A Sport That Is Rolling : Cycling Has Gone Into Promoting Itself, Its Stars

Connie Paraskevin-Young had just flown in from Tampa and, boy, were her vocal cords tired.

“You should have heard me yesterday,” she croaked, which meant you couldn’t have heard her yesterday, unless you happen to have amplifiers in your ears.

Paraskevin-Young is talking, mostly, and being looked at quite a bit these days. She is cycling’s first cover girl, its first object of mash notes, its first female rider who has been marketed at such a flat-out rate.

Never mind that at 26 she is already a three-time world champion in the sprints, or that she is a four-time U.S. champion, or even that she has been on two Olympic teams as a speed skater. All the attention she is getting these days is on account of her new agents, ProServ, and their aggressive marketing campaign.

Why? Because the demographics are right. Because lots of people ride bikes and many of those people will buy products they associate with the sport.

“Cycling is our fastest-growing division,” said Steve Disson of the division he heads for ProServ. “In 1984, about 78 million people rode bikes. It was the second-largest participatory sport in the country. I saw the potential there to be a kind of growth sport, like tennis and golf.

“The demographics are good. We can get to a broad market and reach children and women.”

To that end, Paraskevin-Young was signed by ProServ, flown to Washington and plunked into a high-fashion photo shoot, complete with soft-focus lenses and lots of blowing hair.

“We wanted to picture her as the premier active woman,” Disson said.

Before ProServ ever heard of Paraskevin-Young, or even her sport, she was pedaling away in obscurity. She was winning world titles, dominating the national sprint scene in cycling and spending her winters bent over an oval of ice. She was a member of the national speed skating team from 1977 to 1984.

Paraskevin-Young had begun cycling in her native Detroit at age 10. She won five national junior titles.

“I got out of cycling for two years to prepare for the 1980 Winter Olympics,” she said in an interview here last week. “When I got back, it was totally different. I had to re-learn. That’s why I’m grateful for what the sport has and where the sport is going.

“A few years ago, no one was being taken care of. Now, nobody is ever happy with anything. They always want more. I try to tell them how much better it is.

“In speed skating, I would have to pay out of my own pocket to train with the national team. I would have to work my butt off all summer to train all winter.”

If cycling has opened up to commercial endorsements, though, the opportunities have been late coming to the women. Even though Paraskevin-Young was winning world championships, she was virtually unknown outside the sport.

Women cyclists have lacked an international showcase--the Olympic Games. Until 1984, there were no cycling events for women in the Olympic Games. In Los Angeles, the road race for women was introduced. At next year’s Games in Seoul, some sprints will be added.

Said Olympic gold medalist Mark Gorski: “Being the world champion is a very prestigious thing around the world, but not in the United States. Connie’s been world champion three times, but Americans need the Olympics. Certainly, the lack of opportunity to compete in the Olympics has hurt Connie.”

She’s making up for lost time, and exposure, now. And, with her new forum, Paraskevin-Young is trying to influence the direction the sport will take.

“Cycling is really still a new sport,” she said. “A few years back, if you asked me if I would be competing like this, I would have laughed in your face.

“We want for it to continue. It has to be handled right. After 1984, after the team did so well, if we had the people in place in our federation, we would have done well.”

ProServ now represents the entire U.S. cycling team and is applying its marketing savvy to the entire sport. The Madison Avenue slickness is foreign to cycling, though, and some in the sport are uncomfortable with the glitz.

Some have smirked at the cream-puff ads Paraskevin-Young has done.

“She’s added glamour to a sport that didn’t have any,” said Ed Pavelka, executive editor of Bicycling Magazine.

Paraskevin-Young said: “Some things I’ve done for the hard-core cycling magazines have freaked people out. I just want to show the feminine side. There’s a lot of good looking women in cycling. However, they are usually shown in these bogus sweaty pictures. Why not show their beauty?

“I can tell you how little girls get into the sport, I know what they’re attracted to. There’s a little gymnast out there and a big cyclist. What’s a little girl going to choose? Which will society pressure her to choose?”

The irony for Paraskevin-Young is that she is starting to draw attention at a time when she’d just as soon lie low. Paraskevin-Young is ill. She keeps getting painful head and neck aches that are as mysterious to her doctors as they are to her.

At the World Championships last August, team officials had to pack her head and spine in ice before she raced.

“I knew something was up,” Gorski said. “It was pretty evident in her riding that she was in serious pain. I don’t know if it would have been evident to others, but she seemed to be bothered. She didn’t seem to be as confident. She looked really pale. I saw them putting ice on her head.”

Few knew what was happening to Paraskevin-Young, but most people knew something was wrong.

“The pain was so severe, there were times I literally couldn’t see,” she said last month at a USA-USSR meet here that she helped organize but couldn’t race in.

Parasekvin-Young, who lives in Indianapolis, stayed in Los Angeles after the competition to meet with specialists. Before that, she had been tested for everything from migraines to a brain tumor.

This week, she was reluctant to discuss her problem, other than to say that doctors here were ruling things out in a process of elimination.

Paraskevin-Young and Roger Young, her husband and coach, are moving to Newport Beach for winter training. She said she will continue to see her doctors here.

And, most likely, she will continue to hopscotch the country, preaching the gospel of cycling.

“For kids, it’s not a school sport, it’s not a televised sport,” she said. “They are not going to see it every day. These kids are going to have to work to find out where the local clubs are. They don’t know how to get into it. We’ve got to have a national program.

“I’d like to see more young girls get into the sport. The women have to push a lot harder for what they get. That’s true for athletes in general.

“But this sense of ‘We want more!’ we have to keep a lid on it. They feel it’s a right, that it’s always been this good. If I went out there and complained about every little thing, what would these kids think?

“I don’t get involved in anything I don’t believe in. The No. 1 thing is if I want to be in this, I want to be in it for a long time.”

That considered, it would seem that, one way or another, Paraskevin-Young will be around a long time.