Manuela Gomez

Manuela Pacific Gomez is a rising cycl-E racer from Colorado. She started out in electric dirt bike races before earning her spot in electric road bike racing. She has won the Aspen Blast dirt bike race twice and the Denver Deca. She has grabbed sponsorships from Cupidi S.p.A., an Italian electric sport bike manufacturer, as well as the sportswear company ATHA and many others.

In a most ironic manner, her entire existence stemmed from a motorcycle accident and its aftermath. In 2000, Manuela’s father Marco Gomez got into a motorcycle accident that left the rider with a minor but permanent back problem. He sued Marco and Marco lost what had been his late mother’s house and all of his savings. He was homeless in Phoenix, Arizona for 10 months, going from shelter to encampment to abandoned building to shelter again.

One night in 2001, Marco snuck onto a freight train, unsure where it would go but hoping it would go somewhere more friendly to the homeless. He would end up in Denver, Colorado. But just as he was getting off the train, he was caught by a train crewman. But this man was a very reasonable guy. He decided to let Marco do some house cleaning work for him in exchange for not calling security. Eventually, Marco would go on to do more and more work and eventually, he got to meet the trainman’s daughter, Tracy. 

Tracy was 22 and still living with her single father while studying to become a speech therapist. Her father was struggling to balance his busy schedule as a train crewman with helping her achieve her dreams. But she developed a crush on the homeless Marco. This crush grew into something bigger, and in 2004, they married. Marco and Tracy were able to buy a small house with their combined income.

Very early in 2006, Manuela was born. She was given the middle name Pacific by her father because the train that brought him to Denver and enabled him to meet her mother and own a house again was a Union Pacific one. When Manuela was a toddler, the 2008 recession hit, and the Gomez family narrowly managed to avoid losing their home. In 2011, Manuela’s brother Fernando was born, followed by Axel in 2019.

When Manuela was 13, her parents ever so reluctantly let her get a dirt bike. Her father remembered a motorcycle was what had made him homeless 19 years earlier. Her dirt bike is an orange electric one of the Teton brand. She caught on quickly and made some friends with which to try dirt bike racing for the first time.

She used the experience gained from these small-time impromptu races to enter into the Aspen Blast in 2021, which she won. She had hoped to race in the Blast in 2020, but it was cancelled that year due to COVID-19. In 2023, she won the Aspen Blast again, but not before a faulty electric motor capacitor almost cost her the win. As she made a name for herself, she drew the attention of cycl-E teams. One of these teams was Cupidi Moto.

Cupidi is by far Manuela’s most generous sponsor. They are an Italian bike manufacturer specializing in renewable power. They first got into contact with Manuela after they learned of her impressive dirt bike record. They gave her an initial contract to race their aerodynamic and shiny blue electric bikes for a $100,000 a year salary.

On September 4, 2023, Manuela took home the trophy for the Denver Deca, a series of ten races around or near landmarks in the city. During one of these races, she became the first person to circle the Broncos stadium in an electric bike in under 30 seconds. This feat was witnessed by her parents and little Axel in the stands, while her other brother Fernando watched the event from school. Her victory came with a $125,000 grand prize and Cupidi raised her contract to $225,000 a year.

Manuela has hair that is dark puce at the roots to Tuscany blonde towards the ends. Her eyes are brown and her face is pristine. During races, she wears a vibrant dark blue racing jumpsuit with black and pink checkered stripes. It has the logos of several sponsors on the front of the right leg and Cupidi’s logo written in huge letters on the backs of the legs. The zipper has a large red triangle with “SUIT RELEASE” on each side. On the left wrist is a tiny red drop with “B-“, her blood type, in case she needs an emergency transfusion after a crash. Manuela wears pink gloves and racing boots.

Cupidi uses a similar color scheme on its racing bikes, which are also painted smooth glossy blue and covered headlight to taillight in the logos of sponsors. For the 2022-2027 seasons, Cupidi team members are encouraged to stick on their bikes a small purple domestic violence ribbon decal. This commemorates Ayasa Tomori, a Japanese motorcycle racer who was murdered by her fiancé in a case that has been dubbed “Japan’s Gabby Petito” by the media.

