MTB
American Muscle
Kate Courtney and Chloé Dygert might not seem like ideal training partners, but the two radically different personalities are united by a common goal: to win gold in Tokyo.
Let’s start with the similarities. Kate Courtney and Chloé Dygert are both professional bike racers, both world champions in their disciplines. They’re both Gen Z, born after Kurt Cobain died. Their coaches worked closely with each other for 15 years. And together, they represent the best chance American cycling has for gold at the Tokyo Games—whenever they ultimately happen.
That’s where the similarities end.
In reality, they are fundamentally different, which is what makes their time together in January at Courtney’s “Camp of Champs” so fascinating. An annual post-holidays training block, the Camp of Champs is hosted by Courtney’s parents, Tom and Maggie, at their Mediterranean-style villa in California’s leafy Marin County. Also present are two Red Bull-sponsored cyclists—retired cyclocross champion Tim Johnson and Dirty Kanza 200 winner Colin Strickland—to make sure the rides are as difficult as possible.
On an unseasonably warm January day, an entourage of coaches, managers and stylists are shadowing Courtney and Dygert alongside a camera crew, video team and magazine staff. A chef prepares meals for before and after training rides, which will begin as soon as the shoot ends. No one present has heard of coronavirus—this is a simpler time.
Jim Miller, who has coached both, calls them "super fierce warriors."
© Joe Pugliese
As wardrobe is discussed, there’s a debate about hot pink: Do they want to look like badasses, or badass princesses? Though hot pink is Dygert’s favorite color, she insists she’s not girlie; one of many angles to her worldview that might seem hard to square until she explains it. She’s got a cross tattoo on the back of her neck and a pierced nose. She’s a staunch conservative. She doesn’t drink and she hates social media. She married—and divorced—young. She’s grappled with many injuries en route to 10 world championships. She views setbacks as fuel for the fire. She doesn’t believe in feminism and collects Barbie dolls.
While Dygert has an unmistakable edge, Courtney is smooth and polished. Equal parts cerebral and gregarious, she emits undeniable star power. She graduated from Stanford with a degree in human biology. She’s camera friendly and has 400,000 Instagram followers. She’s into yoga, meditation and the power of mantras. She views setbacks as learning experiences. She cites sparkles, waffles and tacos among her favorite things. Her racing, like her training, is calculated. She’s a smiling assassin.
And while they’re contemporaries, their trajectories to the top have followed different paths. Dygert burst onto the scene at the 2015 World Championships in Richmond, Virginia, where she doubled up with wins in the junior road race and time-trial championships. Ten months later, she left Rio with Olympic silver in the team pursuit on the track.
Dygert went on to collect rainbow jerseys on the track, but injuries curtailed her success on the road. That ended at the time trial at the 2019 World Championships in Yorkshire, England, where she won by a staggering 93 seconds on a 19-mile course, averaging nearly 27 mph. She took some heat over her nonplussed post-race interview; the truth is, she expected to win.
Courtney, 24, took a win at the 2018 UCI Mountain Bike World Championship.
© Joe Pugliese
By contrast, Courtney’s rise has been metronomic. From a young age, she was the best in the U.S. and among the best in the world. In 2012 she became the first American woman to win a World Cup event in the junior category; she ended the year as the junior World Cup series champ. In 2013 she enrolled at Stanford and signed her first pro contract.
In 2017, Courtney won four U23 World Cup races and the series title, plus her first elite national championship. The upward arc continued in 2018, culminating in a perfect ride at the world championship in Switzerland. Courtney was the first American in 17 years to earn a rainbow jersey. And though she’d long dreamed of winning worlds, she certainly hadn’t expected to win—this was the first time she’d stood on the podium of an elite World Cup race.
Equal parts gregarious and calculating, Courtney is like a smiling assassin.
She validated that surprise with multiple wins in 2019, ultimately clinching the elite World Cup series title. There are three holy grails in pro mountain biking—the world championship, the World Cup series title and Olympic gold. Courtney had ticked off two of them before her 24th birthday.
