“You must be so sad about the team ending,” said yet another person, adding to the heap of sympathetic responses that’s been growing for months.
Lying feels disingenuous, but I suspect nobody wants to hear the truth: I’m mostly just relieved. After four wonderful but incredibly long and challenging years, shutting down the Hagens Berman Supermint Women’s Pro Cycling team will feel like stepping away from wrestling a cantankerous, heavy octopus.
“All good things must come to an end,” I always reply with an appropriately sad smile. This team has been an amazing experience – for me, the staff, riders, fans, American cycling – and everybody touched by the end of something beloved needs time to grieve. Maybe I’ll suddenly be struck one day by an outburst of sobs in the grocery store. Maybe my grieving happened in the brief tears shed following Hagens Berman’s announcement that the money wasn’t coming again in 2020. Maybe I’m actually just dead inside.
My first impulse at the initial news was to find another title sponsor. The show must go on, I thought frantically, unable to imagine filling the void in my life left by the team ending. I started making calls and sending emails, tracking leads in a spreadsheet and building PowerPoints and updated budgets. But the momentum spluttered out as quickly as it began. Finding a title sponsor four years earlier had been such a draining process and that was when I was still starry-eyed with hope about the dream of pro cycling. Now I was beginning the same process, but jaded with the knowledge of how tiring it is to run a team camp and not accidentally (or intentionally) abandon a rider in the desert. Days went by and the spreadsheet sat unopened.
When it was time to join the team at the next race, I braced for the devastation that would come from seeing the whole gang and knowing it would all end soon. I assumed the plane ride home would be spent sobbing while frantically contacting potential sponsors for a last-minute save. Instead there was a calm silence punctuated only by the crunch of binge-eating free pretzels. By the time the plane landed, I’d already emailed the everybody letting them know there would be no 2020. “Thank you for being the most incredible team. This has turned into so much more than I ever hoped for in the early days when Supermint was just an idea and we had no money, no plans, and nothing but wild dreams.” I meant every word, but sent it with dry eyes and a certainty that it was time to say goodbye.
It’s not that I haven’t loved this whole adventure or haven’t taken pride in what we’ve accomplished. On the contrary, it’s one of the best things I’ve ever done. There were dozens of moments that brought tears of joy and messages from supporters that made it feel like we actually were a little bigger than just ourselves: “Thank you for what you’ve done for women’s cycling and the cycling community as a whole through Supermint. Y’all have been my favorite pro team for years now and it’s been soooo inspiring as a younger rider to see a bad ass group of women doing great at something they love.” It feels like an undeserved honor to have made an impact on people, but I hope we have. I hope people remember the best parts of what we built.
But for every race won and every fan we inspired, there were 20 hours spent at home, digging around in my garage (the “Service Course”) for a requested helmet or banging away at my laptop buried in logistics. I kept fifty tedious and unglamorous balls juggled in the air at once for years, suspended in a perpetual state of anxiety. Setting those balls down feels like freedom and weightlessness.
The announcer called our team up to the line on the final race day, and we all reached for each other in a moment of weepy solidarity. Then we raced hard, attacking past the limits of our tired legs before claiming victory in the final sprint; a fitting end to this team’s legacy of going all at in every race and a happy way to part. I welled up briefly but knew the end was far from near – while the riders said their goodbyes, the staff still had to disassemble every piece of team property. The circus doesn’t end when the audience leaves.
The past 10 days were spent in the sweltering garage, cleaning, sorting, packing, and boxing everything you’d imagine a pro team might own. Piles of things once essential to our work, heaped on the floor to pick through and sell or trash. Sweat pooled in my hair, behind my knees, dripping off my forehead through day after day of undoing what took four years to build. It was a metaphor for what it’s really like to run a team – this was the actual job, the ugly and dull side of how the sausage had been made. There are no team Instagram posts showing exhausted staff sitting on a dusty floor at the end of each long day, but that is reality.
When it was done and the last box was sealed to send away, I felt sad for a moment. Was this the real end? No spectators screaming for us, no hugs from teammates, nothing climactic. Just a quiet, empty garage and me standing there with the sweaty, wonderful, hardworking mechanic who had done everything he could to make us great. It was sad, but also the most fitting end to the truth of running a pro cycling team. And now we’re done.