Cycling again dominated the headlines in 2019 and filled The Durango Herald’s top sports stories of the year. Above all the others, and narrowly edging the feats of fellow pro cyclist Sepp Kuss, it was the year-long accomplishments of teenager Quinn Simmons that stole the show in 2019.
In the spring, he won a stage and two jerseys at the Redlands Bicycle Classic and then became the first American rider to ever win Junior Gent-Wevelgem in Belgium. He returned home and broke Payson McElveen’s White Rim fastest-known time record in Moab.
In the summer, he won two of the three junior national championships in road cycling. He followed that with a remarkable second-place finish in the Leadville Trail 100 MTB mountain bike race, the only mountain bike race he contested in 2019. Then, he won the junior road world championship to claim his first rainbow jersey on the same day it was announced he had signed a two-year contract with the Trek-Segafredo World Tour pro team to achieve his 2019 goal of earning a contract with a pro cycling team.
Simmons, 18, accomplished all of this and much more in only his second season of racing road bikes.
“I’m super proud of my year,” Simmons said in a phone interview with The Herald while on his first pro team camp trip to Europe. “When I was training last year, it would have been a dream to have one or two of the results I had. To make all of it come real and now be here with a pro team and riding with all these guys, it still doesn’t feel like it has quite set in yet. Scrolling back through my phone and looking at what I was doing a year ago to now, being here on one of the top teams in the world, it’s still pretty crazy.”
The two results Simmons said stood apart from the rest were Junior Gent-Wevelgem and the Leadville 100. His first major win in Europe gave him confidence for the rest of the year, while it was his comeback effort on a mountain bike in Leadville that made the entire world of cycling take notice.
In a field with two-time defending champion Howard Grotts of Durango, who would become a three-time winner in 2019, as well as three-time winner Todd Wells and a loaded slate of World Tour pro road cyclists, Simmons erased a 10-minute deficit after an early flat tire and climbed all the way back up through the race and beat World Tour pro Lachlan Morton in a sprint finish to take second place.
“That took the biggest effort. That’s the one result I’m probably most proud of,” Simmons said. “It showed me how hard I can push myself, and it’s something I’ll remember next year when every race is now six hours.
“It was an eye-opener and showed a lot of teams I could go that long and that hard. Leadville was the start of the last block of my season, and people could see I was riding on a different level than I was before and how I had progressed through the year.”
At the national championships, Simmons got to share the stage with his younger brother, Colby, who won the junior 15-16 criterium an hour before Simmons won the junior 17-18 criterium title. Simmons also won the time trial national title in 2019.
“To be there when Colby won his first one was pretty cool,” Simmons said. “I can’t wait to see him take that jersey around Europe next year.”
At the world championships in England, Simmons showed his superior form. He made an early break, and the entire peloton working together would only lose time to him the rest of the way. Standing on the podium in the world championship jersey while the American flag raised behind him during the national anthem made even the steely teenager come to tears.
“It’s something I hold special, and now it’s motivation for me to do it on an even bigger stage,” Simmons said.
Simmons did it all his own way, bucking the Durango trend of political correctness, endless humility and the need to bow down to the veterans who have come before him. He rubbed people the wrong way when he set out to break McElveen’s White Rim record only weeks after the two-year-long film project had been a success for the fellow Durangoan, particularly when he chose a different starting spot than the one McElveen had attempted to make the standardized start point for those going after a record attempt.
“I think the drama around White Rim was more fun than the actual record,” said Simmons, who saw his record get beat by Utah’s Keegan Swenson later in the year. “I’m going back. I don’t know when, but I’ll be home for a period of time after Paris-Roubaix next year, sometime in May, and I could be going for it again with everything on the line.”
He’s made enemies and rivals through the years at local races, but the brash teenager has earned respect for his speed and results, and Durango has been proud to claim him as its own with every major accomplishment. Even his rivals have had to marvel at some of his accomplishments at such a young age, particularly at Leadville.
Part of what makes Simmons such an exciting rider is his never-back-down attitude. It’s what he believes will continue to make him successful in his first year racing as a World Tour pro.
“For me, looking at a long-term career in this sport, I want to be an entertaining rider,” Simmons said. “I want to be someone who has good style on and off the bike. If you look at someone like Peter Sagan, there’s a reason he’s so popular and so good. There’s a huge divide between the guys who always are saying something right and the guys saying what they actually think. It might annoy some people, but if I’m true to myself and pushing myself to be the best, that’s all I care about.
