Rabdau reflects on the Women’s Challenge

By Marti Stephen
Posted Apr. 17, 2008

Jim Rabdau (second from right) still gets together with the old Women's Challenge crew.
Last year, the women’s world championship road race covered 172 kilometers, a distance that stirred little comment.

With that in mind, it may be difficult to recall that as recently as 1990 a proposed 129km women’s road race was deemed “excessive” by the sport’s international governing body, which refused to sanction it. That race, and the 16 other stages surrounding it, not to mention the 22,000 feet the stages climbed and the 1067km (663 miles) they covered, took place anyway.

Because of that race and its predecessors, starting in 1984, roughly a two-decade leap in expectations, fitness, and excellence can be traced in women’s racing. The race was, of course, Idaho’s Women’s Challenge (1984-2002). The person behind it was Jim Rabdau.

The old FIAC deemed the Women's Challenge to be "excessive" on many counts.Sponsored by a frozen food company, the first Ore-Ida Women’s Challenge in 1984 had 52 entrants who raced 180 miles, cumulatively. Rebecca Twigg won and took the silver medal in the first-ever Olympic women’s road race that year in Los Angeles, which, by the way, was just short of 50 miles, or 80km.

Now retired, Rabdau says, “I have no idea why it had to be a women’s race. A friend of mine said, ‘You ought to do a women’s track meet.’ But no, I said it had to be cycling. Cycling has the color, the speed, the thrill.”

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It was 1963 when Rabdau first imagined the race, and he had seen only one bike race, with male racers, in the Italian Alps while he was in the Army. Rabdau’s car was stopped at an intersection by the Caribinieri, clearing the course for the peloton. The image stayed with him for years, he recalls.

After retiring from the military, Rabdau moved to Idaho and worked as an office manager in the human resources department of Ore-Ida. The 20-year-old image of that bike race inspired him in the early ‘80s when he won the support of company president Paul Corddry when Rabdau floated the idea for the first Women’s Challenge.

“Do it!” Corddry said and Rabdau single-handedly designed the race for the next 19 years. The Women’s Challenge switched to sponsorship from Hewlett Packard from 1997 to 2002, then Con-Agra in 2003. But Con-Agra backed out that same year, too late for Rabdau to find a new backer.

The Women's Challenge served as an inspiration for many young women.
Photo: Jen DialRabdau was facing a challenge of his own in 2003. He had been diagnosed with syringomyelia, a rare and degenerative disease of the central nervous system. Golf great Bobby Jones suffered from the same disease. Rabdau has had two spinal operations and walks with a cane. His right leg is paralyzed, but there is still no stopping the man who dreamed of helping women cyclists beat back all limitations. In fact, he and his wife, Marge, continue to travel internationally and have been to the cycling world championships, specifically to see the women’s races, in Spain, Italy, France, Holland, and Canada.

Knowing excellence
“I’ve always thought in my life, that if you can be around people who are excellent, then you’ll know what excellence is,” says Rabdau. “That was a lot of what I was trying to do (with the Women’s Challenge) — to get girls to that level.”

Perhaps one of the last women to benefit from Rabdau’s excellent adventure was 2006 world time trial champion Kristin Armstrong. She credits the Challenge with bringing her valuable experience, saying in 2003, “I would not have had the opportunity to sign on with an international team (T-Mobile) without this race.”

Rabdau remembers Armstrong as the American woman who gave the Lithuanian racers a hard time.

“We were all excited that there was an American girl up there,” he remembers.

Armstrong eventually placed 13th overall in the 2002 race. Lithuanian racers were an Ore-Ida specialty, so to speak, joining the Women’s Challenge in 1991, before the country had even successfully achieved statehood.

“We flew the Lithuanian flag in Idaho before the United States ever did,” says Rabdau, noting that Lithuanian Rasa Polikeviciute won the Hewlett-Packard Women’s Challenge in 1997.

The courses that Rabdau asked women cyclists to race were hand-picked by him. The former Green Beret, who spent 25 years in the service, including time as a platoon leader in E-Company 506 (the legendary infantry portrayed in Steven Spielberg’s “Band of Brothers”), and who served in Vietnam, charted each course on maps and then drove the course himself each spring.