Courtney and Dygert are both hot favorites for Olympic gold. How they’ve reached this point in their careers reveals how different they are as athletes and individuals. Just ask Jim Miller, head of athletics at USA Cycling, who coached Kristin Armstrong to gold medals at the past three Olympic Games. He’s coached Courtney since 2016; Armstrong has guided Dygert for the same period of time. Miller has also worked with Dygert through his role at the federation.
Dygert, 23, has 10 world titles on the track and the road.
© Joe Pugliese
“I’ve known Chloé since she was 16, and worked with her a ton on the track and on the road,” he says. “She’s a warrior. Once she decides she’s going to do something, it’s only an act of God that she doesn’t. She loves to win that much. That’s Chloé. Kate is also a super fierce warrior. I love the warrior in an athlete.”
Then Miller explains how the athletes are so different. “Kate had a great chance from the get-go,” he says. “She’s well educated, comes from a super supportive family. Chloé is from the other side of the tracks. She had to fight for everything she has. She didn’t really like school, though she was a great student athlete. It has not been an easy road for her.”
How each responded to COVID-19 illustrates their contrasting personalities. Courtney emailed a thoughtful, crafted statement, while Dygert texted that she was trying to think of something that wouldn’t “piss anyone off.” On social media, Courtney posted instructional videos of herself doing strength and balancing workouts. Dygert, an introvert who lives alone and often trains alone, posted that she was ahead of the curve on social distancing because she’d been “practicing my whole life for this.”
Side by side
© Joe Pugliese
Eight weeks after the Camp of Champs, Dygert will go on to win her ninth and tenth world titles at the track world championships in Berlin—in the team and individual pursuit. In the IP, Dygert will smash her own world record twice in one day, winning in 3:16, more than 5 seconds faster than any other woman has ever ridden 3,000 meters. A world championship and two world records in one day would be enough to satisfy most athletes. But Dygert will tell reporters she was “a little bummed” she hadn’t gone faster.
Dygert didn’t spend her childhood dreaming to become a pro cyclist. She grew up playing basketball, a religion in the Hoosier state. Playing hoops took its toll on her teenage body, however, resulting in a broken nose, torn labrum, stress fractures—and a torn ACL that required surgery and left her sidelined during her senior year. She took to cycling for recovery.
In a 2015 interview, Dygert told the Indianapolis Star, “I love the contact in basketball. I have a very competitive, want-to-hurt-somebody kind of mentality.” That attitude carried over to other sports; she was kicked off a club soccer team for being too aggressive and was asked to play on a boys’ team.
American muscle
© Joe Pugliese
“I’ve had to quit every sport I’ve ever done because of injuries,” she explains, itemizing the carnage from her high school track and field career. “It was just a train wreck of injuries.”
Enter cycling, which has long been in the Dygert family. Chloé’s father, David, is a lifelong cyclist who built a dirt-bike track at their home near Indianapolis. Her older brother, Gunner, was a serious amateur and collegiate cyclist; her younger brother, Daniel, races cars. Her mother, Gretchen, is Chloé’s “biggest cheerleader”—her barbershop is decked out in pictures of Chloé, her jerseys and U.S. flags. Gretchen says she saved up for years to buy a ticket to Tokyo.
Dygert didn’t start bike racing until age 16. Her first race was in May 2013; a few months later, at the junior national championships in Madison, Wisconsin, she earned medals in every discipline. It was there that she met Logan Owen, a cyclocross star who now races for the EF Pro Cycling WorldTour squad, who was racing in the same field as Gunner.
“He had no idea who I was,” Dygert says. “I saw him that year at cyclocross nationals. I found him on Instagram, then searched for him on Snapchat. I accidentally sent him a Snapchat, then we started talking.” They got engaged in 2015, when Dygert was 18 and Owen was 20, and married a year later.
