January 7, 2001 | Geneviève Jeanson |
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January 7, 2001
Cyclist bound for the stars
She's regarded as one of the fiercest, most naturally gifted, most magnificently fit hill-climbers in elite women's cycling, a young athlete who's happiest when her lungs and legs are on fire and her heart is bursting as she attacks a brutal ascent, laying sorry waste to the very many who can't keep pace.
But now Genevieve Jeanson is curled up snugly in a mezzanine-level sofa of a downtown hotel and her cheeks are slowly reddening, her complexion yielding to the warm, rosy blush of guilt.
"Did you take the stairs to come up here," she's been asked, "or did you take the escalator?"
"The escalator," Jeanson's confession begins, and at first she seems a little pained by the truth. "I hate going up stairs. In an airport, I'll take the moving sidewalk every time, and I won't even walk - I'll just stand there."
This catharsis is good, she discovers, and presently Jeanson confesses more, admitting she's an unworthy opponent for fat-free ice-cream and jellybeans.
Yet you won't find the 19-year-old languishing today, avoiding stairs or nourishing a sweet tooth at her parents' home in uncyclable Lachine. She's been in Arizona since shortly before Christmas, training diligently near Phoenix for a season she views with enormous enthusiasm.
In October 1999, only three years after getting serious about her sport, Jeanson was crowned a double junior world champion in Italy, winning both the time trial and road race.
She followed that last March with a sensational victory in the Tour de Snowy, a 473-kilometre stage race through Australia's challenging Snowy Mountains, and a monumental win the next month over the greatest names in women's cycling, triumphant at the World Cup's Fleche Wallonne in Mur de Huy, Belgium.
The latter victory qualified Jeanson for the Canadian Olympic trials, and by finishing among the nation's Sydney-qualified road-racers in Peterborough, Ont., she earned another trip to Australia, placing 15th and 11th in the road race and time trial in an Olympics she never expected to ride.
Jeanson and five Canadian teammates were unveiled last month as Team RONA, an eager squad that will compete in 11 North American events beginning with the Redlands Classic stage race in California March 13-18.
This should be a season of little pressure, at least compared with the autumn of 1999 and the stressful calendar of 2000, a long campaign that spanned from Dec. 20 to Oct. 1. There will be no Olympics this year, no must-win races simply to qualify for an Olympic trials, no less the Games themselves.
This should be a year to decompress a bit, perhaps a time to enjoy life in the peloton for a while. But such a suggestion to Jeanson earns you a look that says you really should know better.
"I want to win a senior world championship," she says flatly, "to prove I can be very competitive, that I can go faster, climb faster, be faster in time trials, in the mountains, in the sprints, that I can win on every terrain. I'm hungrier this year."
It's now, after this staccato checklist clearly spells out her goals, that you realize you're talking to one of the world's truly focused cyclists, a superbly talented passenger on an escalator bound for the stars.
You don't become a world champion by accident, and at the highest level of international sport you seldom reach the podium's top step without stepping on a few toes.
Genevieve Jeanson has been called many things, some reasonable, others unfair. On this day, she's willing to assess the commonly heard adjectives :
Perfectionist : "True, for sure," she says without hesitation.
Strong-minded : "True again."
Determined, stubborn : "Both true."
Control freak : "Maybe a bit. I like to be in control of my life - train for a race, win it and move on. I like to live, and live hard."
Rebellious : "Sometimes, I guess - but only if that means doing my own thing, the way I want."
All of these words accurately described another marvelous champion of recent vintage: double Olympic biathlon gold medalist Myriam Bedard.
Likes the Comparison
"I think maybe I'm quite a bit like Myriam," Jeanson says, "and it's an honour to be compared to her."
Jeanson was 12 in the winter of 1994, a young girl coveting her father's too-large Peugeot bike when Bedard was mastering the pine forests and shooting ranges of Lillehammer. The cyclist was being shaped then, as she is now, by Andre Aubut, an accomplished paddler and cross-country skier who teaches physical education at Lachine's Dalbe-Viau High School.
Like any outstanding athlete, Jeanson routinely made her sport look absurdly easy. Her first visit to the podium came at the Quebec Games in 1993, to accept a peewee-division silver medal, and soon she was winning races at every level as she hopped up the rungs of local, regional, provincial and national competition.
But the public generally pays little mind to cyclists unless they're hogging the sidewalk, so when Jeanson's steady climb finally earned her two world junior titles in 1999, she was more of a revelation to Canadians than she was to herself or her coach.
She was feted on Parliament Hill that autumn, deservedly the amateur sport flavour-of-the-month. Still, many keen cycling observers clucked that this slight teenager, with only 112 pounds on her 5-foot-6 frame, could not possibly compete with the mighty, piston-legged women of the senior ranks. How, they wondered, could she keep up with riders many pounds more powerful, and perhaps a dozen years more experienced ?
