Here are a few things you should know about riding bikes with Ruby Isaac. First she will flash her wide grin, and then she will drop you. She will approach descents like Anna van der Breggen while you grab your brakes and take no risks. She will jump curbs and bomb through puddles you painstakingly avoid. When you confess to her that you prefer the flats, she will cheerfully tell you that hills make you stronger.
Ruby Isaac has been riding bikes for half her life. She is 12.
Like most kids, Ruby began riding around age 6. Unlike most kids, she has more than 21,000 followers on Instagram, 6,000 on Twitter, and 3,600 on YouTube. She’s been sponsored by two of the biggest bike companies in the world, first Specialized and now Trek, and was named by a U.K. cycling charity as one of the 100 most inspirational female cyclists in Britain. (She’s also the youngest person ever to make that list.) This past summer, she received a Global Child Prodigy Award, and in October, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson honored her with a Point of Light award, a designation that pays tribute to inspirational volunteers.
Ruby is best known for her astonishing ability to perform tricks no-handed on indoor rollers. She has also interviewed such cycling celebrities as former world champions Peter Sagan and Lizzie Deignan, as well as pop artists like the English singer Natasha Hamilton and the actor Will Mellor.
And all this is because of another thing you should know about riding bikes with Ruby Isaac: She adores it. At a time when the grownups in cycling are busy bickering over blood doping and sock height, Ruby Isaac is out there raising money for charity, getting more people on bikes, picking up litter during her rides—and having a blast along the way.
The village of Grafton Underwood, home to a mere 120 people, sits in the middle of a region known as the East Midlands. It’s two hours north of London and just a few miles from where Ruby lives with her parents and brother. In the village center, nothing much is happening at 7:50 a.m. on a Sunday morning in late fall. A few cats meander around; a couple of cyclists whiz by.
I’m 10 minutes early and Ruby is already waiting for me by the side of the road. Her bright red jacket and even brighter red Trek Émonda 650 stand out against a sepia background of modest homes and thatched cottages.
Ruby wears the Trek-Segafredo kit—a kids’ replica of the one worn by former world champion and Trek-Segafredo rider Lizzie Deignan. The British superstar also happens to be Ruby’s favorite cyclist, along with Peter Sagan of Slovakia. On top of her Trek kit, Ruby wears a Bontrager helmet, Limar sunglasses, and a red Santini jacket. (The Italian apparel company is another one of her supporters.)
At first Ruby comes across as shy and reserved. Her dad, Nick, is along to support her and to warm her up with a couple of high-fives before we start riding. During our later conversation at the café, he helps Ruby when she needs it, but he also gives her the space and time to think and respond in her own way.
On the bike, Ruby is all confidence and determination. Her pedal stroke is flawless and efficient. She transmits a good amount of power to her pedals and keeps the pace at around 15.5 mph. When the gradients increase, she shows her strongest skills, quickly changing gears through the electronic shifter and dancing on the pedals at a high cadence, opening an immediate gap that I have to scramble to close. Once I notice this pattern, I realize that all those hours she spends on the rollers clearly have a benefit beyond attention-grabbing stunts.
For our ride, Ruby has decided on a gentle—albeit hilly—road around Grafton. The bike seems to relax her, and the conversation flows seamlessly. It is clear that the bike is where she expresses herself best. To put it simply, when she’s riding, she’s at home.
Ruby’s path to cycling was the unlikely result of screen time and serendipity. Neither of her parents ride, and although they bought her a bike, “she never really wanted to ride it,” Nick says. But one day, when she was at her grandmother’s house, she saw a track race on TV.
“I thought what they were doing was amazing,” Ruby says. She begged her grandmother to walk back to her house with her to retrieve her bicycle. They took it to a nearby field with a slight downhill slope. “She held on to me and then just let go. And I was like, ‘Am I riding?!’” Ruby was able to stay upright for about 20 seconds.
“It was pretty cool to go down the hill,” she says. “I didn’t know [how to stop], so I just rolled into a hedge. I didn’t have to use the brakes.” She went up and down four more times. And from that moment, Ruby knew she wanted to be a bike racer.
The first bike Ruby raced was a little orange Apollo with a straight handlebar. (The Isaacs still have it in their garage.) She had to compete that day with both boys and girls (40 in total) for five laps on a cyclocross track, with kids everywhere and a lot of people cheering and shouting.
“It was tough. It was a small path and a bit of mayhem,” she says. “I cried for the whole race.” Still, she was undeterred. “I came last, but it was really fun. So I decided I wanted to keep carrying on.”
After the Apollo, the first race bikes arrived. When she was 7, Ruby rode a 24-inch Worx kids’ racing bike with a drop handlebar. Eventually she graduated to a tiny Specialized Allez as part of her then-partnership with the California company, and now rides the red Trek Émonda. When Specialized invited Ruby and her family to its Morgan Hill headquarters for the 2017 Tour of California, she had the opportunity to interview Peter Sagan. A few months later she flew back to the States, where she performed some of her roller tricks in Hollywood as a guest on the TV show “Little Big Shots,” hosted by the comedian Steve Harvey.
She got into riding rollers when she joined a local cycling club after her first race. Nick had heard other parents talking about turbo trainers and rollers. “Somebody at the club said that because [the kids] were so small, rollers would be less stressful on their legs,” he says. On her first rollers (she has always used Tacx), Ruby needed a few tries to properly stay upright. Nick would hold onto her seat or handlebar to help her maintain balance, letting go little by little.
It didn’t take long for Ruby to master the basics, and the natural progression—at least for her—was to learn tricks. First one-handed, then one-legged. “My dad taught me how to do no-handed as well,” says Ruby. “That only took me only a couple of minutes to learn."