At the 2015 junior nationals in Truckee, California, Dygert took gold in the time trial and road race and silver in the criterium. Two months later she was a double world champion in Virginia. She was quickly recruited by USA Cycling to try out for the team-pursuit squad; though she had no experience on a fixed-gear track bike, her physiological data dumbfounded national team coaches. When offered the opportunity to be an Olympian, Dygert walked away from college after one semester.
Things moved quickly. Five months after the 2016 track world championships, where she helped drive the team-pursuit squad to a gold medal, she powered a team that finished second in Rio. Truth be told, Dygert was unsatisfied with silver. Following Rio she declared intentions to compete in the next six Olympics, gunning for gold across track, road and time-trial events.
In the fall of 2016, Dygert started working with Kristin Armstrong, the 2008 and 2012 time-trial gold medalist who came out of retirement to take a third gold in Rio. At that point, Dygert had been working with one coach for the road and another for the track, and the overlapping programs weren’t meshing well. She was no longer enjoying riding.
“I was a bit nervous because she was burnt out, and she was so young,” Armstrong says. “She was getting married that fall, and she got through her wedding, and I said, ‘How are you feeling? You just took a month off. Are you ready to get back at it?’ And she was like, ‘Not really, no.’ And I was like, ‘All right. Let’s just take more time off.’"
She came back in style. In April 2017, just two years since she’d taken up competitive cycling, Dygert became world champion in the IP, with a time only a half-second off the world record. She set a new world record a year later.
“She’s all about breaking records,” says Armstrong. “Chloé wants to make history, to accomplish what no other female has accomplished. Those are the kinds of things that drive her. As long as she has a plan and can see next steps, she’s fully committed. When she can’t see the next steps, she drifts a little bit.”
She’s all about breaking records, Chloé wants to make history.
Just as Dygert’s career was starting to blossom, the 2017 and 2018 seasons presented setbacks. A torn labrum in her hip and a bulging disk in her back caused her to miss the entire summer of 2017. She had six weeks to train for the world time-trial championship in Norway, where she finished fourth. A crash at the Amgen Tour of California in May 2018 left her with a concussion that derailed her for most of the year. When she did get back on the bike, a knee injury hindered her progress; she’d ultimately have a surgery in December 2018.
Then, in March 2019, Dygert’s friend and teammate, Kelly Catlin, died by suicide. Catlin’s father pointed to several factors, including depression caused by a training-crash concussion. It was a personal loss and a wake-up call for Dygert, who admits her personality has changed after her own concussion. “I really do have to work on being nice,” she says. “I have low patience. I like to blame my concussion. It changed my personality. I’m different now. I feel like I come across as rude when I don’t mean to.”
The traumatic brain injury also caused vision problems and an inability to focus. It became a source of anxiety while trying to maintain position within the cutthroat, handlebar-bumping pro peloton. And it affected Dygert’s ability to dig deep, both in training and racing, which had always been her greatest gift.
“When Chloé races, she has almost no pain filter,” Armstrong says. “She can turn herself inside out. I can’t train her off of her race numbers. It’s impossible. I can’t even explain it. It’s like a pain filter that I don’t understand as a coach.”
When Dygert got back on the bike after her concussion, the pain filter did not work properly. She could match her training numbers in racing, but she couldn’t exceed them. And she struggled with sustained efforts; anything over five minutes was too long to hold her focus. “We had quite a year trying to get through this,” Armstrong says.
It wasn’t until the Pan American Championships, in August 2019, that Dygert returned to top form. She left Peru with gold medals in the time trial and team pursuit, and a few weeks later she won all four stages at the Colorado Classic stage race. Each time, she soloed to victory as an entire field of riders tried and failed to bring her back.
“I didn’t think my strength was going to come back after the concussion and the knee,” Dygert says. “I knew Kristin could get me to the top level again; it just came down to what my body would let me do. It was a stressful year for us both. I think Pan Am was the realization. I did the time trial, and I remember looking down at my power and thinking, ‘Oh, crap. I’m going way too hard.’ But then, halfway through the race I was at 340 watts and I’m like, ‘I’m nose-breathing. Oops. I should’ve gone harder.’ I got a call from Kristin after the time trial finished, and it wasn’t ‘Oh, good job. Oh, yay for you.’ It was ‘Chloé, you’re back!’ I will never forget that moment.”