How indeed, Jeanson replied in winning Australia's grueling Tour de Snowy. ("I'm going to die before somebody beats me here," she told Aubut.) How indeed, she added in winning the Fleche Wallonne, her highlight of last year. She had arrived in Belgium only a day before the race, and her stunning victory played a huge role in paving her road to Sydney.
"It was kind of weird," Jeanson recalls. "I was alone at the end of the Mur de Huy, the steep climb at the end, and I'm saying, 'Wow, I'm here, I arrived last night, I'm in front and I'm winning the race. What's going on?' "
The Sydney Olympics were an anticlimax, a letdown despite her respectable results. But in the past few months she's put her Games in perspective, thinking back to the 1996 Atlanta Olympics she had watched on TV.
"I thought, «Oh my God, they're so big,» " Jeanson remembers of Atlanta. "I never thought I'd be in Sydney, never. My dream came true in Peterborough (when she made the team), and Sydney, for me, seemed like just another competition.
"I had to win all those races just to get a place on the team. The transition from junior to senior last year was hard, and it was a big year for all of cycling - everyone was so fit.
"In Sydney I was thinking I had to win for my parents and my coach, who had so much faith in me. Then I finished 11th and 15th. I was so mad at myself. Maybe I was so overwhelmed by everything that I was kind of lost. I think I forgot why I'm cycling.
Leader of New Team
"If I had had trust in myself, believed I could have won a medal, maybe I would have done a podium. Now I know I really want to be the best for myself, and I forgot that last year."
It's with this in mind, and with a commitment to focus more on the positives she can glean from each race, that Jeanson pedals into 2001. She's the leader of fledgling Team RONA and has ambitious goals.
You almost believe her claim that she could live with losing every race this year if she could win only a couple : the Canadian championships in New Brunswick in late July and the senior world championships in Lisbon in mid-October - and perhaps Montreal's World Cup on Mount Royal June 2.
"I believe I can win the worlds," says Jeanson, a meticulous planner who is studying the Lisbon course on the Internet and will both train and race extensively on similar terrain to prepare. "I will have to work very hard, but the other girls are just like me. They don't have four legs or six lungs."
"If Genevieve is ready physically and mentally, then yes, the worlds are winnable," Aubut agrees. "Last year was very stressful, and I don't think she realized how much she learned. She learned how to deal with pressure, how to win with a knife at her throat."
Jeanson figures she has another 10 years of high-performance cycling in her, guessing she might be ready for a career and a family by age 30. She loves to cook nearly as much as she enjoys eating, and has toyed with the idea of opening her own restaurant one day.
"I just don't know if I'd have that kind of dedication," she says admiringly of the restaurateur's life. "I'd eat what I cook, and I don't know if I could sacrifice my shape and fitness. For me, it's always been important to have a good spirit in a good body.
"Now, I'm very, very happy. I'm working hard to get these results. I'm the kind of person who will never do something halfway - it's all or nothing, and right now I'm training and eating and sleeping for my results.
"One morning after Sydney I woke up and realized how much I love to win. I just hate to lose, and I never want to have that feeling again."
Genevieve Jeanson
Pedaling hard into 2001
- Born : Aug. 29, 1981 (age 19).
- Birthplace/Residence : Lachine.
- Vital stats : 5-foot-6, 112 pounds.
- Team : RONA.
- Coach : Andre Aubut.
- Education : Part-time administration student, Andre-Laurendeau CeGEP.
- First Medal : Silver, 1993 Quebec Games time trial, peewee division.
Recent Competitive Highlights
2000
- 11th, Sydney Olympic road race.
- 15th, Sydney Olympic time trial.
- 2nd, Mount Washington Hill Climb, New Hampshire.
- 19th, Canadian championships, road race, Peterborough, Ont.
- 2nd, Canadian championships, time trial, Peterborough, Ont.
- 24th, Montreal World Cup, Mount Royal.
- 1st, Jiminy Peak Road Race, Massachusetts.
- 1st, Moore Tour road race, North Carolina.
- 1st, Fleche Wallonne World Cup road race, Mur de Huy, Belgium.
- 37th, Canberra Classic World Cup road race, Australia.
- 1st, Tour de Snowy, nine-stage road race, Snowy Mountains, Australia.
1999
- 1st, Junior world championships, road race, Verona, Italy.
- 1st, Junior world championships, time trial, Treviso, Italy.
- 1st, Killington stage race, Vermont.
- 1st, Mount Washington Hill Climb, New Hampshire.
- 2nd, Fitchburg-Longsjo Classic (criterium, time-trial, two road races), Massachusetts.
- 1st, Canadian junior road championships, road race, Mont Orford.
- 1st, Canadian junior road championships, time trial, Mont Orford.
- 1st, North Atlantic championship, Massachusetts.
- 1st, Mount Sunapee road race, New Hampshire.
- 1st, Jiminy Peak road race, Massachusetts.
- 1st, Moore Tour road race, North Carolina.
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January 7, 2001 by
