Steamboat Springs Kelly Boniface didn’t know what to expect.
The Steamboat Springs Winter Sports Club summer cycling program she coaches for hadn’t even started, and the girls she guides still were tied up with a million other activities, from soccer to dance theater.
“They hadn’t ridden since last summer,” she said. “My own daughter had only been on one mountain bike ride.”
She reached out to the girls she’d coached last summer, however, and enlisted five for an early-season trip to the Beti Bike Bash in Lakewood on Sunday, a cycling event designed to get more women into mountain bike riding. It featured a small but stacked pro division, a huge field of racers in the sport category and a junior race, where Boniface’s Steamboaters shined, racing three laps that were each about a mile in length.
Maddie Heydon led the way, finishing fourth in a field of 40. Isabelle Boniface finished sixth, Riley Hodges was seventh, Annika Malacinski was 10th and Caitlin Smith was 23rd.
“I coach these girls twice a week in the summer. I drag them all over the trails in Routt County, to the top of Emerald, Mad Creek, Hot Springs, all of it,” Boniface said. “We pre-rode one lap and they were like, ‘We’ve got this.’”
The results show that, in fact, they did.
“I’m fairly certain a lot of the bikes were just pulled up from the basement, but there we no crashes, no mechanicals and they all had a blast while they did it,” she said. “The mountain girls came through.”
Steamboat locals scored big elsewhere in the race, as well. Hannah Williams was ninth in the women’s pro/open division. Karen Tremaine finished second, just 20 seconds back of the leader, in the women’s singlespeed race, and Marla Bailey wasn’t far behind her, in fourth.
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