A month later she won her first elite world time-trial championship at age 22, the youngest man or woman to ever take that title. She also won by the largest margin in the event’s history, catching and passing seven riders who started ahead of her. She collapsed in a heap at the finish, yet in her post-race interview she came across as nonchalant, perhaps even indifferent about the triumph.
“I don’t want to downplay how special it is to win rainbow stripes, because I know it is a big deal,” she says. “I hate sounding cocky, but my goal at each race I show up to is to win—to win by a lot.”
The experience taught Dygert a lesson about how supporters can be fickle. “I had success at a young age, and then I had all my injuries, and some people thought, ‘She was good when she was young, but she’s not going to be good again,’” Dygert says. “That was the mentality most people had. I’m not saying I didn’t have support, but it was frustrating. I understand, it was because I’d been injured, I had no results, but seeing that lack of belief was hard to deal with. It was amazing how many new friends I had after winning the world championship. I’m not upset about it, but I learned who my real supporters are—the people who I will keep in my corner.”
While Dygert was struggling through her season of darkness, her marriage was falling apart. Dygert acknowledges that she had married too young, and that, ultimately, her career “just mattered more.” This past January, the divorce was finalized. By that time, Dygert had relocated from Washington to Idaho to be close to Armstrong.
“I don’t regret marrying Logan,” she says. “It wasn’t the right decision. Training with him helped form me into the rider that I am. I appreciate Logan and his support. I will always love him as a friend, and he is someone I will always stay in touch with. But I think he and I both knew that it was for the wrong reasons. I appreciate all that he has done in my life. I wouldn’t take it back.”
And that’s Chloé Dygert—not wasting time regretting mistakes or setbacks. She’s too busy chasing the next victory.
Dygert has an obvious edge while Courtney is all polish.
© Joe Pugliese
Though she hasn’t lived with her parents for seven years, Kate Courtney’s childhood room remains untouched. Ski racing medals, pictures of horses and a Macklemore poster hang on the walls. Scattered on the ground are boxes of bike-racing gear. Her mother, Maggie, refers to her daughter’s bedroom as “shipping and receiving.”
Courtney grew up at the base of Mount Tamalpais, the birthplace of mountain biking. She found cycling as a youngster, riding on tandem with her father, a former hedge-fund analyst, to get pancakes on Sundays. She still rides with him often, while Maggie, a retired employment attorney, is her agent, helping negotiate sponsorship deals.
Courtney grew up ski racing and running cross-country. She began bike racing as a freshman at the Branson School, a prep school. In 2012, at a junior World Cup event in the Czech Republic—her first international competition—she finished 10th. Six weeks later, in Windham, New York, she became the first American junior woman to win a World Cup event. She was 16.
The next year, racing as a junior, she won a national title and finished sixth at the world championship. Heading into 2014, as she moved into the under-23 category, she signed with Specialized Racing. It made sense; she’d ridden Specialized bikes her entire life. The most promising American mountain biker, adorned in stars and stripes, would be bonded with the storied bike brand.
The only drama in Courtney’s career thus far was her surprise split from Specialized late in 2018. Publicly, she was a rising influencer with an infectious smile, posting with the upbeat hashtag #sparklewatts. Yet privately, she had grown unhappy with treatment by team management, which favored established Europeans such as 2016 world champion Annika Langvad of Denmark.
In the week before the 2018 world championship, Courtney and her mother worked out a deal with Scott-SRAM, managed by Swiss mountain-bike legend Thomas Frischknecht and led by Swiss world champion Nino Schurter. Days later she shocked fans with a world title of her own, catching and passing Langvad with superior technical skills on the final lap.
