This current level of success across classes is a new trend, as there has never been more than one world champion female class winner in the same year. Related: Women Coaches Face Greater Professional and Personal Obstacles Than Men … he had to be tough.” Stoffer credits the lack of negativity she received when beginning to compete in the NHRA to the success she had in the Craftsman Series before moving up to the pros. Though Stoffer debuted just eight years after Sampey, she agrees that Sampey “had endured significantly different experiences. One of Sampey’s competitors, world record-holding motorbiker Karen Stoffer, debuted nearly a decade later, in 2004. But not much had progressed in racing through the 1980s and early ’90s until Sampey arrived. Sampey’s debut came 14 years after pioneer Shirley “Cha Cha” Muldowney, a three-time champion in the high-speed Top Fuel series who was known as the “First Lady of Drag Racing,” won her final World Championship. Success for women in drag racing is not a new phenomenon. “The way they treated me, such as accusing me of cheating, is what made me so fierce.” “I thanked them all for being a**holes to me the past five years,” she remembers saying in her speech after winning her first pro stock motorcycle world championship in 2000. The hostility Sampey faced was clearly a tool to get women like her to quit racing, but it instead fueled her success. Girls today don’t have the rocky road I had.” This included accusing me of cheating or saying they didn’t want me to crash into them because as a woman I couldn’t handle the motorcycle. “Back then,” said Sampey, “many of the men I raced against were ruthless and did nasty things to try and get me to not come back. She was an outlier, a woman in a man’s sport just trying to avoid the ire of the men around her long enough to race another day. When drag racer Angelle Sampey debuted in the National Hot Rod Association in 1996, she was not yet a champion, not yet an inspiration. Monthly Issue Access & Opportunity in Sport
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