Blanka won medals at both the Cyclocross and Mountain Bike U23 World Championships last year and also won the CX World Cup Overall in the same category, by handily keeping pace all season long with the world’s fastest elite women. She clearly feels at home in the dirt! She is also the current Hungarian Elite MTB, ‘Cross and Road Champion. It’s no surprise that she’s gained the attention of one of the most successful women's World Tour teams, SD Worx. This June, Blanka will join their team of highly accomplished athletes, including current World Champion, Anna van der Breggen, former World Champion, Chantal van den Broek-Blaak, Liège–Bastogne–Liège winner, Demi Vollering and current Esports World Champion Ashleigh Moolman, among others. Many world tour road teams and world tour team sponsors are becoming more interested in off-road racing, and this works in Blanka’s favor. When she’s not on the world tour road schedule she will be racing at the world’s most prestigious off-road events.
A special kit, produced within limited time
So it’s pretty exciting to us that for the last two months, Blanka has been riding in LASTIG gear! How, you ask, does a new brand like ours become involved with a rider like Blanka? It’s actually a short story. We’ve been friends with Blanka and her family for some time, and this April we spotted her on a MTB ride, preparing for the first two World Cups of the season. She was wearing blacked-out kit, which we thought was odd given that she’d won the Hungarian title in XCO last year. It turned out that Blanka was in between contracts for a short (but important) few months, until June 1.
Within hours, we agreed to fast-track our prototyping for our 2022 summer race gear and produce some warm weather race suits and training gear specially designed for Blanka. It helped, of course, that we are partly based in Hungary, and so our designers and manufacturers here were equally excited about producing gear for her. After a few calls with Blanka, and taking measurements, everyone kicked into high gear to prepare a very special custom kit.
And Blanka was seemingly happy with her outfit, texting us from the races: “Thank you for the clothing. I like it so much!”