Two-time Olympian Mary McConneloug, currently the top-ranked U.S. mountain biker, runs her own team with partner Michael Broderick and has no plans of retiring any time soon.
By Peggy Shinn
In early August, USA Cycling’s Pro Mountain Bike Cross-Country Tour (ProXCT) stopped at Mount Snow in southern Vermont, and the top domestic trade teams’ colorful trucks and trailers were parked at the ski resort’s main base area. Under the trailer awnings and team tents, the top American riders mingled. Olympians Jeremy Horgan-Kobelski (Subaru-Gary Fisher), Todd Wells (Specialized), Georgia Gould (LUNA Chix), and Mary McConneloug (Kenda-Seven-NoTubes) were all there.
Except McConneloug’s team rig wasn’t parked with the others. The top-ranked female mountain biker in the U.S., McConneloug and her partner Michael Broderick had parked the Kenda-Seven-NoTubes van and trailer about a mile south of the main venue at Mount Snow’s Carinthia base area, the designated camping spot for this event.
Not because they aren’t welcome by the other teams but because Team Kenda-Seven-NoTubes consists only of McConneloug, 38, and Broderick, 36. Their team rig is a gray Ford van and Tail-Gator trailer that serves as their staging area and their home.
With a full kitchen and bath, large table in the middle, and a bed that descends from the ceiling, the trailer has everything they need and uncluttered, it feels bigger than it looks from the outside. A few pieces of luggage, including a 2008 Olympic team- issued suitcase emblazoned with USA, are scattered in the back.
McConneloug has been approached by the big teams that offer perks such as mechanics, massage therapists, and team managers who handle logistics. But she prefers to go it alone with Broderick, whom she said is “incredible, I wouldn’t be here without him.”
“For me, this is a lifestyle,” she said. “I want to share this with my man. Yeah, it’s more difficult, and I don’t know how much we make compared to anyone else. … But we’re free. We’re able to choose where we want to go and where we want to race. It’s amazing to be in control and not have someone tell me what to do.”
The freedom that she and Broderick have chosen has not only kept her happy and her life more balanced – if incredibly busy – but also has helped her achieve the success that she’s had, including two trips to the Olympic Games and seven World Cup podiums.
McConneloug discovered mountain bike racing relatively late in life. She was 27 in 1997 when her then-boyfriend persuaded her to race. Growing up in Fairfax, Calif., McConneloug had mountain biked for fun but didn’t even know mountain bike racing existed.
She graduated with a degree in vocal performance from Santa Clara University, and perhaps surprisingly, found that studying music was a good rehearsal for mountain bike racing. “I know if I keep practicing something enough, I can get better,” she said.
Although she does not sing regularly anymore, she sometimes speaks melodically and lyrically, and always with passion. “The pedaling, the rhythm, the cadence, the improvisation of getting out there and wondering, ‘What am I going to do here?'” she said, further describing the connection between sport and music.
Once she discovered mountain bike racing, she quickly moved up the ranks, turning pro in 1999. She also met Broderick that same year. Broderick is from Martha’s Vineyard, the island off Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and he was out west racing his mountain bike when friends introduced them.
“The kicker was his truck,” said McConneloug. “He had this Toyota with a homemade cap on the back. Inside was a little single bed, a refrigerator, his camp stove, toaster, espresso maker, surfboard, mountain bike, road bike, and guitar. I was like, this guy is special. He’s totally self-sufficient doing what he loves.”
With Broderick as mechanic and McConneloug as cook, they became their own self-contained team. Seven Cycles became the couple’s primary sponsor in 2002.
“We share the same commitment to authenticity and self-reliance,” said Mattison Crowe, Seven Cycle’s marketing manager, when asked why the company chose to sponsor the duo. “Mike and Mary also happen to be genuinely wonderful people. They way they conduct themselves as ambassadors of our company and the sport are traits we value.”
Kenda Tires and NoTubes.com (tubeless wheel systems) now co-sponsor McConneloug and Broderick along with Seven, but the duo still runs a lean operation, sharing the roles of manager, mechanic, cook, driver, and whatever else needs doing.
McConneloug’s first big victory came at Mount Snow at a national series race in June 2003. By November of that year, she realized that the Olympic Games were within reach.
“We read that there were two positions for [American women mountain bikers at] the Olympics and that I was the second-ranked American,” said McConneloug, who dreamed of going to the Olympic Games ever since watching gymnast Mary Lou Retton win a gold medal in 1984 but never thought someone who picked up a sport at age 27 could pursue it to that level.
Her ranking was based on UCI points. The UCI – Union Cycliste Internationale – is the sports’ governing body and awards points at sanctioned races such as World Cups and national series events. USA Cycling does not have a specific national team and usually appoints riders, who compete during the season for sponsored trade teams, to compete for the U.S. at the Olympic Games and World Championships based on their UCI ranking.
But then the news came in December 2003 that the U.S. would only be allowed to send one woman to the Athens 2004 Olympic Games. According to UCI rules, Olympic berths are awarded to countries based on their national ranking. Countries ranked ninth and lower were awarded only one spot.
