Mountain Bike Racing

THE CACTUS CUP

MOUNTAIN BIKERS RISK HARM AND HURT RACING ON DESERT TRAILS The scene is Reata Pass near Pinnacle Peak, a classic Sonoran Desert setting outside Scottsdale. It is springtime, and it is incomparably sunny, calm, warm, and flowery. Desert hyacinth, chicory, brittlebush, and lupine are in bloom with many others about to burst.

The event is the three-day Specialized Cactus Cup II Mountain Bike Stage Race. Day one: a time trial, bikers riding alone cross-country against the clock. Day two: a criterium, several laps around a tight, twisty, closed course. Day three: a cross-country race around a grueling nine-mile circuit on desert trails.

It's a festive scene. Racers in team colors warm up on the gravel roadway leading into the staging area. Bike clothing and equipment manufacturers showcase their wares under multicolored awnings.

Professional racing teams with corporate sponsors arrive first-class in recreational vehicles, equipment trailers in tow. Amateur riders, lucky to get a local bike shop to kick in entry fees, camp in vans or pickup trucks. In the early morning, you see them tuning a derailleur on a portable bike stand or sitting at breakfast on truck tailgates.

Spectators mill among the displays of bicycle equipment and clothing. A few wear T-shirts emblazoned with screened prints like "1990 World Mountain Bike Championships. Durango, Colorado, USA." Others circle the staging area mounted on pricey custom-made bikes. Looking fit enough to race, all are de rigueur: Lycra shorts; double-layer wicking-action bike jerseys; and high-tech all-terrain bicycling shoes. These mountain-bike aficionados are here to see and be seen.

The best riders are the professionals, of course. And the Cactus Cup has attracted the top American, Canadian, and European mountain-bike-racing pros.

Ned Overend is here. A superstar in the young sport of mountain-bike racing, he was world champion in 1990 and has won the national championship three years running. John Tomac is here, as are Swiss rider Sylvia Fuerst and Americans Sara Ballantyne and Juliana Furtado. A list of their combined championships would fill a magazine page.

I decide to put on my helmet and ride part of the nine-mile cross-country course to get a feel of what the racers men and women of all ages, from teenagers up to 60 are experiencing. Earlier, out walking the course, it looked easy. But as soon as I start pedaling from the start-finish line near the staging area, I realize this is a tough course.

CACTUS CUP MOUNTAIN BIKE STAGE RACE

What was a gentle incline while walking becomes uphill work. Pushing my own body weight plus the weight of a bicycle, I feel sweat trickling down my brow. After about a quarter mile the course becomes a tight-twisted cross-country desert single-track, uphill and down, for about six miles.

This is real mountain-bike riding. Despite the desert setting, for most of its distance, the Cactus Cup course is pretty smooth, as all-terrain-bicycling courses go. I've been on a few that were so rock-cobbled my teeth rattled from the radical violence of the terrain shivering up through the bike frame into my elbows, shoulders, and head.

For me, the toughest part of the Cactus Cup course is all the maneuvering required. That's part of the fun of mountain biking, of course, the part that takes you back to when you were a kid riding your paper-boy special hell-bent for leather across vacant lots. But over a distance of several miles this becomes tiring.

The mental challenge is also tough.

Halfway through the course I'm mentally drained from trying to look ahead and check the terrain while negotiating my bike past a tricky dip followed by a steep climb and an immediate hard-right turn.

Now, with a few limb-threatening hazards tossed in, it gets really interesting. There are slots between boulders that narrow to a needle's-eye as I tilt toward them at top speed. And moguls that turn my gut to ice with the thought of catapulting over them onto deadly cholla-cactus spines. If the course is this tough without someone riding with me wheel-to-wheel, determined to snuff me if I make one little mistake, I know I don't have the right stuff for racing.

Thrills and spills? Mountain-bike racing is full of them. Every rider has "crashed and burned" more than once and has the scars to prove it. So to watch a pro like Californian Tinker Juarez or Canadian Alison Sydor maneuver a mountain bike at top speed over a tough single-track trail is to acknowledge the truth in the hackneyed, "poetry in motion."

