Homemade
It’s never been easy for Olympian Ann Trombley. But she plans on going out with a bang.
by Charles Pelkey
Golden, Colorado

“And what’s your name again?” the marketing man asked the woman in the straw hat, as she handed him a small bag of homemade chocolate chip cookies.

“Ann, Ann Trombley. You sponsor our team, we ride your bikes, and I just wanted to thank you,” she smiled.

“Cool. I’m usually lucky to get a phone call,” he laughed. And Trombley — bags of cookies in hand — wandered off through the crowds at the Sea Otter Classic to look for “that guy from Shimano,” her component sponsor.

It wasn’t all that unusual for Trombley, in her sixth year as a professional cross-country racer, not to be recognized by one of her own sponsors. Only a few of them spotted the brown-haired woman with the warm smile on that March day, even though she had just been named to the Olympic long team for Sydney. Fact is, back in March, Trombley was relatively unknown and something of a long shot for Sydney.

Not much has changed since, except that the 36-year-old Coloradan is no longer a long shot. She made the team.

With a little help from....
Ever since she turned pro in 1995, Trombley's story has been a tentative one — never quite scoring that big sponsorship, never quite able to concentrate solely on racing her bike, always just at the edge of success.

“Well, more like slightly off-the-back,” Trombley offered with a laugh. “I started late (at age 29), and while I could look to people like Susan DeMattei and Juli Furtado, who had what at the time I thought were pretty good sponsorships — team vans, mechanics, soigneurs … salaries! — I kinda came in at the back end of that, just as things were beginning to fade.”

Like many other racers, Trombley showed some early talent, moved into the pro ranks after a couple of years, and got her fair share of encouragement from fellow riders and even a few potential sponsors. And like most talented riders, Trombley quickly found that “you sure can’t make a living off of this.”

Instead, Trombley supported herself working as physical therapist — she has a master’s degree in the field — and cobbling together a few small deals for bikes, components, clothing, even travel money.

“Go to the races on Thursday, come home on Sunday, work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday and then leave again on Thursday night," is the litany she recites.

And somewhere in there, you’re supposed to train.

“The hard thing is that every year you think you’re going to get better sponsorship for the next year,” Trombley sighed. “You start training in December, January, and you don’t find out until February or March: ‘Well, the sponsorship fell through or we don’t have the money we thought we’d have,’ and you’re already committed by that time, so you just go with what you can get…. It’s too late at that point to go out and find another sponsor.”

That's what happened in 1997. Early that year, Trombley and a small group of other riders, including Lauri Brandt and a young Argentinean named Jimena Florit, scored what seemed to be a good deal: sponsorship, bikes, a manager, mechanic, soigneur and even salaries. From Trombley’s perspective, the Charmar-Klein squad looked like the gravy train.

“We even had contracts where he was going to pay us — I think it was like $15,000 a year,” Trombley recalled. “And then, our first month into it he suddenly announced ‘Oh, I’m out of money … uhhh, sorry.’”

Gravy train derailed. The team pooled their resources, took jobs and rode out the season. But Trombley was beginning to wonder what it was she was trying to accomplish.

“I went back and forth, especially at the beginning of the year,” she said. “I would often wonder if it was worth it. I’d have to ask myself, ‘Is this worth it? What am I getting out of this? What is the purpose?’ You gotta ask yourself.”

Well, maybe another season ... or two. After all, her progress in NORBA’s National Championship Series had been steady: 11th overall in 1995; eighth in 1996; seventh in 1997; fifth in 1998.

“And then I started thinking about the 2000 Olympics.”

So Trombley hired a coach, focused her efforts, and concentrated on improving strengths and overcoming her weaknesses.

“I’ve been with my coach (Phil Hackbarth) for two years now,” Trombley said. “We have worked on a lot of my weak parts. Before, I would always regard the flats as rest time — and they’re not. I’m getting better at really getting into the habit of hammering on the flats. I do intervals on the flats now, that’s not something I always did before.”

She finished out 1999 taking third in the NCS. She also joined up with Gina Hall, Nicky Pippin and Audrey Augustin and put together a mountain-bike team sponsored by a women’s athletic-wear company, Koulius Zaard. All told, Trombley was “primed for 2000.”

