Training programs were different a half-century ago: sometimes not so sport-specific or focused as today. Three-time Olympic cross-country skier Mike Elliott, a Durango native, found various outdoor summer pursuits to keep him in shape.
Backpacking in the San Juan Mountains was one. He bought into Colorado Wilderness Experience Trips, a guide business his mentor and ski coach Dolph Kuss had set up. Colorado WET, as it was dubbed, took clients into the San Juans for grueling weeklong loop trips. When their clients couldn’t handle their loads, Elliott and Kuss would take their food cans and stuff them into their own already heavy World War II-era rucksacks. Carrying the heavy loads built strength.
“Using the environment was really a key thing as far as the year-round training,” said Kuss, a national ski team coach in the 1960s and early 1970s, and Fort Lewis College ski coach beginning in 1964.
About this series
This year marks the 50th running of the annual Durango-to-Silverton race pitting bikes against train. Ed Zink, who promoted and fostered the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic from the start in 1972, died in October 2019. He was eagerly anticipating the 50th anniversary, and this Memorial Day weekend’s festival is being held in his memory.
In conjunction with the Iron Horse organizing committee and as part of its 50th celebration, former Durango Herald writer and editor John Peel put together a series of stories looking back at the race and ride’s history. These stories and more were compiled in a book, “Iron Horse Bicycle Classic 50th Anniversary: Looking Back, Racing Forward.”
Cycling was another option. A U.S. national teammate, two-time Olympic cross-country skier Bob Gray, coaxed Elliott into road riding in the early 1960s.
“A lot of skiers started riding their bikes,” Elliott said in a joint interview with Kuss in April. “It’s a lot like cross-country skiing in a way. You go over your threshold a bit, but you get some recovery (on downhills).”
After his final Olympic competition in February 1972 in Japan, Elliott remained in tiptop shape.
“He was always in training mode,” Kuss said. “Most of the successful athletes that I worked with, particularly at the college, sometimes I couldn’t work them hard enough.”
Back in Durango after his international travels, Elliott was up for a bicycle contest or two. At the second annual Tour de Vallee from the La Plata County Fairgrounds to Hermosa on May 14, Elliott pulled away to win the 10-mile race by 45 seconds over fellow 1972 Olympic Nordic skier Ron Yeager. Two weeks later Elliott was at the train depot with 35 others for the first Great Iron Horse Bicycle Race.
There was a festival atmosphere. Kuss’ oldest son, Mike, racing in the junior division, was doing wheelies just before the start. Helmets weren’t required, although Elliott was wearing what he calls a “leather brain bucket” – an airy contraption that exposed more head than it covered.
By design, riders stayed with the train out into the Animas Valley, and when the whistle blew, the race was on. Elliott’s strongest competitor that day was Ed Kautz, a bearded state Division of Wildlife employee whom Elliott had gotten to know. Kautz had taught Elliott a few cycling tactics, and he’d helped Elliott prepare his bike.
Kautz was the last rider to have an eye on Elliott, who pulled away and rode alone up Coal Bank Pass. Elliott’s superb fitness and high-altitude acclimation kicked in. With little in the way of prizes or notoriety – Elliott says he was given a handshake and a candle – this was just competitive juices taking over.
“I wanted to win it by as much time as I possibly could,” he said.
Dolph Kuss was following the racers in a vehicle. So was Elliott’s sister Lucy Olson with her husband, Art. Kuss was one of the first to congratulate Elliott at the finish atop Coal Bank.
A few minutes later Kautz crested Coal Bank to take second overall and was quoted in The Durango Herald as telling Elliott:
“The next time I help work on your bike I’m going to put epoxy in the gears.”
After several other riders finished – it is believed that Mike Hackett was third overall, followed in fourth by Tom Mayer, the brainchild of the event – many gathered and continued to Silverton. For many riders that day, the downhills on Coal Bank and Molas were the most difficult part of the ride, something new and exciting, but scary. Elliott recalls being the last down Coal Bank.
Ironically, Elliott and Kuss didn’t know Tom Mayer before the race but knew his brother Jim, a brakeman on the Denver & Rio Grande Western and the other half of Iron Horse lore. Jim had helped load their packs countless times when they used the train to access their backpacking adventure trailheads.
Elliott headed to Massachusetts a few months after that first Iron Horse to work for A&T Ski Co., a ski manufacturer. He wouldn’t ride the Iron Horse again until years later. As far as the Iron Horse, his involvement was as a runner. In 1978, while working at Purgatory Sports downtown, Elliott and Larry Malick plotted the course for the Narrow Gauge 10-Mile Run, a Memorial Day weekend event that continues today.
Cycling became a big part of Elliott’s and Kuss’ children’s lives. Evan Elliott was briefly a serious mountain bike downhiller. His twin brother, Tad, won several under-23 cross-country mountain bike races and was a mechanic at Mountain Bike Specialists before switching sports and nearly making the Olympics as a cross-country skier. Evan, Tad and sister Paige have all coached cross-country skiing.
Sepp Kuss, the son of Dolph and his second wife, Sabina, is now one of the top road cyclists in the world, known foremost for his climbing abilities. Kuss won the 2017 Iron Horse just as his pro cycling career was taking off. More recently he has won stages at two grand tours, the Vuelta a España and the Tour de France.
After major races he telephones “mama” and “papa,” who went to visit Sepp in fall 2021 in his home in Andorra, a principality in the Pyrenees Mountains on the France-Spain border.
“I’ve never been a sports watcher or spectator,” Dolph Kuss said. “But since Sepp has been riding, you get to know the players. And even if he’s not riding, I know the other players on his team. It makes it interesting.”
In 1972, Elliott wouldn’t have dreamed that every May, even a half-century later, people would still ask him about his winning bicycle ride. The Iron Horse’s popularity blossomed without Elliott around, but perhaps Elliott’s achievement meant more to the event than at first meets the eye.
Race director Ed Zink, for one, knew that Elliott’s victory would add some prestige. From a marketing perspective, it was fortunate.
“It was especially lucky someone of his caliber won it,” Zink told the Herald in 2017. “The cycling media took it much more seriously because an Olympian won it than if some kid from Durango had won it.”
Elliott’s candle for winning in 1972 is long gone, but the memories burn bright.
