By Kathie Reid
One early Saturday morning last July, Megan Guarnier woke up to find a letter from USA Cycling. “I was so excited,” she recalled. “I opened it and woke everybody up in the house because I was going to the Olympic Training Center” in Colorado Springs. She had been invited to USA Cycling’s Women’s Talent Identification Camp, a five-day camp held each summer, and she knew it was a big deal. “I knew that there were a lot of big women who had gone through that program, and that [this] was the first step to being recognized as potentially a good cyclist.”
Jim Miller, Director of Endurance Programs, sent the letter, and he is the one who selects the 10 to 12 women invited each year. This year’s camp is scheduled for July 14-18, and, as in previous years, he has been considering potential invitees all year. “You have to do something to get invited,” he said. And that something is to get good results in hard North American races. “To be there [at camp] says a fair amount about where you’re at,” he explained.
To make his decision roughly six weeks prior to camp, he relies on race results – “I generally keep a running list all year long of race results of new riders,” he said – as well as information and opinions gathered from a handful of coaches around the country. He said the USA Cycling Collegiate National Championships is another place he looks, and he is interrupting time in Europe with the National Team to attend the event in Fort. Collins, Colorado, May 9-11.
“We always have to keep moving forward,” Miller said. “Ideally, our goal is to find riders, identify riders, develop riders, and move them into pro teams so we can find more. As long as we have riders racing in Europe and internationally – succeeding internationally – then it opens more doors for USA Cycling and American riders in general.” The Talent ID Camp is a very important weapon in his arsenal for accomplishing these goals.
“I think the success rate we’ve had with the camp is pretty significant as far as girls that make it into the National Team,” he said. “If you look at the girls we’ve had come through the camp, it’s quite exceptional. We’ve had Kat Carroll, Brooke Miller, Mara Abbott, Katheryn Curi [Mattis], Carmen McNellis – you can go through almost a list of “Who’s Who” in the American peloton, and at some point, they came through this Talent ID Camp. And all of them came without really having to have made a big name for themselves.”
While Miller is obviously familiar with the women’s results on paper prior to their arrival at camp, they are invited so he can get to know them better and begin to determine their physiological and character strengths. “The camp is really heavy on just trying to acquire as much information as we can about these girls,” he said. A similar itinerary is set each year to enable this.
The first day includes simple introductions – to each other and to the goals and logistics for the week. The second and third day are spent at the track not only learning how to ride there – a first for many of the athletes – but participating in mass start events, track riding tests that are used to determine the track talent pool. “We don’t actually have that many women who make the talent pool through the mass start test … But I’ve had a couple occasions where girls have come in and they’ve never ridden the track, but have been right on top of the time. So it’s kind of a way for us to also identify some endurance track riders and try to push them that way, too,” Miller said.
The remaining two days are spent doing field tests, and attending lectures by a variety of experts. “We’ve developed some field tests over the last four years that we’ve also finally implemented into our junior regional program as well,” Miller said. “I think they’re pretty solid at helping us identify what we’re trying to look for.” The women are shown their individual test results, as well as current and past camp means, so they develop a sense of how “they stack up,” Miller said.
Guarnier said she remembers that the field testing was a bit stressful – “I had never really been put under the microscope like that” – but that the camp was a terrific experience. The testing helped her learn to “put the stress to the side, and just do what I had fun doing.” She said she also learned a lot from the lectures. Miller said who he invites to speak depends on schedules and availability, but two regulars are Corey Hart, an exercise physiologist who teaches the women about training with power, and Dr. Kristen Dieffenbach, who discusses sports psychology. Because so many of the women who attend are about to begin riding for domestic trade teams, Miller always gives a talk on important skills for surviving on pro teams.
Miller said that Guarnier is a good example for exactly what Talent ID Camp can – and often does – accomplish. “When she was at camp last year, she didn’t really do anything exceptional,” he explained. “But she kind of had the character and personality that I know survives in Europe.” As he does with all the women who attend camp, he followed her results after she left. “I saw her name up in some results early on this year, and I was like, ‘Wow, she’s doing pretty good.’” Because of what he’d learned about her at camp – that she had the “grit” to race in Europe – when an opportunity arose for him to send three American women to race with a composite team in France, he offered her a spot. Then, due to a series of injuries and illnesses with the National Team, she ended up racing for almost a month with the National Team in Italy, Belgium, and Holland. “And in that group, she didn’t disappoint at all,” Miller explained. “For her first time over here, she was really pretty good.”
Miller said that, though USA Cycling could conduct the Talent ID Camp somewhere other than the Olympic Training Center, he believes that holding it there helps impress upon the women that they are a part of something larger. This was certainly not lost on Guarnier. “You show up and you know there are all these amazing athletes from all different sports who are at the top of their game,” she said. “And it’s like, ‘Whoa! I want to be here, too. I want to be able to compete at the level that these other athletes are competing at.’ … The greatest athletes in the world have been through those facilities, and there you are. This is your first step, and it was really cool just to be there.”
And she also recognized the cycling legacy associated with the camp itself. “When we went into the camp, he [Jim] gave numbers and dropped names on the women who had gone through the camp and obviously had been very successful immediately,” she said. “So it was like, am I gonna be one of those? … So it’s kind of that mysterious ‘Who at this camp is going to be going to the next level?’” Guarnier left the camp having no idea that she would soon be racing in Europe with the National Team.
With the July 14-18 dates of this year’s USA Cycling’s Women’s Talent Identification Camp fast approaching, Miller is beginning to make decisions about who those next women will be – the ones who will experience camp at the Olympic Training Center and wonder if they, too, will go to the next level.
