by Janet Hurley
photos by Sarah Henry

While driving the Blue Ridge Parkway, you get behind a cyclist in tight riding shorts, neon jersey and gleaming helmet. Head down, shoulders hunched, legs pumping, she’s gliding up the mountain on slender tires. You pass her, as you have so many cyclists around Asheville, not knowing she is Lauren Franges, 24, and she’s riding toward her Olympic dream.
Standing in a parking area, you’re about to set off on a hike in Pisgah Forest. A pair of cyclists crunch by on their fat-tired bikes and disappear into the woods. You’ve just seen another Olympic hopeful, Willow Koerber, 30, out for a training ride with her dad.

Both Koerber and Franges call Asheville home, but they have never met. Both were named to the USA Cycling Olympic Long Team, which put them on the short list of candidates to compete in Beijing in August. Though aspects of their biking careers are remarkably similar, these two women ride in very different worlds. 

Koerber loves riding because she loves the woods. “It’s a nature thing,” she says. “It’s all about energy renewal, about getting my soul recharged.” She comes from a “super athletic family” who ski and love the outdoors. One weekend in 1993, while she was away at a gymnastics meet, her dad and brother went to a mountain biking race. They called her immediately afterwards. “They said I just had to try this, that I would just love mountain biking. They knew I was fearless,” Koerber says. She’d ridden a road bike, doing time trials with her brothers for fun, but she’d never ridden in the woods. She entered a race at Cataloochie, placed in the first-time beginner class, went to the Junior Nationals two weeks later, was spotted by a USA Cycling coach and was invited to the World Championships in Vail before the end of the year. She was just 15.

“Willow was adventurous” says her father, Bob Koerber, a homebuilder in Asheville. “I had a real visceral connection when I gave her her first bike, it felt like it was sort of a key to some sort of new reality for her.”
Franges started her cycling career indoors, at the internationally renowned Lehigh Valley Velodrome near her home town of Barto, Pennsylvania. She was 12 when her Dad invited her to do a six-week riding program with him. “When Lauren was younger and played softball and volleyball and basketball, she got upset if someone on her team didn’t give it their all,” says her father, Mike Franges. “I thought track cycling would give her something to pursue individually, at least at the junior level. She could compete with herself.” 

The next year, Franges went to the junior nationals, then to training camps at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. She was 16 when she first traveled to South America for the Pan American games. “It was hard for me to keep close friends in high school because they had their parties on the weekends and I’d be traveling so I’d miss some of that,” Franges says. “But I don’t really regret it. I still went to prom and did that sort of stuff.” 

When she was 17, Franges moved to the road, meaning she stopped riding a circular track inside the velodrome and moved to racing on mostly paved roads. “I got burned out from all the training and the constant being on the track six or seven days a week, sometimes double sessions, two hours per session. You get tired of seeing the same thing over and over again,” she says. According to Franges, USA Cycling has been putting more endurance road women onto the track. Still, she was a little surprised when she was named to the Olympic Long Team for track cycling this year because her focus for the past seven years has been road racing.

The switch to the road meant Franges had to learn how to race in the peleton (French for pack or platoon), seen by many car drivers as just a pack of riders. It’s really an integrated unit that the cyclists use to save energy by drafting near or behind other riders. Her first “trade” team was Victory Brewing, out of Allentown. She then rode with Team Lipton for two years before they disbanded. Today she rides with Team Tibco, sponsored by a San Francisco software company. “On the road you need the team,” Franges says. “It’s one of the things I really liked about going to the road, having that friendship and camaraderie.”

Koerber agrees that her team, Subaru-Gary Fisher, provides friendship and support. But when she is in a mountain bike race, she is completely on her own. After a great 2007 racing season, she struggled in the European races that determined her chances for the Olympics. “I worked so hard to be confident...now I feel like, wow, how could I make my story any more difficult?” Koerber said in June. “Everyone asks, ‘Is it physical?’ No blood test is going to tell me what’s wrong; it’s not explainable on a physical level. I feel like this is just a test to push through until I get to the next level.”
For Franges, mental preparation is as important as physical training. “I’ve been working on the psychology aspect,” she says. “Going over and over a race before it starts, and trying to give myself confidence to succeed. I’ve learned that a huge part of cycling is belief in yourself.”

Making it financially as a professional cyclist requires lots of juggling: annual signings with teams and corporate sponsors, traveling, interviews, all while trying to have a relationship, finish school, or fix up a house. As a teen, Koerber rode with Team Devo, a junior mountain biking team that paid all her expenses, but she didn’t make any money until she moved to the Cane Creek team. She rode with them during her early twenties, winning three collegiate National Championships while she finished a degree from UNC-Asheville, but had to wait tables to make ends meet. At 25 she signed with Team RLX (Ralph Lauren Extreme) and finally supported herself completely through biking. She now owns a home in Montford.
Financial independence came a little earlier for Franges. She bought a house in Asheville when she was just 20, “before the market went through the roof.” She first came to the area to train on the recommendation of her boyfriend, Mike Tamayo, now her husband and the director for the Men’s Health Net Trade team. Franges doesn’t take her financial security for granted. With the current slumping economy, sponsorships are harder to come by and companies may pull support for their trade teams. “It’s a little stressful toward the end of the year [when contracts are signed] because you have to make a living somehow,” Franges says. She estimates that a woman cyclist with team and product sponsorships can make around $25,000 a year plus prize money, which could add as much as another $10,000. She recently completed a degree in web design as a fallback, and might do some freelancing until she retires from cycling.

Koerber’s partner of five years, Richie Schley, is a former extreme skier and pioneer of the downhill free riding movement. They lived together in Whistler, British Columbia until 2006, but Koerber missed Asheville, her extended family (“there isn’t a family member I can’t call to go biking”) and the great training trails. “Of all the places I’ve been to ride there is nowhere I like to ride more than Pisgah Forest.” She now divides her time between Asheville, Whistler and Europe, where the couple travels often. An Asheville gal through and through, she says, “When I’m traveling and away from Asheville, I miss my friends and family, and I really miss my acupuncturist.”

Both Franges and Koerber recognize the gender disparity in their respective biking worlds. It’s less irksome for Koerber, who feels mountain biking, as a fringe sport, is less financially lucrative for both men and women. In road cycling, most races have smaller purses for women, and their teams aren’t as fully financed. From Franges’ perspective, this creates a sort of Catch-22. Without money to train full time, she feels women are seen as less professional, their races seem less exciting and they don’t attract the media and fans. Men have the luxury of putting all their time into cycling and appear more professional. “Sometimes, it looks more like a bunch of women getting together for a weekend race instead of displaying a professional team,” Franges says. “It’s changing but as women we need to keep pushing, keep putting ourselves in the media and gaining respect.”

Koerber says her focus is on self-respect. The website of one of her sponsors, Smith- Optics, calls Koerber “the sexiest gal on dirt” and she really doesn’t mind. “I’ve been really blessed. I’ve never been treated like anything but a human being in mountain biking. I feel like I have 100 percent control over my image, and I’ve never felt pressured in any way. It might be a woman’s choice to be a sex symbol. It’s 2008 and we do have choices. You have to go with what vibes with you.”