Her new contract came together before her world title but was not made public until early January; the global cycling audience couldn’t have known the vindication Courtney felt on that podium in Switzerland. Specialized founder Mike Sinyard, who covets rainbow stripes and was not involved in the team’s management, was said to be furious. It’s not a topic Courtney cares to discuss; her public comments on the matter have been gracious, thanking Specialized for years of support. She’s currently signed with Scott-SRAM through 2021.
Behind Courtney’s success is a team that includes Frischknecht, Miller, a nutritionist, strength coach, sports psychologist, physical therapist, mechanic and her traveling partner, Brad Copeland. Frischknecht offers technical and tactical advice; Miller manages the minutia of workout data and long-range physiological development.
When Miller first met Courtney in 2015, he wasn’t ready to take on new athletes heading into an Olympic season, but they stayed in touch. In 2016 he officially became her coach. Together they built a four-year plan for 2020. “From early on she intrigued me,” he says. “I thought the results she was getting on the training she was doing were exceptional. She’s anaerobically inclined; she has really good 30-second, one-minute and five-minute power. At that time, she hadn’t really developed a threshold, so she was getting results almost all anaerobically. Which, as a bike racer, that’s a finite amount of effort you can put in before you start to fail. So for her to get the results she was getting through her anaerobic energy system, I was super impressed.”
At that meeting Miller asked Courtney what she wanted to accomplish. Without hesitation, she said she wanted to win gold in 2020. “I was like, ‘OK, cool,’” he says. “But this is what it takes. This is what the best riders look like in terms of power-to-weight, absolute power, anaerobic power, aerobic power. This is what it takes. And she said, ‘Well, can I get there?’ At that point it was like, ‘If you progress on average 3 percent year-over-year, then yes.’ And she said, ‘OK. That’s what I want to do.’"
Without question, the 2019 season was Courtney’s best to date. At the season opener in Germany she won both the short-track and cross-country races. She won again the next weekend in the Czech Republic, and again in France in July. She finished fifth in a hard-fought world championship race, but her consistency netted her the World Cup title.
She closed out the season with a trip to Tokyo in October, where a test event was held on the extremely technical Olympic course. Courtney crashed in a rock garden during course reconnaissance, requiring stitches and forcing her out of the race. The following day, she watched the women’s race closely with Miller.
“It was a valuable experience for me,” she says. “I’ve never sat out and watched an elite mountain-bike race. I was able to watch with Jim, so that was a huge advantage. I know how everyone rode. I know how fast they went in different sections, what the key sections were— information that if I had been having a mediocre, end-of-the-year race, I would not have really gathered.”
The Izu mountain-bike course is adjacent to the Olympic velodrome, meaning Courtney and Dygert could earn their respective Olympic medals within a few hundred meters of each other. When exactly that might happen, however, is still unconfirmed.
Courtney and Dygert banged out the miles on the roads of Marin County.
© Joe Pugliese
Back at the Camp of Champs, it’s a cool morning in Marin, and Courtney and Dygert are kitting up for another round of photos. This time, they’re wearing matching U.S. national team jerseys and they’re sharing the lens with a 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge. It’s a formidable symbol of American muscle that Courtney envisioned for the shoot. Are they badasses, or badass princesses? The truth is, they’re each a bit of both.
Dygert has been under the weather but is tolerating an operation involving photographers, videographers, a lead car, a follow car, an entourage. Courtney is posing for Copeland, who films a video of her braiding her hair.
Once things get moving, the riders get positioned behind the GTO for some casual motor pacing. Though she’s not feeling well, Dygert slips into warrior mode, sitting inches off the car’s bumper; Courtney is at least a bike wheel’s length back—not surprising since mountain bikers have less practice drafting at close range. It’s yet another example of how these unlikely training partners are drawn together less by discipline or personality than by shared sponsors and nationality, age, talent and potential.