He cleared courses with police stations and local townspeople, even going to the point of making sure that if an elderly woman lived on a criterium course, she was able to get out and go shopping, in spite of the cyclists buzzing along her street.

It’s in the manual
He himself wrote both the technical manual and the racers' manual, with enough details to run, not surprisingly, a military operation. “It’s supposed to be that the bosses are working harder than the soldiers,” he says, referring to the preparations he made for his dozens of volunteers, some of whom worked for the race for 16 years.

Saturn's Lyne Bessette won the Women's Challenge in 2001.
Photo: Casey B. GibsonEven so, the volunteers worked plenty hard.

“The racers are getting up at 6 a.m., well, the staff gets up at 4 a.m.,” says Rabdau. “I never bothered the staff the whole year — they weren’t consulted.”

But when the time came to set the race in motion, doctors, nurses, mechanics, course marshals and other volunteers gathered for meetings, read their technical manuals, and didn’t have to ask any questions. Even with all that forethought and planning, it was hard work.

“After 17 days, the staff was tired. The girls (racers) were just getting into it,” Rabdau says of his “excessive” stage race.

Point A to point B
All eyes were on the racers, who, as Rabdau wished, only had to worry about getting from point A to point B as competitively as possible. What he valued was “the mind games, the testing, the attacks. The words. It would just knock you out, it was so great,” says Rabdau of the women’s peloton. “I used to listen in on the team strategy sessions — it was fascinating.” (And remember, Rabdau was an experienced military leader.)

Rabdau’s race provided housing for everyone, and would help out the poorer teams with food and supplies. He remembers the Lithuanian coach first showed up with two suitcases: “One had vodka and caviar in it, the other had spare parts and underwear,” he says. His goal was to provide a level playing field. He says he was saying to the racers, “It’s up to you.”

Of course, Rabdau was also referring to the then-common challenge that women racers couldn’t or wouldn’t attack, use tactics, or really race.

“We had to get people to stop using that word,” he says of the many press members who called the racers “good women athletes.”

“She’s a good athlete,” he told them.

He also faced critics who told him he couldn’t mix the relatively more experienced racers with the less experienced ones.

“Well, where did you start?” he says he told them. “I wanted to take all the lids off this thing. I wanted to see what would happen.”

Rabdau doesn’t follow bike racing these days. He and his wife visited Turkey instead of going to the world’s in Germany last year—even though his old friend the Lithuanian coach personally invited him to join the team there.

About the Women’s Challenge he says, “Whether it would have continued, I don’t know. You would have had to find somebody who had the same attitude, spirit.”

From 1984 to 2002, women’s racing is lucky it found Jim Rabdau.

Marti Stephen, a former VeloNews mountain bike editor, is now a freelance writer, living in Boise, Idaho.

ATTENTION LADIES: Ever wanted to give track cycling a try but not quite sure how to get started?

If so, check out the Ladies Only Track Sessions (LOTS) at the ADT Event Center Velodrome. The girls-only program has grown quite the reputation for providing women with opportunities to see what track cycling’s all about whether they’re experienced cyclists or not.

Under the coaching and direction of Velodrome Director Roger Young, LOTS teaches women the basic skills needed to ride on the track. Often, participants even have the chance to learn from the world’s best. For instance – several reigning masters world champs have been on hand to share their experiences at this season’s sessions. Last year, attendees received instruction from elite riders like keirin world champ Jennie Reed and Becky Quinn who are now preparing for Olympic Team selection.

The program only started a year and a half ago but has become so popular that its reach extends well beyond Southern California. Two ladies fly in from Arizona for the monthly sessions while another group of women drive over eight hours from Northern California to attend a session once a month. Several more women have plans to attend sessions from out of state.

Located in suburban L.A., the ADT Event Center Velodrome is a world-class facility that could easily intimidate a newcomer, but the LOTS program is designed to make both experienced and inexperienced women feel comfortable.

“We definitely try to make everyone feel safe and welcome regardless of their background in or knowledge of the sport,” says LOTS Session Director Julia Cross.

