Worlds Apart, a Friendship Built on Dirt Tracks and 50cc Engines

Stefy Bau got her first dirt bike when she was 4, an Italjet with a 50-cubic-centimeter engine. She was a quick study. “It was at the age of 6 that I started racing,” said Ms. Bau, who is 45 and lived in Turate, Italy, but now calls the open road home as a digital nomad.

Tanya Muzinda got her first motocross bike when she was 5, a Yamaha PW50, a cousin to Ms. Bau’s Italjet. One day a year earlier, her father picked her up from kindergarten on a motorcycle, and “that’s when I first had a taste of revving the bike,” said Ms. Muzinda, a 17-year-old high school junior from Zimbabwe.

In 1982, Ms. Bau’s father, a butcher shop owner in Saronno, Italy, bought a two-stroke KTM 350 enduro bike and rode trails on the weekends. Soon after, motocross — dirt-bike racing on challenging terrain — became a family favorite, with motocross magazines strewn about the house.

“I got an education about the sport even before learning how to read and write,” Ms. Bau said. “I was identifying the names of colors with the names of the motorcycles.” Each brand had its own color: Honda was red, KTM was orange and Yamaha was blue. “For me, colors were KTM, Honda and Yamaha.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/03/business/motocross-women-girls.html