To Sydney
And, somehow, it all just clicked this year. First, Trombley scored an important win at March's Hedgehog Hustle, a relatively small, early season race that gained importance in 2000 when USA Cycling pegged it as an Olympic long-team qualifier.

“It was a breakthrough for me … it was like having someone tell you that they know you’re doing well,” Trombley said. “It was the mental support more than anything, but it has been nice to have a mechanic, a soigneur, to have travel and expenses taken care of.”

“And, of course, they (USA Cycling) paid for my European vacation,” she added, laughing. “I was able to do all of the European World Cups because of the support I got from being on the long team.”

That “European vacation” and other trips to World Cup events also gave Trombley a big — and justifiable — boost in confidence. She’s finished consistently in the top of Word Cup fields all season, her best being seventh at Sarentino, Italy, and never worse than 16th (Napa).

“After doing them this year, I wish that I had done the World Cup for a few more years,” Trombley said. “Part of succeeding is the attitude, and once you feel that you can do it, that’s half the battle. This year, I’ve broken into the top 10 and suddenly realized, yes, I can race with these women.”

With Sydney beginning to look like less of a long shot, Trombley took the big step three months ago: She finally quit her job.

 “That’s when my boss and I figured that I wasn’t going to be able to work any more. She knows what I’ve been doing and she just told me that the door’s open any time I’m ready to come back.”

The rewards were immediate. In June, Trombley finish 12th at the world championships, the second highest placing for an American. In July, Trombley joined Alison Dunlap and Ruthie Matthes as the final rider named to represent the U.S. in Sydney.

“I was just so relieved that I had gone through all the hoops and done what I needed to do, " said Trombley. "I was just so incredibly relieved.”

But after that, Trombley said she had some difficulty maintaining momentum, staying focused on doing two more NCS races. “I knew it was time for a vacation. This is going to be a long season and I hadn’t stopped going, going, going since March.”

A small breather, and then Trombley and Matthes moved to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs for a two-week training session, under the guidance of USA Cycling’s mountain-bike coach Stephane Gerard. Dunlap had opted to road race in Europe as preparation for Sydney.

Finishing touches
“It’s just been these last few weeks — coming to the training center and getting ready to leave — that it’s finally really hit me that this is really huge,” said Trombley.

Huge as it is, there is still work to do, Gerard pointed out.

The Olympic course is unlike those usually favored by Trombley, who is happiest, she says, on a “long steady climb that just goes on and on.” But in Sydney, she'll face a relatively flat course, punctuated by climbs that require short and intense efforts.

“No more than two or three minutes each,” Gerard told VeloNews.

Toward that end, the training session in the Springs was focused on precisely that kind of work: intervals, intervals and a few more intervals, including regular ergometer sessions in a hyper-oxic environment, during which Trombley and Matthes carried out a series of hard-easy cycles while breathing a mix of 60-percent oxygen and 40-percent nitrogen. Watching his charges suffer through their training session and noting the results, Gerard said he was heading to Sydney with high hopes.

“We have such a good women’s team,” Gerard claimed. “There really isn’t any reason to believe that they can’t all three finish in the top ten. That is incredible.”
Two days after the camp ended, Trombley relaxed by taking an easy 90-minute road ride around her home base in Golden, Colorado. She agreed that the team looks strong and figured that the two weeks in the Springs did her a lot of good.

“I know that there is no way that I would have worked that hard had I just been up here on my own,” Trombley admitted. “I know that should make a lot of difference in Sydney.”
She’ll be there with an entourage.

“My family is really worked up about the whole thing,” Trombley said. “They’re all going: my mom, her husband, my dad, my sister and (fiancé) Bob (Forney, a one-time RAAM competitor) … and my aunt lives there, so her husband and their little boys.”

Only her brother and his family can’t make the trip.

And when it’s all over, after the team heads home and the Sydney Olympics are just a memory, Trombley said it will finally be time to retire from racing.

“I’m 36,” she said. “I’ll be ready to quit racing.... And if I say it enough, I may actually start believing it.”