“This year, being an 18-year-old on a World Tour team, it’s important to remind myself to stay fearless. Sure, all these guys have years more experience, but I’m not going to approach a year like I’m only here to learn and not to compete. I’m here to be competitive, help the team any way I can. I’m coming in with an aggressive style that I hope to maintain. If it annoys people, that’s their problem.”
Paris-Roubaix will be one of the big targets of Simmons in 2020 along with the 200-mile Dirty Kanza gravel race. He plans to compete at the national championships, possibly as both an under-23 rider and in the elite pro categories. He would love a chance to earn a spot at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
“I know there are only two spots for the U.S., but I think I still have a relatively good chance to go, even as a younger guy,” Simmons said of the Olympics. “I’ll gain experience, hopefully come back from Paris with a medal, and that will be a really good first step. I know I gotta go prove I deserve the spot.”
Simmons will no doubt be thrown to the fire in 2020. He’s ready to ditch the junior gears and race with the big boys. He’s sure to make a few new enemies, plenty of more fans and, he hopes, the continued respect of his rivals. He’s only 18, only getting faster and setting the bar higher each year. If Year 2 of his road cycling career was any indication, the proverbial ceiling is sky high.
“Two years ago when I was dreaming of doing this and hoping to someday make it happen, I had no idea I would do it by 18,” he said. “Everything is new now. I’m at such a higher level in the sport with these riders. It’s a completely different game than I’m used to playing, but I’m ready to play.”
It was another banner season for Sepp Kuss in the UCI World Tour with his Team Jumbo-Visma. A year after he won Tour of Utah and then made his Grand Tour debut at the Spanish Vuelta, he checked off the Giro d’Italia and then the Spanish Vuelta once more, leaving only the Tour de France as the last of the three Grand Tours he has yet to contest. In December, it was announced he will be on the Jumbo-Visma roster for the 2020 Tour de France.
In 2019, Kuss won his first stage at a Grand Tour, when he climbed past everyone on Stage 15 of the Vuelta. He turned in several stunning climbs at the Vuelta to help teammate Primož Roglic claim the red jersey as the race’s champion. Between the Giro and Vuelta, Kuss also had a standout performance at Critérium du Dauphiné, among many others. His three-week ride at the Tour de France in 2020 will be one of the highlights of the upcoming year for cycling fans.
The Fort Lewis College athletics department underwent a massive makeover in 2019. Brandon Leimbach was named the new athletic director and remade the athletic department with two new assistant athletic directors, including former women’s basketball head coach Jason Flores, as well as a new sports information director. He made Brandon Crosby the head football coaching going forward after his first couple of games with the interim label, as Crosby replaced former head coach Joe Morris in the early winter months of 2019.
Leimbach has also made new hires for head coaches in softball and women’s lacrosse and promoted Durango’s own Orlando Griego to interim women’s basketball head coach. Griego’s team is off to an 8-2 start and 4-1 record in the RMAC. A year after volleyball was the lone FLC sport to qualify for conference tournament play, both men’s and women’s soccer returned to the postseason, and both basketball teams appear poised to do the same in 2020 after fantastic starts, with an exciting men’s team that brushed off a tough 2018-19 season by completely rebuilding the roster en route to a 9-2 start to 2019-20.
Seemingly ignited by her singlespeed cyclocross national championship in 2018, Durango’s Sarah Sturm put together an incredible 2019. She won the 135-mile Belgian Waffle Ride gravel race, won a road criterium race on a gravel bike at the Sea Otter Classic and then claimed the women’s road race at the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic. A week after a strong showing at Downieville, she then finished second in her first career start at the Leadville Trail 100 MTB race, followed by a second-place finish at the 140-mile SBT GRVL race only eight days later.
For good measure, she repeated her singlespeed cyclocross national championship in December. Proving she can win and be as entertaining as successful on any bike, Sturm had a 2019 to remember. And she did it all while still helping coach her alma mater Fort Lewis College cycling program.
If it is possible for a reigning national champion to have a breakout season, that was the case in 2019 for Durango mountain biker Riley Amos. The Animas High School senior was a force in Canada Cup races, medaled in every race in which he competed at the Pan-American Continental mountain bike championships in Mexico, including a gold in the UCI Category 1 junior race, and then stunned the pro riders of North America with his fourth-place finish at the Carson City Off-Road 50-mile backcountry race. Three weeks later, he won the junior men’s short-track and cross-country mountain bike national championships in only his first year in the 17-18 age group.
