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Commentary: Wendy Skean [1]

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Date: 2025-02-27

If you’re wanting to win a world championship in cycling, a good start is to live in Nathrop, Colorado. Tucked beneath Mount Princeton of the Rocky Mountains’ Collegiate Peaks, its 7600 feet in elevation can turn you into a sea-level superhero. That’s what Wendy Skean experienced as she sprinted to the Union Cycliste Internationale Gravel World Champion for women’s 80-84 category. The low elevation ride through Belgium found her passing at least ten women in lower age brackets onto her defining moment as the lone champion. America’s national anthem echoes throughout her and her husband’s home as she replays the podium moment on YouTube.

She says she doesn’t feel eighty. Maybe 60? When asked the secret to life, her first answer is stubbornness. Her husband, who prefers to remain in the background, coaxes her to a more complimentary answer: perseverance. After some contemplation, it seems to fit quite well. Her being a single mom and trying mountain biking as a hobby she could share with her two boys. Those family jaunts turned into triathlons until her knee complained too much. On a bike she’d have to be through countless medals, crashes and epiphanies. She’s found pilates an excellent answer to staying strong and in shape and that Zwift cycling—where she can compete on a stationary bike in a virtual world—can keep her on two wheels no matter what the weather doles out to central Colorado.

If you’re on Zwift, look for the team called OWLs, or Older Women in Lycra.

Her husband asks me why I’m here to do a story. “I read it in the newspaper,” I reply. Salida’s Mountain Mail covered her championship run. But he presses: “Would you be here if she were 79?” he asks in an informal survey of one. I see his point. Has turning 80 flipped an instant switch for compelling journalism? There’s something to that and, perhaps in Skean’s case, it’s that she’s still out to break records and top personal bests. Eighty is a short, punchy word that simply sounds like a pinnacle. All those years and her only downhill is a place to pick up speed. If you work at it, maybe age is just a number along for the ride.

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