From Nashville To Europe, Jennifer Schuble Hits High Gear

Most Wednesday nights, you’ll find Jennifer Schuble at Nashville Fairgrounds Speedway.

She’s not racing stock cars.

But she is on her bike.

And the three-time Paralympian loves going fast.

Schuble is a sprint specialist who competes in the highly competitive WC5 class. She has won five Paralympic medals, dating back to winning a gold in a 500-meter time trial on the track during her Paralympic debut in Beijing in 2008.

Now, the 48-year-old from Homewood, Alabama, is also racing on the road and hopes to make the world championships teams in both disciplines this year.

“I’m one of the fastest C5s in the world,” Schuble said. “If I’m there at the finish, I’m definitely in the bunch sprint.”

Schuble credits her recent success in part to the weekly bike races at Nashville Fairgrounds. Having spent most of her working career in the automotive sector, she’s right at home on the half-mile speedway track that opened in 1904 and still hosts the Music City 150, an annual ARCA Menards Series East race.

“We turn it into a criterium,” Schuble said. “We use the pits and everything else.”

Schuble, who last competed in the Paralympic Games in 2016 in Rio de Janeiro and the track world championships in 2018, is enjoying her resurgence.

In May, she joined the U.S. team in Maniago, Italy, for a road world cup competition. Having just cleared a four-week medical wait following surgery for a hematoma condition, Schuble finished fourth in the road race and sixth in the time trial.

“It was really encouraging to see where I was at,” said Schuble, who joked that she “looked like somebody had taken a baseball bat to my leg.”

Schuble said she lost a lot of fitness during her recovery but still came into Italy feeling pretty good. If not for a cramp in the road race, she believes she would have reached the podium.

That same determination and drive led Schuble into Para-cycling nearly two decades ago.

She was a cadet and three-sport varsity athlete at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York, before a series of traumatic brain injuries and a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis changed her trajectory.

She wound up at the Lakeshore Foundation in Birmingham, Alabama, a U.S. Olympic & Paralympic training site, where she took up cycling in 2007. One year later, she was a Paralympic gold medalist.

While the weekly races at the Nashville Speedway and other regional races she is considering this summer (one of them at Talladega in Alabama, another NASCAR track) will keep her going in road competition, the focus will now also shift to track racing. The track is Schuble’s wheelhouse, especially the scratch races, pursuit and time trials — aka the sprints.

“I’m one of the only actual Para riders that have a lot of mass start racing experience on the track,” she said.

Her 15 world championships medals going back to 2007 include six gold medals, the most recent coming in 2017 in a 500-meter time trial, as she focused on track.

The track season kicks into high gear in June with the U.S. Paralympics Track Cycling Open, set for June 14-15 at VELO Sports Center in Carson, California. The competition will determine the U.S. roster for the world championships and will be followed by a week-long track camp for those who make the team.

The UCI Para-cycling Road World Championships are set for Aug. 28-31 in Ronse, Belgium, followed by the UCI Para-cycling Track World Championships on Oct. 16-19 in Rio de Janeiro.

“I’m super excited for the road race in Belgium, the world championships, because if I get the start right, I really think I’ve got a good chance of being on the podium,” Schuble said. “We’ll see. We’ll see what happens.”

Also on her mind is the 2026 road world championships, which will be hosted by the U.S. in Huntsville, Alabama. The same site was used for this year’s U.S. Paralympics Cycling Time Trial in March.

“That’s a huge goal of mine, for road worlds in Huntsville,” Schuble said. “That’s kind of a hometown race for me, University of Alabama grad, two decades in Alabama.”

“I could just sleep in my own bed and drive down for race day,” she joked, “if they’d let me.”

Paul D. Bowker has been writing about Olympic and Paralympic sports since 1996, when he was an assistant bureau chief in Atlanta. He is a freelance contributor to USParaCycling.org on behalf of Red Line Editorial, Inc.