A lot of buzz was generated by 16-year-old Elena Myers scoring a victory in the SuperSport class at Infineon Raceway on Saturday. The headlines out of Sonoma read “Elena Myers Becomes First Female To Win AMA Pro Road Race”. Well”¦ yes and no. Longtime AMA road racing fans may remember Sherry Friduss, who won a pair of Battle of the Twins Heavyweight Modified races in the mid-1980s riding a Moto Guzzi one at Daytona in 1984 and another at Pocono in 1985. Friduss later tried her hand at AMA Superbike racing in 1987. There’s no record of where she finished or even if she qualified for an AMA Superbike race because during that era the AMA only kept records of points-paying finishers. Friduss also raced in the prestigious Suzuka 8-Hours Endurance in 1984. Sherry and her female teammate Mari Igata finished a respectable 26th out of 61 teams. So was Myers really the first female to win an AMA professional (sprint) road race? Myers won $3250 in posted purse and contingency at Infineon Raceway, which would support the race as being a professional event, and the official results label SuperSport as being one of three AMA professional classes featured on an AMA Pro weekend. When Friduss raced in Battle of the Twins (BOTT) Modified, the AMA classified the series as an amateur class, and the official AMA results were labeled as such. However, there was a small purse at least at Daytona, so it was not amateur if you go by the strict definition of the word. Friduss never got a lot of credit for her BOTT Modified wins. Part of the reason is that the class was run as a race within a race. Friduss might have won in her class, yet could have been the 20th rider across the finish line. Certainly Friduss never won a stand-alone AMA Pro race overall, enabling her to get the recognition Myers received this weekend at Infineon Raceway. Friduss’ accomplishments did not go completely unrecognized, however. She was featured several times in the Daytona 200 souvenir program and her hometown paper, the Gainesville (Florida) Sun, did a feature on her. So the question of the first female to win an AMA professional road race is not completely settled. It’s not the concrete, black and white answer we might like to have, but in this instance a case could be made for both Myers and Friduss. Regardless, both riders are historically significant and if nothing else the Myers victory may have given Friduss more acknowledgment today than she got during her racing days. In any case, Myers is the youngest and the most recent by about a quarter century. She’s also the only woman to win overall. You make the call.