Racer’s Intensity Runs in Cycles : Beck: Simi Valley teen-ager changes from gregarious to tenacious when the competition begins.

Katie Beck is ready for serious cycling.

The question is, is it ready for her?

Tana Curtis, cycling coach at the U. S. Olympic Festival, pauses to consider the question.

“Well, you’ve heard the expression, ‘They broke the mold when they made them’?” Curtis says. “Well, in Katie’s case, she was free-formed.”

Beck, 17, has a personality that, to put it tactfully, is unique. The Olympic Festival could be considered a fairly important event in the life of someone so young, but if Beck was nervous during the competition over the weekend at the U.S. Olympic Festival she veiled it well.

Seconds before the start of a race, she continued to blab away to anyone who would listen.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been told to shut up before a race,” Beck says. “People have different ways of preparing themselves. I race better when I’m relaxed and having a good time.”

Opponents don’t seem to know quite what to make of her. She goofs around, then leaves them gasping on the track.

“Everybody thinks I’m not serious, that I’m just loud and obnoxious,” says Beck, a senior-to-be at Simi Valley High.

Curtis, who worked as a coach in the Amateur Athletic Foundation’s cycling program, remembers the first day Beck showed up at the Encino Velodrome.

“Most of the kids were pretty timid,” Curtis says. “Some of them had never been in competition on a bike before, let alone on a track with no brakes and the whole works. Most of them were shy. Not her.”

Curtis recalls wondering how long Beck’s enthusiasm would last, and whether it would carry over to racing.

She no longer has to worry.

Beck was entered in six events at the Olympic Festival. In all, she raced 15 times, more than any other junior woman.

Though her only medal--a gold--came in the team trials, Beck placed high in several individual events against senior riders.

Whether the race is on the road or a track doesn’t matter to Beck, who has raced everything from a BMX to an old, beat-up 10-speed she found rusting at a junior high school near her home.

Top racers at the senior level tend to specialize in a few events, but Beck has put off choosing.

“I like them all,” she says.

At home, she often rides through the back roads of Simi Valley, Moorpark and Thousand Oaks on her way to the beach.

The trips are part of her training, but she says they also are an enjoyable way to pass the time.

“She rides in many ways like a guy,” Curtis says. “She’s got that aggressiveness. You can see her jaw set and it’s like, ‘Uh-oh, here she goes.’ ”

Like a guy? Funny that Curtis should put it that way.

Beck grew up playing with the guys. Adopted just a day after she was born, Beck grew up with her adoptive mother’s three older daughters, an adopted older brother, an adopted younger brother and various foster children--most of them boys.

“There were really no girls in the neighborhood,” she says.

Beck rode dirt bikes in the hills near her home. She played tackle football.

And she kept on playing tackle football--even at Simi Valley High.

Beck played for the Pioneers as a freshman and sophomore. She says she was a two-way starter at wide receiver and cornerback on the freshman team and a part-time player on the junior varsity the next season.

She attained celebrity status as the only girl on the team, but decided to give it up when the boys started to get bigger and she stayed the same size.

“I wanted to save my knees for cycling,” she says.

And the rest of her body as well. Some opponents weren’t too fond of the idea of a girl playing football. A few let her know about it. In one game, Beck says, she was attacked by several members of the opposing team.

“They were like, ‘Get that girl!’ ” Beck says. “They didn’t care what else was going on. They just wanted to beat me up.

“I was really scared. About five of them jumped on me and just started wailing on my face. I couldn’t even breathe.”

Finally, an official broke up the scuffle.

But the same tenacity Beck showed in competing with the boys in football also benefits her on the cycling track.

“There have been times in the last couple of days that she’s been dead tired, but refused to give up,” Curtis says. “She was just about to drop out in the points race and something clicked inside her. It was like, ‘I’m not going to be lapped. ‘

“That switch is so important. It has to be there if a kid is going to be a top-level athlete. Katie has it. She’ll pass out before she’ll quit.”

On Saturday afternoon she almost did. Beck had just sat down to rest after a sprint race when she looked up and saw the field for a points race taking off.

Without time to make the appropriate mechanical adjustments on her bike, Beck chose to race in the 15-kilometer event anyway.

She stayed with the lead pack, and even led one sprint, but she felt dizzy and barely managed to hang on during the last five laps.

Shortly after the race, Beck collapsed with heat exhaustion. It marked the third time in four days that her health had been at risk.

Last Wednesday, during practice at the National Sports Center Velodrome at Blaine, Minn., Beck ran into a spectator who had wandered too close to the track.

“He said he was looking at the grass or something,” Beck says. “My shoulder hit his and I went all over the track.”

Two days later, during a sprint race, Beck’s bike lost traction and she slid down the track, injuring her other shoulder.

“I went to the trainer and they said, ‘What sport are you in, softball?’ Everyone thinks I must be in softball because it’s my arms that are beat up.”

Softball is just about the only sport she hasn’t tried in the past few years. She seems set on cycling, which is good news for the United States, Curtis says.

“She’s got power, she’s got strength and she has speed,” Curtis says of Beck. “She’s been cursed by talent. She’d better not give it up.”