Ask and She Shall Succeed : Fearless Missy Giove Crashes to the Top of Mountain Biking World With an Odd and Aggressive Style

Missy Giove never dreamed of a career riding bicycles down mountains at breakneck speeds. But then nobody had ever asked her to ride one.

Until 1990, that is. During a competition four years ago in Mt. Snow, Vt., a friend lent Giove his bike and dared her to enter. She won a beginners’ race, then finished second in a pro-class event.

“I also crashed really, really hard,” Giove recalled in a recent issue of Rocky Mountain Sports. “I was going about 40 (m.p.h.) down this ski slope, because I had no concept of what you can and can’t do on a mountain bike.”

She went flying over the handlebars and landed about 40 feet down the hill.

“I got up, with grass sticking out of my helmet, got my bike and did the same thing again,” she said. “So (friend and pro racer) Charlie Litsky saw this and said, ‘I’ve never seen a woman do that. You’re psychotic.’ So he got a local bike shop to lend me a bike and pay for my entry fees.”

And professional women’s mountain bike racing hasn’t been the same since.

Sporting dreadlocks and a nose ring, wearing a dead piranha around her neck for inspiration and carrying the ashes of her dead dog in tribute to her former “buddy,” Giove is still crashing more often than the rest of the women on the tour.

But that’s only because she is riding faster than they dare.

“I think she’s a new breed, in that she doesn’t have any fear,” said Eric Sakadinsky, 26, a friend and rider from the Dos Equis-Barracuda team. “She makes all the other ladies realize that they’re going to have to go a little harder if they’re going to win races.”

Says Kim Sonier, 30, a rider for Team Iron Horse: “She is very fast, but she doesn’t always make it to the bottom. But we definitely have to try harder just to stay closer.”

Giove, 23, who left Team Yeti after last season to join the new team, Volvo-Cannondale, is leading the Grundig-UCI World Cup Downhill Standings going into this week’s competition on Mammoth Mountain in Mammoth Lakes. Racing starts today, and the downhill on Saturday will cover 3.5 miles and drop more than 2,000 feet.

In the first World Cup race of the season, on May 29 at Cap d’Ail, France, Giove had to dismount to repair her chain derailleur, but still finished third. Anne-Caroline Chausson of France was the winner. Giove’s victory on June 5 at Hindelang, Germany, was by an impressive 16 seconds over second-place finisher Chausson. Elke Brutsaert edged Giove in the last World Cup downhill in a driving rain on June 26 at Mt. Saint Anne, Quebec. Giove leads Chausson by 11 points. Sonier is third.

Giove credits her aggressiveness and instincts, and, of course, her once-feisty motivator, the piranha.

“The piranha was my bud, my little warrior buddy that used to hang out with me when I was in college studying late nights,” Giove says, explaining that the voracious little fish died one night after jumping from its tank while Giove was in Vermont competing in a ski race. “For me, my pet piranha is my reminder to be aggressive and to act on instincts, and to not think too much and to just be , you know?”

As for Ruffian, the black lab that watched over Giove for 18 years before dying, Giove merely sees no reason to let go.

“I got him cremated and I carry him with me--just a part of him, not the whole urn; he was a large dog,” she says. “So I just take a little bit of his ashes every time I race and sprinkle them on me and I just take him for a ride. He was my buddy.”

With her flamboyance on and off the mountain, it’s easy to see why Giove is the most popular rider on the women’s tour. She is well liked by most other riders because she is always willing to help.

“She has a different side that most people don’t see,” Sonier says. “She really cares about other riders. If we’re standing around, looking like we need something, she comes over and she asks us what we need. She is really a nice person and not just this wild and crazy girl.”

Giove only wishes that she had always been so well understood.

While growing up in Manhattan, she was kicked out of several schools.

“I was a good student, but I always questioned authority,” she says. “I was either very liked because I was creative and my own person, or I was very disliked because (teachers) didn’t want to accept me because I was questioning them, instead of just understanding that I wanted to further my knowledge.”

Giove learned how to handle a bicycle while delivering Chinese food on Manhattan’s East Side.

Her athletic prowess surfaced on the kick-ball courts of Manhattan and then on skateboards in and around New York.

“I’d just thrash the chutes in New York City and then I would thrash the chutes in New Jersey and (later) in Vermont,” she says, still clinging to the street-talk she grew up with. “I was just really into skateboarding.”

She later got into motorcycles and, after moving to Vermont, became interested in competitive ski racing. A downhill racer, she finished second in the 1989 U.S. Junior Nationals.

Then came her grand entrance into mountain biking.

Some were slow to accept this brash young newcomer, who dressed and adorned herself as she pleased.

“Sometimes I was misunderstood because I present myself differently, you know, like on the exterior,” she says. “I look different than the next person. I might act different than the ‘quote’ stereotypical woman. But I choose to express myself.”

And always quick with the tongue, she ruffled more than a few feathers.

She was suspended last year for 20 days for swearing at and spitting on a race official at the Iron Horse Classic in her hometown, Durango, Colo. The suspension might have cost her the downhill championship, because she missed three races and still managed to finish fourth overall.

One high-ranking race official even said Giove was bad for the sport, that “mountain biking will flourish in the long term only if we have a more conservative image than what’s presented in Missy.”

But it has been quite the opposite.

Giove seems to be just what the sport needs. She has the biggest fan club among all female and most male riders, consisting of mostly young wanna-be pro racers who, if their parents would let them, would probably be wearing dreadlocks and nose rings.

Officials at Volvo-Cannondale realized that and went after Giove before this season. First they had to assure Giove that they wanted her as she was and not “a clone of everybody else.”

Says Volvo-Cannondale General Manager Tom Schuler, “We talked to a lot of people and realized that Missy was an obvious choice. Her personality works and she’s very popular. People appreciate her style.”