Cross over

Katie Compton pedaled her bike on rollers while watching TV in her living room on a recent snowy afternoon. It was too icy for a three-hour training ride. Instead, she was studying footage of past races, looking for weaknesses in her competitors.

Compton, 29, wanted to be able to read other top racers’ body language so she could tell in the next race whose feet were dancing light on the pedals, ready to attack, whose heads were drooping from fatigue, and whose handlebars were swaying side to side in exhausted hands.

“I call that move ‘wrasselin’ with the bear,’” Compton said as she pedaled. “When you see that, you know that girl’s pretty much done.”

Compton, who lives on Colorado Springs’ southeast side, is one of the top cyclocross racers in the world. She has won the U.S. National Cyclocross Championship four years in a row. In October she became the second woman to win a cyclocross World Cup race in Europe (a feat only fellow Colorado Springs racer Alison Dunlap has duplicated). And next week, Compton has a very real shot at winning the Cyclocross World Championships to gain the title of best female rider on the planet.

“I think I can do it,” she said. “Anything can happen, but as long as everything goes right, there’s a good chance.”

Americans aren’t supposed to win cyclocross races. Most Americans don’t even know what cyclocross is.

The European winter cycling sport pits riders on sturdier versions of road bikes with knobby tires against a short course fraught with mud pits, sand traps, stairs, hills, hurdles and slick hairpin turns more suited for mountain bikes. Conditions are often so brutal that riders have to hop off and run.

“It’s a very tough sport,” said Mark Legg, Compton’s mechanic, manager, training partner and fiance. “Your hands are frozen. You’re soaking cold. You have mud in your eyes and you’re riding horrendous terrain. You need to be strong.”

The short, crash-heavy races with lots of passing on multiple laps have made cyclocross a major spectator sport in Europe. Big events are televised. Pros hand out trading cards to young fans.

“It’s like NASCAR,” said Andrew Yee, editor of Cyclocross Magazine. “At a big race in Belgium you’ll have 20,000 spectators drinking beer and cheering.”

It’s a far cry from the United States, where most races take place unnoticed in city parks, cash prizes are almost nonexistent and even riders of Compton’s stature are almost unknown, even to their neighbors.

Working her way up

Technically, Compton’s cyclocross career began on a bar stool, but it took a long, rutted route to her first big win.

In 1999, she was drinking at a bar with some college cycling buddies when one asked if she wanted to do a cyclocross race the next day.

“I was like, ‘I don’t want to run with a bike,’” she said. “Then I had another beer and decided ‘what the hell?’”

She showed up on a clunky mountain bike with a hangover and got second place.

Compton hadn’t exactly come from nowhere. She grew up in Delaware, where her dad got her into racing when she was 10. By the time she was 12, she was driving two hours each way to compete in track races at the closest velodrome. In high school, she went to junior world and national championships as a road rider.

She was good, but not great. Her body was a little too big for road racing, her old Junior National Team coach Craig Griffin said, and the intense training made her quads cramp so badly that she could sometimes hardly walk.

When Compton started college at the University of Delaware, she quit racing.

“I was just tired of it,” she said.

Instead, she started mountain biking. It was more fun, more casual. You could ride hard, then tip back a beer after. It was the same with cyclocross — no stress, just fun.

To graduate with a degree in exercise physiology, Compton needed an internship, so she took one at Carmichael Training Systems, a personal training company in Colorado Springs best known for coaching seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong.

Carmichael eventually offered her a job and she stayed.

One of her bosses at Carmichael was Griffin, her old coach, who had become head coach of the U.S. Paralympic Cycling Team and was searching for “pilots” who could race tandem bikes with talented blind racers.

These front-seat riders had to be top-level athletes, but couldn’t be actively competing in pro races because of Paralympics rules. They were tough to find.

“Then here was Katie,” Griffin said. “She was solid, talented, enthusiastic.”

Griffin introduced her to Karissa Whitsell, an up-and-coming blind rider from Oregon. A few months later they won two first places at the World Championships. In 2003, they grabbed two more. In 2004, they won two gold medals at the Paralympic Games in Athens, got on the podium in every other race, and set a world record.

“We really clicked,” Compton said.

At the same time, there was this cyclocross thing. Compton thought she could do well in the sport. She had learned as a tandem racer to train without getting leg cramps. But if she raced cyclocross as a pro, it would bar her from the Paralympics.

There was one option though. Griffin told her the ban didn’t include the U.S. National Championships, so in 2004 she showed up to the country’s top cyclocross race as a total unknown.

Deciding to make her move

Compton had no previous race wins to earn a front-row spot at nationals so she had to start five rows back in the pack.

It took two laps to get to the front. Then she realized she could ride faster than the pack was going and surged ahead.

“The crowd was going crazy,” she said. “They were like, ‘who the hell is this?’”

She won.

She didn’t enter another cyclocross race until nationals in 2005. She won that too.

Winning Nationals was a rush, but Compton knew the true competition was in Europe. Going down that road, though, would mean no more piloting for a blind racer.

She decided to leave tandem racing.

“It was tough. But we’d done everything we could do together,” she said. “I had to move on before I got frustrated.”

As soon as Compton was free to enter pro races, she started winning. She clinched the national championship again in 2006 and headed to Belgium for the Cyclocross World Championships.

On a recent afternoon while Compton was riding the rollers, her fiance put on a DVD of the race.

Some 35,000 fans leaned over logospattered barriers as a pack of 42 riders churned through the mud. For much of the race, Compton was lost in the middle of the pack. Then, as the struggle with mud and sand and steep climbs claimed more and more riders, she fought for sixth place, then fourth, then third.

Even with the language difference, the surprise of the Belgian TV commentators was audible as she passed one seasoned European rider after another. The commentators knew nothing about her, except that she was American and wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near the front.

No American woman (and only two American men) had ever medalled at the World Championships.

In a rutted, muddy hairpin turn near the finish Compton passed a French rider and nabbed second place — just over one second behind the winner.

“Everyone was really surprised,” Compton said. “It was great for U.S. cross. We’ve never done that well.”

On Wednesday Compton and Legg flew to Europe with three bikes, four sets of wheels, nine pairs of tires and a mechanic’s kit with doubles of every part.

After weeks at home doing long rides and sprints up the Incline, Compton said she is ready to go.

She just has to sit down and go over every turn of the course in her mind so at the start gun, she no longer needs to think.

Readers in a Cyclingnews.com poll last week picked her overwhelmingly to win against the best European racers.

But her coach said in a sport known for crashes, anything can happen.

“She’s coming in now as a favorite. She’s another year wiser, another year smarter. She has a real good chance. Now it’s time to roll the dice and see what happens.”

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0223 or dave.philipps@gazette.com

DEFINING CYCLOCROSS

What: A type of racing in which cyclists on road-style frames with knobby tires race laps on a short (1.5- to 2-mile) course featuring pavement, wooded trails, grass, steep hills, mud, sand, stairs and obstacles requiring the rider to briefly dismount. Races generally last between 30 minutes and one hour.

When: A fall sport with most races from September to December.

Where: The largest races are in Europe, but American hot spots include New England, the Pacific Northwest and Colorado.