PARIS – Savilia Blunk wasn’t set up to be a professional mountain biker.
Her family lived mostly off the grid in Inverness, a town of little more than a thousand people on a peninsular strip in Northern California. On the west side, it is buttressed by Point Reyes National Seashore and beyond that, the frigid waters of the Pacific Ocean. To the south lies an ecological reserve, while Tomales Bay hems it in on the east.
Blunk’s father is a woodworker. Her mother is, she told USA Cycling, “very musical.” She was home-schooled through the ninth grade and spent most of her childhood scampering over the local trails and marshes after her two older brothers. When they opted to travel by bicycle, she did, too. Competition, other than with them, wasn’t really in her purview.
Maybe, though, living in Marin County – the birthplace of mountain biking – the sport was in her blood. And maybe moving to Durango, America’s incubator for Olympic mountain biking talent, got it pumping. However it happened, Blunk finds herself in Paris preparing to vie for a medal Sunday in the Olympic women’s cross-country mountain bike competition.
“Mentally and physically, it really brought up my level of cycling and just made me a better rider and better athlete,” Blunk, 25, said of moving to Durango.
She arrived at Fort Lewis College a few years ago unsure of what life had in store for her other than a future business development degree and a spot on the Skyhawks’ mountain biking team.
“I came one time to visit and really fell in love with the mountains and community and decided to live my life there,” she said.
She already had a few national titles in tow when she arrived in Durango. In the years since, she’s brought that tally up to eight, including the 2023 elite cross-country and short track jerseys. Last year, for the first time she stepped onto the podium of an elite World Cup race. That put the Olympics in her path.
In a concerted push to try to do well at the first two World Cup races, which was central to qualifying for the Summer Games, Blunk moved to Girona, Spain. There, she felt, she would be closer to most of the Europe-based World Cup competitions. Yet it felt like a sacrifice leaving behind Durango and her boyfriend, 2023 men’s mountain bike marathon champion Cole Paton, who became her fiance in April.
“If I was going to do something, I wanted to do it all the way and be the best I’ve been at it,” Blunk said. “So I wasn’t really like, ‘Olympics!’ but I knew I wanted to do cycling or mountain biking at the highest level.”
The move paid off. Blunk finished second and third, respectively, in the first two Olympic-distance World Cup races in Brazil. Six races in, she enters the Olympics ranked fourth in the UCI World Cup standings. That’s one spot below Team USA’s Haley Batten, who is returning to the Olympics after finishing ninth in 2021. Alessandra Keller of Switzerland leads the standings and Puck Pieterse of the Netherlands sits in second.
Oddsmakers may disagree, but USA Cycling Mountain Bike Director Alec Pasqualina said between Batten and Blunk he has faith the United States can claim its first mountain biking medal since Georgia Gould in 2012. Despite being the homeland of the sport, the U.S. has won just two medals, both women’s bronze, since mountain biking made its Olympic debut in 1996.
“With her results at the World Cup last year and this year, I mean, she’s really, really stepped up into that medal-contention sphere,” he said of Blunk.
Èlancourt Hill, where the women’s and men’s mountain bike races will be held Sunday and Monday, respectively, is an old landfill that has been turned into a park. Blunk said it is mostly gravel and “very manmade.”
“It requires you to be laser-focused the entire time,” she said. “And the Olympics is the pinnacle of the sport. So, it should challenge all aspects of what being a cross-country mountain bike racer is, and I think it does a good job of that.”
It’s not what she’s used to, it’s true. But that has never been a problem for Blunk.
Julie Jag is a former sports reporter for The Durango Herald and now works at the Salt Lake Tribune. She is covering the Summer Olympics from Paris.
