Vera Looser – the serial winner

VERA Looser (neé Adrian) has dominated women’s road cycling in Namibia for close to a decade, and will soon be participating in her second Olympic Games in Tokyo.

A natural athlete, Looser also excelled at swimming and triathlons at a younger age, but eventually decided to focus on cycling.

By 2009, at the age of 15, she won her first senior title at the Nedbank Cycle Challenge, going on to win the title three times in the four years thereafter.

By 2012 she won the National Championships for the first time, and from 2014 went on a fantastic, unbeaten run, winning the national title for seven years in a row.

In 2016 she qualified for the Rio Olympics in brilliant fashion when she won gold at the African Championships in both the road race and the time trial, but her Olympic debut was one to forget as nerves got the better of her.

“I was so nervous and emotional before the race. I started getting knots in my legs the day before the race, and the next morning I started getting shivers and hot flushes. When I left for the race I was fine again, but I think the whole experience cost me so much energy, so I wasn’t on top form and got pulled off before the end,” she says.

By now, Looser was racing more in Europe, and in 2017 received her first professional contract, joining a Spanish team.

By 2018 she joined a Swiss professional team, while she also produced her best performance on the European tour that year, coming fourth at a Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) event in Cham, Hagendorn, Switzerland.

At the African Championships in Bahir Dar, in Ethiopia, in March 2019, Looser once again suffered a setback as she was struck by a stomach bug a day before the race and could hardly eat.

She eventually finished fifth overall to miss out on an automatic qualifying spot for the Olympics.

She, however, still had a chance of qualifying by finishing the year among the top 100 professional cyclists in the world, and after picking up crucial points at the Africa Games in Morocco where she won two bronze medals in the road race and individual time trial, she just managed to qualify for the Olympics by finishing 98th overall at the cut-off date.

“It was very close at the end towards the deadline, and I was quite worried that I may not make it. I was considering competing in some more UCI races, while I even entered an African race in Port Elizabeth that was cancelled at the last minute, but in the end I just made the qualification and it was a huge relief,” she says.

Looser married Swiss marathon cyclist Konny Looser in February 2020, and although she could not compete much for the rest of the year due to the advent of Covid-19, she still managed to post some encouraging results.

In February she won the National Championships for the seventh year, and a month later finished fourth at the Cape Town Cycle Race.

Looser also competed in some mountain-bike races in Europe, coming third in the Tour du Jura and fourth at Rund um Uzwil.

In February 2021 she did the double at the National Championships, winning the road race for the eighth time and the individual time trial for the sixth time, and a month later she won two bronze medals in the road race and time trial at the African Continental Championships in Cairo.

Having now qualified for her second Olympics, a wiser and more experienced Looser is aiming to do better than at her Rio debut.

“I know what I have to focus on, but it won’t be easy. But I’m definitely in better physical shape than before Rio, because back then I’d never raced in Europe, and being young and still studying, I think I was just overwhelmed. Now I know what the racing is like, and I’ve raced against a lot of these girls before, so hopefully I’ll be more relaxed,” she says.

Looser will compete in the women’s cycling road race at Fuji International Speedway on Sunday, the 25th of July.

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