That allowed him to compete at the world championships in Canada in September. That’s when he was part of an unforgettable team along with Durango’s Christopher Blevins, as the Americans took silver in the team relay race at the world championships for the first time since 2007. Amos capped his strong 2019 with a varsity boys state championship in the Colorado Cycling League’s title race held at Durango Mesa.
It was a powder year in 2019 for Durango and the surrounding mountains. Epic winter storms brought record snowfall that allowed backcountry enthusiasts to make turns on in-town mountains that hadn’t filled out enough to ski and ride in a decade. Durango High School also hosted the 2019 CHSAA State Skiing Championships with Alpine races at Purgatory Resort and Chapman Hill, as well as epic Nordic races at the Durango Nordic Center in the middle of one of the biggest storms of the year in February.
All the snow allowed Purgatory Resort to open for a few weekends in May for the first time in history, and some lucky people were able to ski at Purgatory Resort and ride in the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic on Memorial Day Weekend. Locals will long remember the epic winter of 2019, and the 2019-20 season is already off to a ripping start.
Bayfield High School’s Jordan Lanning showed exactly why she was a Division I recruit to Colorado State University. The track and field star won the heptathlon at the Great Southwest Classic and claimed three Class 3A state championships in the 100-meter hurdles, long jump and the high jump, as she broke her own Class 3A state meet record in the high jump in the process.
She added a third-place finish in the 300-meter hurdles at the state meet, making her a one-woman wrecking crew in her final high school meet.
After she won the Class 4A two-mile state championship in a thrilling finish at the spring state track and field championships, Durango High running sensation Madeleine Burns represented USA Track & Field at the Mountain Running Youth Cup and helped the team to a bronze-medal finish in Italy, as she placed seventh as an individual.
Burns then had a standout senior cross-country season in which she broke the 5-kilometer school record set by current professional marathon runner Laura Thweatt, with a new school-best time of 17 minutes, 22.71 seconds. Burns finished fourth at the Class 4A state championships and has signed with Princeton to compete at an Ivy League college after she graduates in May 2020.
It was a sensational season for the Durango High School football team, which went 8-4 overall and fell in the Class 3A state quarterfinals to eventual state runner-up Pueblo South. Junior quarterback Jordan Woolverton finished with nearly 3,000 total yards and had 38 offensive touchdowns. Senior Everett Howland went over 1,400 yards rushing with 17 offensive scores, and he also led the team in tackles. Meanwhile, Carver Willis led one of the best offensive lines in school history on his way to a first team all-state selection a day after he officially signed with Kansas State University.
The Demons’ lone losses came an epic showdowns to elite teams, and DHS got to avenge a regular-season loss to Palisade with a big home win in the first round of the state playoffs. With Woolverton and much of his supporting cast set to return in 2020, the Demons will look to contend as one of the top teams in all of Class 3A next season.
Though a highly-anticipated Hardrock Hundred Endurance Race was canceled in 2019 because of the winter’s deep snow that caused avalanches that left debris all over the 100.5-mile course through the San Juan Mountains, it was still a strong year for ultra-runners who call Durango home. The race world will again turn its attention to Silverton in July 2020, as the same loaded field that was selected for the 2019 Hardrock 100 will race in 2020. Durango’s own Jason Schlarb was the first American to the finish line at the Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc, the Super Bowl of mountain trail running, as he placed 19th. Durango’s Kyle Curtin was the second American man to the UTMB finish line, as he placed 43rd. Schlarb also took wins at the Tushars Mountain Runs 100K in Utah, where Curtin was third, and the Ushuaia by UTMB 130K race in Argentina in 2019.
But perhaps the biggest result came from new Durangoan Maggie Guterl, who was the last man – or woman –standing at the Big Backyard Ultra last-man standing event in Tennessee, as she ran 250 miles in 60 hours to become the first woman to win the event. Guterl also has helped make the Durango seven-summits challenge, as she linked the seven summits that surround the city of Durango during a 61-mile run in exactly 15 hours. With more elite runners moving to Durango each year, the seven summits challenge will likely boom in 2020.
jlivingston@durangoherald.com
Top Stories of 2019
Honorable Mention
The stories that didn’t quite make the cut for the top 10:
Durango boys 4x800-meter relay team wins title, sets record at state championships
Bob Pietrack records 100th win as head coach of FLC men’s basketball in a school-record 135 career games
Laura Thweatt returns from injury, places eighth at Chicago Marathon
Howard Grotts steps away from full-time pro mountain bike schedule at age 26
Bayfield, Durango, Ignacio all qualify for regionals of state volleyball, and Bayfield makes state tournament
Ignacio girls soccer ends long losing streak dating back to 2012