The pros get their due from the sporting press. But not the quartet of riders I've come to cheer on. They are amateurs. In their nonathletic lives, they work as a pharmacist, veterinarian, fire fighter, and physical therapist. Racing in the Sport Class, a few notches below the pros, and ranging in age from 27 to 35, they're four of the best athletes I know.

Women first: Tammy DeGiovanni, the pharmacist, works at the Arizona Poison Control Center in Tucson. Hers may be the words of comfort ("don't panic") and advice ("apply ice, take aspirin") you so desperately want to hear if some dark night you telephone the center for help.

Tammy's good friend and chief rival is Jodie Petersen. Veterinarian Jodie is an equine specialist, practicing out of her mobile unit.

Tammy and Jodie's companions are Todd DeGiovanni, Tammy's husband and a City of Tucson fire fighter and paramedic, and Dave Peters, a physical therapist specializing in orthopedic and sports medicine. Todd and Tammy race under the colors of a team jointly sponsored by Specialized Bicycles and Full Cycle, a Tucson bike shop. Jodie and Dave also ride specialized bikes and are sponsored by Arizona Cycle and Sport.

Best athletes I know? Yep. None of them could compete with the pros, so I'm not suggesting they'll beat all comers. In fact, if they moved up a class into the Expert rank, they'd more often finish as also-rans than winners. Many other riders are faster and stronger.

What defines "best" for me is their approach to the game. My four riders race mountain bikes for the sport of it. "That's why I got into it in the first place," says Tammy. "When it's no longer fun, I'll stop."

Not that they don't want to win. They're competitive all right, but competitive in the sense that if you're going to do something,

it's more fun to do it well. "When you do

well, you want to keep going," says Jodie. Training, mostly discipline and hard work, is less a drag if you enjoy it.

ing, mostly discipline and hard work, is less a drag if you enjoy it.

Competition is a reward in itself, the payoff for the hours of training and a way of measuring your development, how good you've become.

But my four riders came to these races with a smile, not with a dog-eat-dog, in-your-face determination to win.

"You want to know how well you're doing against others who ride," says Todd, who among the four seems the fiercest competitor. "Sure I'd like to win, but if I don't, that's okay, too. Friendly competition, that's the spirit.

And none is a single-sport kook. When they're not out mountain biking, the DeGiovannis head to San Carlos on the Sea of Cortes for some sailboarding. Hiking, backpacking, jogging, skiing any sport as long as it gets them outdoors and moving.

As for Jodie and Dave, they also race road bikes and participate in triathlons.

Recently in a Yuma triathlon, Jodie took third in her age group. Dave, competing in his first triathlon, finished 11th.

Amateurs in the best sense, they're weekend athletes. The fun, the joy, of exercising to the point of fine-tuning your body, the camaraderie with athletes who share your interests, the thrill of doing well at something that requires strength, endurance, and grace. That's what they go for.

Not that they don't take the sport seriously. Todd, Dave, and Jodie breeze to first-place finishes in their age-group Cactus Cup races, each winding up as overall winners for the weekend.

Tammy came to the Cactus Cup tied for the lead in her class. But bad luck dogs her. She takes second-place in the criteri-um, a tortuous, tight-turned short-course race on Saturday. Not bad. On Sunday, riding in second place in the longer cross-country race, she "flats out" on the first lap. By the time she gets her tire repaired, the other riders have lapped her. "She took a 'd-n-f, did not finish," Todd

says. After the races, my group of four

After the races, my group of four The three winners sport their blue-ribbon earnings: brand-new green and gold race-leader biking jerseys.

leader biking jerseys.

If Tammy is disappointed by her d-n-f, her face doesn't show it. Grinning broadly as she bites into a sandwich, she looks over at Jodie, her friendly rival. "Next time," she says.

Author's Note: This year's race, the Specialized Cactus Cup III, will be held March 12 to 14. For information, tele-phone Specialized Bicycles at (408) 7796229, ext. 333.