The defending overall World Cup champion Alison Dunlap, who had collected most of the UCI points for the U.S. in the previous years, crashed hard in June 2003, separated her shoulder, and sat out the rest of 2003 while recovering from surgery. Without Dunlap collecting points, the U.S. fell to ninth in world ranking (thus giving the U.S. only one spot).
USA Cycling’s Olympic team selection criteria stipulated whichever female rider had the most UCI points collected between July 13, 2003, and July 12, 2004, would be named to the team.
McConneloug started the 2004 season over 150 UCI points behind Sue Haywood. Dunlap, whose shoulder had healed by then, also tried to qualify for the lone U.S. Olympic berth.
But McConneloug had something working in her favor. Without sponsorship commitments to compete in U.S. races, she and Broderick set off for Europe where McConneloug could begin racking up UCI points in early February 2004 – two weeks before Haywood’s first UCI race and five weeks before Dunlap began racing.
McConneloug and Broderick rented an RV in Munich, Germany, and their first stop was the island of Cyprus, where over five weeks, McConneloug earned 160 UCI points. Over the next three months, she competed in nine countries, won 10 races and finished in the top three in three others.
“We would go to these amazing little venues,” McConneloug recalled. “We would look at the UCI calendar, and that was our guide.”
“Mary’s approach to the points chase was brilliant,” said Dunlap in the movie, Off Road to Athens, which depicts the epic struggle these women (and men) undertook in an attempt to make the 2004 U.S. Olympic team.
“It worked very, very well,” Dunlap continued. “I think some of us were maybe a little irritated that she wasn’t racing in the U.S., that she wasn’t doing the national series. But the goal is the Olympic team, and I give her a lot of credit for figuring out what it was going to take to get on that team.”
Although Dunlap was never able to make up the points she missed in 2003 (according to USA Cycling calculations, she was still over 400 points behind by mid-May), McConneloug and Haywood went back-and-forth in the rankings.
In the thick of it, though, the women remained friends. It’s difficult to imagine McConneloug anything but friendly. Even near the end of a six-plus-hour suffer-fest called the 2004 Marathon World Championships – the very last chance she had of earning UCI points before the deadline – she encouraged another rider who struggled toward the finish.
Due to a clerical error and other misunderstandings, the final Olympic selection decision went to arbitration and then to court. In the end, McConneloug was awarded the Olympic berth, but she says the whole process was “sticky and horrible.”
On Aug. 27, 2004, she finished ninth in Athens – a result she remains proud of today.
Qualifying for the 2008 Olympic team was more straightforward but no less difficult. Thanks to several top-five World Cup finishes during 2007, McConneloug and Georgia Gould, along with an increasingly strong contingent of U.S. women including Willow Koerber and Heather Irmiger, kept the U.S. highly enough ranked in the UCI standings that two American women would qualify for the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.
Still, McConneloug felt the pressure. “Anything can happen. You could get injured and then the next person goes. It’s a lot of pressure to commit to it and know that every single pedal stroke counts.”
Once in Beijing, she was awed by the country and the course. “When I saw [the course], I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, it looks like the back of a dragon! Up and down, all around, twisting, and red dirt, and humidity heavy down upon you. Race day was so hot. You felt so alive and in the muck of it all.”
After a bad start, McConneloug fought her way from 20th to finish seventh. Gould was eighth.
A week after the 2008 Olympic race, McConneloug finished fifth in a World Cup in Australia. During the 2009 World Cup series, she has taken two more fifths.
Recently, though, she noted that the level of competition at World Cups has increased immensely in the women’s field and that making even the top 20 is hard.
“You can’t even slip a pedal stroke and not expect to get passed,” she said. “It’s intense. It’s changed.”
What does it take to consistently finish in the top five in such a heated atmosphere?
“You have to have an incredible support system, not having to worry about anything else but your training and lining up and racing,” she said.
“But for me, that’s not real,” she added. “Keeping it real is how I am and how I’m always going to be. It’s not about winning races. It’s about your journey and how you’re doing it and maybe the people you touch along the way. It’s not just about getting the gold medal.”
When asked if she will try for the London 2012 Olympic Games – when she will be 41 – she smiled.
“Maybe so, we’ll see how it is,” she said. “I take it year by year at this point. Right now, I’m definitely working toward country ranking so we can get maximum positions [at the 2012 Olympics].”
As of January 2009, the U.S. women were ranked third in UCI standings – enough for two Olympic berths in 2012 (assuming the UCI keeps the same qualification criteria as it used in 2008).
In the meantime, McConneloug and Broderick continue their journey. From Mount Snow, they pointed the van west toward Windham Mountain in New York for another ProXCT race. Then it’s off to Australia for the 2009 World Mountain Biking Championships in early September. From there, they fly to Europe for the final two World Cups. Then they fly to Las Vegas for the Interbike trade show.
After that, McConneloug isn’t sure where they will go. Perhaps Chile, where they spent the early part of 2008. Or back to northern California, where they wintered in 2009.
As McConneloug said when asked if she has plans to retire: “Life, you can’t really plan it sometimes. You just have to be open to things that come your way.”