Godmother of Cycling

I was cruising around another site today when I found a link to none other than Jacquie Phelan's blog. Poking around her entries, Flickr site, and WOMBATS site sent me back about 20 years when I first picked up a mountain bike and heard of this eclectic woman who wore dresses and pearls and lace and kicked the men's asses in big mountain bike races out West. To encourage more women to embrace dirt and mud as proper athletic ladies should, she formed the Women's Mountain Bike and Tea Society, putting on skill clinics around the states, forming charter clubs, and holding annual gatherings where women would ride the trails all day and always break for afternoon tea.

She's been known as the Godmother of Mountain Biking, but that could easily be extended to all of cyclingdom given that her range includs road, cyclocross, and commuting as well. In the past few years she's been inducted into the Cycling Hall of Fame, too. I remember reading an interview where she was asked why she started riding bikes and she said that her mother wouldn't drive her or her siblings to school so they had to ride bikes, no matter what the weather, year round. Now THAT was tough and someone I knew I wanted to emulate.

Being stuck in Ohio and one of about 3 girls in the state who raced mountain bikes at the time, I never actually joined the WOMBATS, but in a pre-Internet era I cut out pages of their ads and articles from magazines and hoped that one day I would live out West and rides bikes with the same obsession as those free spirited, mud-soaked women. If I ever meet Jackie I'd say that she'd be pretty happy with what she managed to culture inside me.

Oh - and that early 90's photo of her nekkid and covered with mud playing a pair of early RockShox like a lute? It's in her new calendar. I've been on a quest to have that photo in my possession again for a long time. Sold!!