At the 50-mile “Sierra 7500” mountain bike race in 1986, the route took the bikers into a steep ditch about a mile into the race.
Cindy Whitehead Buccowich hopped off her bike in the bottom of the ditch and carried it with her up and out of the steep embankment, similar to how a cyclocross competitor would today. When she jumped back on her fully-rigid Kline bike, however, she broke her seat. She said she tried to at least get her seat post out of the frame before continuing, but wasn’t able to. She ended up riding the rest of the 49 miles in the race without a seat, standing out of the saddle and powering through the course which, like its name suggests, featured 7,500 feet of climbing.
Despite not being able to sit for the remainder of the race, Buccowich still won.
Last weekend, Buccowitch’s son, Parker, was riding his bike near his home in California not far from the Marin Museum of Bicycling, and stopped in.
Buccowich had been to the hall of fame for her induction in 1990 when it was located in Crested Butte, but has never been to its new location inside the Marin Museum.
On display at the museum, Parker found her red bike that she won the Sierra 7500 on, and it was still missing a seat.
“I knew they had my bike, but it was cool because I hadn’t seen it,” she said. “I didn’t know it was displayed. I had no idea.”
The seat post on display with her bike, however, isn’t the one she broke. Buccowich said she remembers throwing that one in a trash can.
Buccowich won her first national cross-country title later that season here in Durango at Edgemont Ranch. About 19 years ago, she moved from Palm Springs, California, to to Edgemont Ranch. She’s currently a real estate agent with Keller Williams.
“I really liked Durango and we moved here to raise our kids,” she said. “I wanted to live here because it’s a special place to me.”
After winning that first national title, she appeared on the cover of Mountain Biking magazine with the men’s national champion: Ned Overend. Overend was also part of the 1990 hall of fame class.
Buccowich said she would ride her bike to school, rain or shine, when she was young, but didn’t start racing until 1982 when she attended the University of California, Santa Barbara. After doing a 26-mile ride to the beach and back, in dolphin shorts and sneakers, she got talked into road bike racing.
“I just loved riding my bike,” she said. Buccowich eventually landed on the Schwinn national team, but it dropped its women’s team in 1984.
“At the time it was somewhat devastating, but then I started mountain biking,” she said. “Mountain biking was the best of both worlds. I could race and be out on the trails. ... Every time something went wrong (in my career), something better came out of it.”
She began by racing cross-country, plus every other discipline, but eventually moved toward the gravity disciplines. “We all did everything, but in the ’90s some us started specializing,” she said. Buccowich went on to win a world downhill championship in 1988 and world dual slalom titles in 1989 and 1992.
“I found my fitness from road racing transitioned, I just had to figure out how to handle a bike in the dirt,” she said. “I knew how to ride in a tight pack. Passing racers (on singletrack) was never a problem for me; I didn’t care if I brushed them.”
Her seat-less win, however, helped launch her career and was one of her first big wins on a mountain bike.
Buccowich had beaten another hall of famer, Jacquie Phelan, in the first race the 1986 season, snapping a multiyear winning streak. Buccowich said she wanted to prove it wasn’t a fluke after Phelan won the second race, and said winning the 7500 was “really big for my confidence.”
She even turned the experience into her own race, the Cindy Whitehead Uphill Challenge, where pros raced without seats for equal prize money.
At a different race she broke the chain on her bike and the crowd started chanting, “she can do it,” to her.
“We used to break things all of the time, but that was part of our value to the industry,” she said.
She also joked that mountain bikers didn’t used to be very popular tourists.
“Not all towns loved mountain bikers,” she said. “They would say, ‘they come to town with $20 bill and one pair of shorts and they don’t change either while they’re here.’”
Buccowich retired from racing professionally in 1994. She said she still bikes for recreation, but now she said she mostly hikes.
In 1987, Buccowich won the Sierra 7500 again. With a seat, she rode the 50-mile course 45 minutes faster.