Participants are free to get a feel for the discipline at their own pace, whether it takes three laps or three years to ride at the top of the track. Many of the women that attend LOTS sessions are road cyclists, mountain bikers, bike messengers or athletes in other sports while others have no athletic background whatsoever. Each session usually sees about eight to ten newcomers who are simply curious about riding on the track.

Take for instance the pair of moms that decided to give it a shot after several Saturdays on the velodrome infield where they watched their kids play volleyball. Wearing tennis shoes and gym shorts, they were fitted with rental bikes and borrowed helmets for their first time on two wheels since grade school. Two sessions later, they were riding on the blue line and their children are now enrolled in five-time Olympian Connie Paraskevin’s junior track development program.

If you observe a LOTS session, you’ll likely see women in t-shirts and blue jeans mixed with women in expensive cycling gear. Some bring their own track bikes while others are supplied with rentals from LOTS wrencher John Walsh.

“I learned a long time ago that a bike won’t make an eagle out of a turkey,” Cross says. “If women learn to love cycling for cycling, the clothing and equipment will take care of itself. But I definitely believe that the heart is where the sport must begin.”

With a background as a marathon runner and road cyclist, Cross got her first taste of track cycling two years ago and it only took her six months to see the need for a program like LOTS. Disappointed to see so few women at open training sessions and even fewer at local track events, she approached Roger Young about setting aside some time on the track just for the ladies.

“If nearly 10,000 women can run the L.A. Marathon each year, then I knew there had to be plenty of fit women out there who weren’t on the track simply because they didn’t know about the track,” she said.

Although plenty of critics told her that women don’t ride on the track and nobody would show up - the first session held in October of 2006 drew 40 participants, 30 of which had never ridden on the track before. The following month’s session attracted 60 women.

“My original goal for the LOTS program was to have four free instructional training sessions that would attract a maximum number of women to the track to allow them to experience track racing,” the program’s founder explained. “Once we began to realize the impact those first four sessions had, we knew we had to continue and grow the program as far into the future as we could see.”

A year and a half after its start, the program continues to attract women to the velodrome once a month with an average of 30 ladies attending each session this winter. Of the more than 200 women that have attended LOTS sessions, 20% of them are now training regularly while 10% race regularly.

So what does the program’s future look like? Cross, who just passed the exam for her Level 3 coaching license, says there’s LOTS in store. The plan is for LOTS to become its own legal entity, opening the door to additional funding through sponsorship – funding that will pave the way for more training sessions, clinics, and camps as well as a quality coaching staff and women’s specific track products.

“All of this will give the LOTS program the opportunity to become portable and will allow us to expand further into the community and to our sister tracks in California and beyond,” she explained.

LOTS OF INTEREST? HERE’S SOME MORE INFORMATION:

WHERE: ADT Event Center Velodrome in Carson, Calif.

WHEN: The sessions are held on the 2nd Saturday of each month from 12:00 to 2:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted on the velodrome calendar. Please plan to arrive by 11:30 a.m.

WHAT TO EXPECT: During the first hour, new riders will take an hour-long New Rider Certification Class while ladies with previous track cycling experience may begin riding immediately. During the second hour, new and experienced riders come together for coaching and mentoring.

COST: The cost is $10 per session and includes the one-time new rider certification class, track session fee, and a rental bike if needed.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: To learn more, please contact LOTS Session Director Julia Cross at Julia@crossins.com or visit her blog at http://zippydsnail.blogspot.com.

USA CYCLING SET TO CONDUCT 2008 WOMEN'S REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT CAMPS
By: Kathy Reid

Colorado Springs, Colo. (April 3, 2008)--USA Cycling has offered Regional Development Camps for junior and collegiate cyclists for a number of years, and with 14 camps on the 2008 calendar, the program is thriving. Open to both male and female cyclists from 14 to 22 years of age, the number of women enrolling in the camps has traditionally been small.

Claire House, a West Coast camp manager since 2006, was thrilled when six girls attended one recent camp. She thought, “If I can get six girls at this one camp, I know these girls exist all over the country.” She figured their needs would be better served through a women-specific camp, assuming they could have “a better experience if they weren’t stacked up against 21-year-old male cat 2 and collegiate riders.”