“It’s unique to be strong American women competing in different disciplines, so it isn’t a head-to-head competition,” Courtney says. “I think that’s a positive thing when it comes to training days, where we can push each other and be comfortable being a bit more vulnerable. It’s not a race. It’s an opportunity to push beyond our own limits and then go back to our disciplines to perform at the top of our capabilities. There’s definitely lots of mutual respect.”
Dygert agrees, adding that what they extract from each other is directly related to how dissimilar they are. “I think every top athlete needs to win all the time, but our mentality is so different,” she says. “Kate will go out and train 30 hours a week; I’m not sure I’ve ever gone over 20 hours in my life. She is very detail oriented. Kate has a lot of support and a great team behind her, while I have just a few people. We are so very different in how we prepare, how we look at things, how she feels before a race, how she feels about the Games. Everyone at the elite level has their own way of coping. We’re very different, but we’re both able to perform at the top of our discipline.”
In February in Berlin, Dygert broke her own world record en route to a world championship in the IP. A few days earlier she’d led the team-pursuit squad to victory; she and her teammates dedicated the victory to the late Kelly Catlin.
The IP is not an Olympic event, meaning her hopes for gold rest on the team pursuit and individual time trial; she’ll be starting the road race as well, though her role there is not certain.“Obviously, I want to win all three events,” she says. “The time trial is going to be the main focus, and then my fitness from that will obviously correlate with the team pursuit. And then, with the road race, it’s a bonus, you know?”
Courtney is diplomatic when asked to define Olympic success. She won’t have three tries like Dygert; it all comes down to one race. “Arriving to the start line 100 percent prepared to give my best performance ever would be a success,” she says. “Whatever happens after that is in some ways out of my control. Of course I hope to win a medal.”
In March, the IOC announced that the Games would be held in 2021. With that recalibration in mind, Courtney and Dygert shared some additional thoughts.
“The coronavirus pandemic has created a lot of uncertainty and mandated unprecedented decisions to protect our global community,” Courtney wrote in an email. “As someone who studied global health in college and reads the news, I recognize that the impact of this crisis is life-threatening for many and poses challenges far more critical than canceled sporting events.
But as a competitor who has been working toward this season for years, it is also very challenging to have the events of an Olympic year be uncertain. That said, I am fully committed to my training toward Tokyo and am approaching this time at home as an unprecedented opportunity to focus and train with one key goal in mind.”
She was more succinct on Instagram, writing, “Our time will come. These dreams are not canceled, they are just on hold for a moment. Hope and heartbreak can live side by side.”
Dygert’s response was quintessential Chloé—blunt and to the point. “I feel like a broken record saying this, as it’s what everybody says, but you have to control your controllables. For me this has no change on my life except that I can’t race. Which to me, is fine. I’m not stressed, because I know I don’t need to race to be fit. I train alone most of the time, I live alone, and I like to be alone, so this really hasn’t impacted my training or added any stress to my life. Obviously it’s a bummer that the Games have been postponed, but I guess it means I have another year to get even fitter.”
After Tokyo, Dygert will probably turn to hallowed European one-day classics such as Strade Bianche and the Tour of Flanders. It’s only a matter of time until she takes on the UCI Hour Record, which she will likely decimate. At some point she’d also like to try to win the women’s Giro d’Italia, though she’s hardly a climber for the high mountains. (Why, then? The leader’s jersey is pink. Duh.)
Courtney has said that following the Olympics she might make a bid for the 2022 Cyclocross World Championship, held in Fayetteville, Arkansas. “I have no aspirations of being the greatest cyclocross racer,” Courtney says. “But I think there’s a lot of skills that could help me, and long-term it’s something I’m interested in trying now that I don’t have school during the fall.”
But now, it’s January at the Camp of Champs. A simpler time, with a clearer focus. The muscle-car shoot is over, and Chloé and Kate (with Tim, Colin and Coach Kristin) pedal into the distance. In the coming months, the certainty of the Olympics will prove malleable. Adjustments will be made and remade. Whenever the Games wind up being held, both women will represent the U.S. and aim for gold. Because regardless of the path each took to get there, winning bike races is what they do.