Manuela’s paternal grandparents were from Oaxaca, Mexico, having been inspired to immigrate to America after the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. Her father Marco was born in 1973 and later inherited their house before losing it in his motorcycle crash lawsuit. Her mother Tracy is also Hispanic as well as Caucasian.

Manuela grew up around her father who spoke some Spanish and watched and listened to Spanish-language TV and radio shows. She now knows Spanish fairly well but has minor trouble with some of the more complex grammar. Manuela has also had to learn some Italian mechanical terms to better communicate with Cupidi pit crews.

Besides actual bike racing, Manuela is also an avid bike racing gamer. She plays Milestone’s motoGP series and GP Bikes, as well as non-motorcycle racing games like the EA Sports F1 series and games unrelated to racing like Minecraft. But she shuns Gran Turismo 7 and F1 Clash. She joined Twitch on December 10, 2023. She likes to stream but does so irregularly. Her content is mainly the motoGP games, but she also discusses the state of motorcycle racing and gives thoughts on different racers and managers.

Manuela games on a DIRT XT4, a $6,600 gaming PC made by an El Paso, Texas company. The design of the olive brown case was inspired by military motifs. Inside are not one, but four Intel Arc A770 GPUs, organized into two “banks” of two like the cylinders of a V engine. There are three separate AIO cooling systems for the CPU and each GPU bank. The CPU itself is an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X, which has 32 cores and 64 threads. The DIRT XT4 comes with a 2 TB hard drive, a socket for a solid state drive, and 64GB of RAM with 3 additional slots for more RAM sticks, to which Manuela has added two extra 16GB sticks.

Manuela has also given her PC a $3,500 T-shaped 8K 240fps monitor. Instead of a keyboard, she uses the Motomus bike handlebar with her PC. This is a gaming controller that mimics a sport bike handlebar and has all the regular keyboard keys built in. It also features a small screen; a D-pad; two sticks; two bumpers; and A, B, Q, X, and Y action buttons. While it can totally replace a keyboard, many users find it awkward to type on.

Manuela’s desk with her PC sits in front of her bed. To the left of her bed is the window and her bookshelf, and to the right is the enclosure for her pet lizard Maurice. On Manuela’s shelf is her small stereo and collection of about 30 CDs and a single vinyl: GUTS by Olivia Rodrigo. Something more unusual on her shelf is her collection of copies of the 2006 Burger King video game Pocketbike Racer. She has 84 copies of the game on the middle two rows.

Other than her bikes, Manuela also has in her garage a vintage Chevrolet Impala lowrider. The previous owner engine-swapped this car with a much newer Chevy LS1 engine (before that, the car had been in a barn for 15 years because the old engine had a cracked block). After buying her Impala, Manuela hired an automotive painter to paint on some pink line work that she drew on a piece of paper and brought into their shop. She then had the old, torn, and stained seats replaced with some comfy sky blue seats. Her father tried his best to teach her how to drive the manual transmission car, but he had not done this himself since his teenage years. Manuela’s lowrider has the license plate “MANI-2K6”.

Maurice is Manuela’s pet emerald tree skink. He originally belonged to a hospital receptionist in Kentucky who went to prison for 318 HIPAA violations and worse yet, making moonshine and letting her 12 year old son drink it. After his old owner went to jail, Maurice ended up with a reptile rescue before Manuela saw him at the mall and adopted him. Manuela bought a 4-foot high 3’x2’ cabinet-style terrarium to be his enclosure, on top of which she also displays some of her bike racing trophies and memorabilia. Besides eating superworms and isopods, and being petted constantly by the Gomezes, Maurice loves cruising in Manuela’s lowrider. Manuela doesn’t let Maurice ride with her on either of her bikes because even with his sharp claws, he could easily lose his grip and fall off on a jump or sharp corner. 

When Manuela was 9-10, she would eat squirtable cheese directly from the can.