Jim Miller, Director of Endurance Programs, agreed. In 2004, he had even gone so far as to include plans to develop two bi-coastal Women’s Regional Development Camps in his 2005-2008 High Performance Plan, a formal document detailing directions and goals for USA Cycling’s Women’s Endurance Programs.

Though House and Miller thought about these camps for a couple years, it was just recently when things finally fell into place. After the rousing success of USA Cycling’s Enhancing Leadership in Women’s Cycling Conference at the USOC in January, Miller said House approached him and offered to coordinate “a women’s camp as part of our Regional Development Camp infrastructure.” He was all for it, and not only assigned her as Camp Manager for a Women’s Regional Development Camp to be held June 22-27 at Sonoma State University in California, but also recruited Kristen Dieffenbach and Ray Ignosh, two of his “top camp managers on the east coast” to simultaneously coordinate a camp in their region, acting as Co-Camp Managers. Ignosh is working on confirming a date and location, but does know it will be in the first two weeks of August in Lehigh County in Eastern Pennsylvania.

Female racers between the ages of 17 and 25 will be invited to the camps, and while Miller said age and eligibility requirements will be somewhat flexible, they are looking for women with some racing experience; Collegiate A/B and Cat 3/4 cyclists, for instance. Recognizing that many women successfully cross over to cycling from other sports, Benjamin Sharp, USA Cycling’s Junior Programs Manager who oversees all Regional Development Camps, said that they will also “be very likely to take” women with elite level or NCAA Division I experience in another sport.

House, Dieffenbach, and Ignosh have been working together to plan the camps. Both camps will follow similar daily schedules that include morning on-the-road skills practice and afternoon and early evening off-the-bike skills and informational clinics. House said that skills practice will include cornering, descending, sprinting, riding in echelon, moving through a pack of riders safely and tactically, moving through a caravan, and how to take a feed. Skills and knowledge clinics will include topics like proper bike fit, basic mechanics, how to build up and break down bikes for air travel, as well as proper nutrition, basic training principles, and sports psychology.

House has confirmed Miller and professional racer and Proman team director, Giana Roberge, to act as coaches at the West Coast camp. She also intends to invite a number of women with professional and European racing experience for question-and-answer panel sessions.

Camp participants will be treated as professionals. From getting up in the morning and checking the day’s schedule posted on the director sportif’s door, to using follow-vehicles, a full-time mechanic, and taking feeds from cars, House said they will “really try to expose them to what it’s like to be a professional.”

While one of the short term goals of the camps is to simply increase the development of female racers in the U.S., ultimately it is hoped that Women’s Regional Development Camps become a more foundational way for women to make their way toward the upper levels of U.S. and European racing. “The idea of the camps really came from Jim’s [Miller’s] experience and his noticing the gaps in the development of the skills and abilities of the women riders,” Ignosh explained. “Women come into the pipeline [of USA Cycling’s Talent Identification Programs and the National Team] with great engines, but not always good techniques or tactics.”

Dieffenbach agreed. “Often women get fast-tracked because they are generally fit, but not yet cycling-smart-fit,” she wrote in an e-mail. “Women who come to cycling fit from other things like soccer or cross country running can really move up quickly due to their fitness. But they don’t get a chance to develop knowledge of the skills, tactical, and technical aspects of racing safety and etiquette, and then, boom! All of the sudden, they are in the top levels and don’t know these things. This leads to a very bumpy ride at a very stressful, high level of competition, particularly when we send women over to Europe to race. Our goal is to work to set our women up for a successful rise, and to empower them to be successful as they move up in levels. And a nice side benefit would be to improve the safety and quality of U.S. racing.”

Invitations for the Women’s Regional Development Camps will go out shortly to licensed racers within the target age range, and will include registration information that will also be found on the USA Cycling website. The week-long camp will cost $700, and includes room and board and a cycling jersey. Ed Burke Travel and Training Grants are available through the USA Cycling Development Foundation for those who need monetary assistance.

The organizers of the camps are optimistic that participants will become more competent and confident racers. Miller said, “I really want these athletes to come away from the camp with the feeling that they have been jumpstarted with knowledge, and are a year ahead of where they would have been on their own.”

This Article Published 2008-04-03 09:08:51 For more information contact: alee@usacycling.org