and when they realized, it was too late,” she says, describing the decisive defense of her title by a slimmer seven seconds.
Second across the line was Emila Fahlin, who presently rides for ProTeam Arkéa-B&B Hotels and is the career UCI points leader among active Swedish women. Söderström also bested WorldTeam Liv AlUla Jayco’s Caroline Anderson, the third on the list, and Julia Borgström, who sat fourth behind Anderson, and is presently riding for WorldTeam AG Insurance-Soudal.
On the short list
Granted, Sweden doesn’t boast the deep road racing tradition of Europe’s storied nations, or even the Scandinavian pedigree of Denmark and Norway. But try finding another two-time defending national champion who isn’t riding on the road for a professional or even Continental team. It isn’t a long list.
Yet in Söderström, the country has produced a rare talent, one who has twice won her national road title without the backing of a professional team. That distinction alone makes her an outlier, but her career chronicle becomes even more compelling when you consider that she is also Sweden’s two-time defending cycling esports champ, that she balances elite competition with a PhD in biomedical engineering, and that she doesn’t identify first and foremost as a road racer.
“In the media and within Swedish cycling, people call me the esports rider doing well on the road,” she says, “but as time has passed, I would call myself an esports specialist.”
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