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 Cycling: Witty barely misses medal
Sunday, September 17, 2000 By Lori Shontz, Post-Gazette Sports Writer
SYDNEY, Australia -- On the rare occasions that Chris Witty shows up at a cycling competition, she endures a bit of teasing.
Her competitors joke that they would rather not see her face, and they suggest that she would be better off going back to speedskating, the sport in which she won a silver and a bronze at the 1988 Winter Olympics. That sport is more fun, they say, laughing.
But there is a note of seriousness in their comments, too.
Because Witty's performance last night at Dunc Gray Velodrome -- fifth place in the 500-meter time trial after only a month devoted solely to training for cycling -- raises all sorts of interesting possibilities about what would happen if she ever got serious about the sport.
Her time, 35.230 seconds, was a personal best by about a quarter of a second and, because the 500-meter time trial was being contested in the Olympics for the first time, briefly an Olympic record. "Cool," she said, laughing. "An Olympic record for five minutes."
Witty, 25, a Wisconsin native who now lives in Park City, Utah, where part of the 2002 Winter Olympics will be held, missed becoming only the second American to medal in both the Winter and Summer Olympic Games by less than half a second.
"Right now, I'm floating," she said. "It's such a great feeling."
Not a bad performance for someone who calls speedskating "my first love" and cycling "my affair, my fling."
Or for someone whose last international cycling competition before two World Cup events this season was the World Cycling Championships in 1998.
Witty began cycling to cross-train for speedskating. The sports complement each other well; of the United States' nine Winter/Summer Olympians, four doubled in cycling (road or track) and speedskating.
Even once Witty was named to the Olympic team, she continued to train for speedskating as well. She isn't exactly current on the latest cycling developments; she went into the event with absolutely no idea what time she needed to put herself in medal contention because she didn't know what the other riders could do.
When she begins to focus on her cycling training, Witty gets better quickly. "Every practice I was cutting a 10th or two 10ths [of a second] on a flying lap," she said.
But such success doesn't turn Witty's goals from speedskating. She isn't sure when she'll next use her bicycle for anything except cross-training, but she knows that on Oct. 1 she will be back in Calgary, training on one of Canada's speedskating ovals for the upcoming season.
That Witty was named to the Olympic cycling team despite finishing second at the Olympic trials (her fourth-place finish at the 1998 world championships and international potential were the deciding factors) irritated the first-place finisher. Tammy Thomas protested the coaches' decision and eventually filed for arbitration. An arbiter requested a ride-off, but Witty simply didn't show up.
Eventually, just three days before the cycling team left for Sydney, Witty was confirmed as a team member.
"I was the fastest, cleanest American athlete," said Witty, who noted that her personal best is faster than Thomas'. "That's who makes the team."
Witty, who has competed in the past two Winter Olympics and is looking for a gold medal in 2002, didn't see many differences between the Winter and Summer Games.
"The Olympic feeling, the atmosphere -- it's all essentially the same," she said. "Just bigger and more people."
Just spending the short time she did immersed in the cycling world at the Olympics taught Witty a few lessons. She realizes now that she needs to work on riding in a bigger gear. She has also discovered being paced more often by motorbike would have helped, too.
"I prepared the way I knew I could," she said. "I did everything I could with speed skating. I did the best that I could have done."
Witty looked at the scoreboard as she talked; with three riders remaining, she was still in third place. "This is more than I asked for," she said.
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