ESOF CYCLING AND CHOCOLATE
Llori Sharpe balances life in the pro peloton and professional chocolate making
When Llori Sharpe’s phone lights up with a message in the family group chat, it’s usually more than a ‘hi, how are you?’ check-in. Rather, messages from her dad are sometimes all business: “he just said he’s about to start roasting the beans,” she tells me one day in mid-February.
Even though Sharpe spends much of her time in L.A. training and racing, it’s important that she always knows what’s going on back home in Jamaica: her dad is her business partner, and those beans are the business. In addition to riding for L39ION of Los Angeles, Sharpe is a professional chocolate maker for Chocollore, her family’s chocolate business. Anytime she’s not racing, she’s back in Jamaica, likely in the family’s veranda-turned-chocolate lab, her long braids tied up under a hairnet, playing “Willy Wonka for a bit,” she says.
Sharpe’s side hustle as chocolate maker — and co-owner of Chocollore — is enough to make the 24-year-old stand out in the pro peloton, but there are plenty of other details that make her story singular. Namely, that she’s in the pro peloton at all. Sharpe is the first Jamaican ever to ride on a UCI team.
Sharpe’s path to professional cycling began, in a sense, in the water. Her mother threw her into swimming lessons when she was eight months old—”she was going to make sure I knew how to swim even if she didn’t,” Sharpe says. By six, she was swimming competitively, and that became her primary activity outside of school for the next 10 years. Then, her swim coach recommended triathlon, and Sharpe excelled easily. However, the running took its toll and she soon developed a painful case of ‘runner’s knee.’ At the same time, she fell out of love with swimming.
That left the bike.
On an island obsessed with track and field, Sharpe became one of few women pursuing cycling. She rode mostly with men, even when competing. Yet, online she was witnessing a different dichotomy: women’s cycling was flourishing. Sharpe followed women’s WorldTour teams on social media and was watching the big races when she could. The Tour de France Femmes was about to debut in 2022, and the hype was real. Then, Sharpe saw a post on Canyon-SRAM’s Instagram page that piqued her interest. The WorldTour team was launching a development squad, and they wanted young women from underrepresented countries to apply.
“I thought, ‘I really had nothing to lose,’” Sharpe says.
She applied and was selected to be a part of Canyon-SRAM Generation’s inaugural class. What followed was a crash course in life in the European peloton. Sharpe uprooted from Jamaica, where she was a university student, and moved to Girona, where the team had secured housing and other resources for the girls. Despite the fact that it was her first time in Europe, Sharpe wasn’t as struck by culture shock as one might imagine; she spoke enough Spanish to get by, the weather wasn’t too cold, and she found herself living about 400 meters away from another cyclist from another Caribbean island — Teniel Campbell of Trinidad and Tobago.
Campbell had arrived onto the pro cycling scene by way of the UCI’s WCC Team back in 2018, so she was a few years ahead of Sharpe in experience. The two became fast friends. On the bike, Sharpe focused on learning how to race. Nothing in Jamaica could have prepared her for racing in Europe, where the numbers of participants dwarfed any peloton she’d ridden in back home. She leaned on more experienced riders on the team, like Agua Espinola from Paraguay, to help show her the ropes.
Sharpe spent two years with Canyon-SRAM Generation. She learned a lot during that time, and when she wasn’t re-signed at the end of the 2023 season, she wasn’t sure she wanted her racing career to be over, even though she had quite the fallback plan — both Chocollore and a degree in exercise science.
“But I was really enjoying cycling and getting to travel just for the sake of getting to race my bike,” Sharpe says. “It was like, ‘I don’t know how much longer I’ll be able to do this so I want to be able to do this for as long as I can.’”
Fortunately, Justin Williams, co-founder of L39ION, a U.S.-based team known for its dominance in criterium racing and its commitment to increasing diversity in the sport, came along at just the right time. Sharpe had met Williams at the Commonwealth Games in 2022 and the two stayed in touch loosely via social media. They rode together in 2023 when Williams visited Girona. Before the 2024 season, Williams reached out to see if Sharpe had a team yet. After their call, the answer was ‘yes.’
Like the small child learning to swim, Sharpe was again thrown into the deep end with L39ION. Her ability to adapt — to be the new girl, to learn quickly, to confront the unfamiliar — has been a constant theme in her career, whether that’s shifting from triathlon to road racing, moving to Europe, or learning the intricacies of high-speed, tactical criterium racing in the U.S.
It all requires a level of patience and consistency that every cyclist is familiar with — no one becomes great overnight. Sharpe, however, is OK with the process, the science, and the craft. It’s a lot like making chocolate — and she’s very good at that.
Words by Betsy Welch
Photos by Robin O’Neill and Kit Karzen