The trick she’s most famous for, rope skipping, took longer. More like several days. “With normal skipping you just jump up, but on the bike it’s not like that. So you hold the rope here [behind her back], you let it go under [the first wheel] and then it goes straight back [pushed back from the rear wheel back up].”
If the whole process goes smoothly, Ruby says, you don’t feel the rope going under the tires.
“The hardest thing for us was when she went to [the 2019 Road World Championships in] Yorkshire and she was set on doing it live,” Nick says. “It’s okay doing it on YouTube and Instagram on your phone, but to actually do it live with a crowd of people, that was quite [nerve-racking] for all of us.”
Ruby was to perform the skipping trick on two consecutive days at the expo. After she nailed it on day one, an even bigger crowd gathered on the second day to watch and film. But Ruby didn’t even notice.
“On the first day I was a bit scared, because it was the first time I was live,” she says. “But on the second day I knew I had done it before, and I didn’t know everyone was filming. I just thought that if I do it, it will amaze people.”
Over time, the real challenge for Ruby has been generating new ideas for tricks and videos. “She quite likes coming up with her own stuff,” says Nick. But she also follows other YouTubers and Instagrammers—not necessarily cyclists—for inspiration. Among her favorite creative sources are Kailem and Zizi Williamson, ages 13 and 7, respectively, who perform soccer-focused tricks and videos. Last November, Ruby featured the brothers—who have a combined 765,000 subscribers on YouTube—on her interview show, Ruby Tube.
Ruby’s own path on social media started in early 2017. While attending a track race at the Manchester Velodrome, she met the Welsh rider Rachel Draper, who asked her if she was on Twitter and Instagram. On the way home, Ruby asked her parents for permission to be on Twitter, and they agreed to help set up her first account.
Once Ruby began posting, people would ask her questions and she’d respond through videos. Today her YouTube channel (titled “My Awesome Channel”) features 75 videos covering a variety of exploits from roller tricks to product reviews to maintenance tips. And she looks like she’s indeed having an awesome time: Here’s Ruby smiling while she installs SRAM eTap on her bike! Here she is attempting the Bottle Cap Challenge on rollers! Now she’s explaining how to shift gears! The original rope-skipping video, “My Best Roller Trick,” is by far her most popular with nearly a half million views, cementing her status as legit cycling influencer.
Ruby takes her role seriously and uses her social media currency to support issues that are important to her. In 2019, she collected nearly $6,000 for World Bicycle Relief through her participation in the Granfondo Stelvio in Italy. (She wasn’t able to climb the actual Stelvio due to snow.) Raising that sum, she says, is one of her most rewarding accomplishments as a cyclist. (Another was her Peter Sagan interview.) That summer she also rode parts of the Tour de France with a group of women riding the entire course to bring attention to the fact that there is still no women’s Tour de France.
And this year, while the world shut down for a global pandemic, Ruby kept posting to her YouTube channel and other platforms with her bright smile and message of positivity. On March 18, for example, she captioned misty ride photos: “I know it’s a scary world at the moment, but it’s also still a beautiful world…” A week later she was giving roller tips to folks stuck at home and chronicling her attempt to recreate the Giro d’Italia time trial in her backyard.
This past summer, Ruby took to her channels to encourage kids to participate in a 10-day challenge with Eco-Schools England, an organization that empowers young people to care for the environment. Her subsequent video, “How Much Litter Can I Collect in 1 Hour?” garnered more than 1,500 views—and her ongoing efforts to eradicate litter earned the attention of Boris Johnson, who appointed her Britain’s 1,507th Point of Light.
During the school year, Ruby’s schedule is limited and her parents manage her priorities: Classes and homework come first, and then she can ride her bike and make videos if there’s time left. So in a normal week she may hop on the rollers once or twice for 20 minutes or so. In terms of content, Ruby decides what to do and when—her parents and brother Finley, who’s 15, help just with filming and brainstorming. Finally, on Sundays she rides outdoors. And she’ll only train with a little more structure if she has some challenging goals ahead, like a race or another gran fondo.
“If she still wants to do cycling, I guess when she’s 14 then she would probably train,” says Nick. “Now it’s just about having fun on the bike, enjoying it, go on the rollers and do little tricks.”
Although Ruby clearly loves cycling and has tried other sports—horse riding, hockey, basketball, netball—she is fond of school too, particularly arts, math, and design technology. The thing she enjoys the most is blending metals for science experiments, which may help explain the impressive technical skills she displays in her video tutorial on installing SRAM Red eTap.
What Ruby’s future looks like is unknown, apart from maybe a rematch with the Stelvio. She says at some point she’d like “to see the zigzag road from above.” Her biggest cycling dream is to race at the World Championships and the Olympics, but she also seems okay with the possibility of doing something else entirely.
“I would love to be a racer, but also interviewing people is really fun. With my YouTube channel I would love to continue doing more videos. I love to inspire people, not just kids, but also other people as well.”
Her advice for people who think they’d like cycling but might be hesitant to try it? “Go have fun. Then if you love it a lot, you can take it a little bit more seriously. But if you’re my age [and even if you’re not] just have some fun with it.”
To the simple question of what she likes about cycling—one that many adults might not be able to articulate—Ruby’s straightforward yet authentic answer is once again about having a good time:
“I love cycling because it’s fun. You can do many different things: ride your bike with your friends after school, or on the weekend and meet up. And there’s a lot of bikes you can ride: BMX, track, road, mountain. My favorites are road and cyclocross bikes, but whatever bike you ride, it’s always fun.”
When we say goodbye and wave at each other one more time, Ruby climbs into the car with her dad. Their next stop is Finley’s soccer match. As they drive past, only her eyes and forehead are visible in the window above the door panel. I will ride again tomorrow, but that ride probably won’t be as fun as the one I had with Ruby.
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