We trained every single day for five weeks, and at the end of it, I was ready.
Honky Tonkin’
Leading up to the 2004 race at Loretta’s, I had to work hard to keep myself calm. I had been among the top riders at the Loretta’s qualifiers and had put in a consistently strong performance all year. I couldn’t wait to show everybody what I could do, especially after 2003’s nonperformance. I knew there was going to be plenty of competition, but I also had a feeling this could be my year. I felt giddy dreaming so big—I’d never won a title before, but now here I was hoping to take the biggest one of them all. Ricky Carmichael, Jeremy McGrath, Travis Pastrana—all the big guys had won at Loretta Lynn’s before hitting the big time. My dad and I had put too much work in, broken too many bones, spent too many hours in the dirt, for things not to go my way. And after five intense weeks of preparation at the Regals’, nothing seemed impossible.
We arrived at Loretta Lynn’s that Saturday and drove by a sign at the entrance that reads NO TRESPASS’N. It always makes me chuckle. Loretta Lynn’s Ranch is much more than a home for a famous honky-tonk singer—it comes complete with an RV park, log cabins that you can rent, a swimming pool, a recording studio, and a concert pavilion. There are no less than three museums on the site—the eighteen-thousand-square-foot Coal Miner’s Daughter Museum, the Grist Mill Museum, and Loretta’s Doll and Fan Museum, filled with her collection of antebellum dolls.
When we arrived the RV park was already filling up with fans, racers, and their families. I saw a bunch of my friends hanging out, including Sarah. She was by herself, wrapped in a blanket, and wasn’t smiling. I ran up to her to find out what was wrong.
“Don’t hug me!” she signed, and held her hands out, blocking my way. I stopped in my tracks, and my heart fell. Had I done something wrong? Sarah smiled weakly. “I’m sick,” she signed. “You can’t come too close.”
She wrote down on a piece of paper “Epstein-Barr virus,” and I ran and showed it to my parents. It sounded frightening.
“Epstein-Barr…that’s like mono, isn’t it, Jim?” said my mom. She explained to me as best she could that Sarah was going to be OK but that she had a kind of flu that doesn’t really go away for a long time and makes you weak. I felt so bad for her. I spent as much time with Sarah as I could when I wasn’t practicing. Sometimes she’d sleep and I’d go take a swim in the creek. It was hot, sticky, and humid, so I jumped off a little cliff into the creek and splashed around.
Before the qualifiers in March, we had received some good news—there would be a change in the way the classes were structured this year. Before, girls aged nine through fifteen were racing one another. Now they had dropped the maximum age to thirteen—my age at the time—which filtered out some of the older, bigger girls from my race.
We had to race three motos on three separate days; each was fifteen minutes long, plus two additional laps. The track was gnarly—a simple layout but mulchy and rutted. The weather was on my side and my body felt energized by the crowds. I saw my mom waving on the sidelines. Sarah was run-down, but well enough to announce the girls’ races. I hoped to make her proud.
Around me, forty-one of the best motocross teenagers in America revved their engines—I couldn’t hear it, but I felt the vibrations in the air and inhaled the exhaust fumes. Then the starting gate fell backward and we sped into the dirt. I got the holeshot (motocross speak for being the first rider around the first turn) and pushed ahead. I kept my line and opened up the throttle, remembering what my dad had taught me about leaning into the turns, when to open up the throttle, how to position my body. The silence in my head allowed me to concentrate fully on everything that was going on around me—it was as though I had eyes in the back of my head. No one was getting past me, and I felt completely at ease. It was only as I crossed the finish line in first place that I started feeling nervous. Only one-third of the battle was won.
Who’s That Deaf Girl?
Two days later, a small crowd had gathered to watch the second moto. Word had spread about the “deaf girl.” I was a little nervous this time around—the sky was an ominous gray and it looked like it might rain any minute. The last thing I needed was a muddy track. Mud racing is like Russian roulette—no matter how skilled you are, no matter how well prepared, the mud will trip you up when you least expect it. It might even creep into your engine and leave your bike a steaming wreck on the sidelines. In motocross they call mud “the great equalizer”—a deceptively deep puddle can topple the greatest rider and allow lesser racers to win. Luckily, the clouds cleared right before we lined up at the gate, and I relaxed a little.
I got a great start and took the holeshot again, but this time my good friend Lindsay Myers was on my back. We were neck and neck around each turn, battling it out for first place. But I had determination on my side, and it pushed me to the finish line a comfortable distance ahead of her.
Afterward my dad and I were in the pit going over the race and Lindsay walked up to me, helmet in hand. “No hard feelings?” I signed, my dad interpreting for me. She shook her head and gave me a huge hug. Life’s too short for hard feelings in motocross. We all understand the need to win.
2004 Loretta Lynn’s Champion.
Two days later was the third and final moto. This time nearly two thousand people were watching this race, dotting around the fringes of the sprawling track, hanging out on the dirt, waiting to see if the deaf thirteen-year-old girl from Florida would actually make it home with the trophy. I saw families sitting with their coolers and their sun chairs and noticed that a crowd of about a hundred people had already gathered around the podium, waiting to congratulate whoever ended up winning this trophy.
The gate dropped, and I was gone! I got the holeshot again, and this time there was no beating me—I was so confident and so determined to win. As I flew over the finish line in first place I punched the air. I saw Sarah on the sidelines, and knowing she had seen me win Loretta’s made me feel doubly proud.
Before I knew it, my mom and my dad were next to me, helping me get my helmet off and hugging me. I saw Sarah run up to the announcer’s tower—she wanted to make sure they said my name right. “It’s pronounced Fy-lek, not Fee-oh-lek,” she told them. The winner’s trophy was gigantic, like a big piece of rock with a big “Number 1” carved into it. The grandstand was outside, in the same spot where Loretta Lynn always sings whenever she holds concerts on her property. It’s a big stage and all our friends, family, and fans were sitting in rows, watching as we got our awards and were interviewed. My dad jumped up on the stage to interpret for me. The race announcers didn’t understand what he was doing at first—they had no idea I was deaf. I had been going to Loretta’s for four years, and this was the first time I had won anything there. More than anything, this felt like affirmation that I was on the right path. All our hard work was starting to pay off.
We had to hurry back to Florida afterward—I had school on Monday and had already missed a week of classes. So there was barely any time to celebrate, aside from stopping at a Chinese restaurant for some crab wontons (my favorite). As we rolled back into St. Augustine, me a Loretta’s champ, I had a feeling things were going to be different from now on.
Courtesy of American Honda
chapter 5
ACCELERATION
Hello, Honda
When I was a little girl I always dreamed of being the number one girl in the world and riding a factory Honda bike—a prototype bike, at the absolute cutting edge of motorcycle technology. Being a factory racer was an honor given to only a handful of the very best riders in the world—all of them men. I longed to be the first woman in American history to join the ranks of a factory team, the ultimate motocross fantasy. I wasn’t quite there yet, but after my performance at Loretta’s, Honda (one of the “Big Four” motorbike manufacturers, alongside Yamaha, Suzuki, and Kawasaki) did cast a glance my way.
Keith Dowdle from American Honda happened to be in the crowd at my first moto at Loret
ta Lynn’s. Impressed, he returned to see how I did in the second. After watching me win again, he sought my father out. “She’s very good,” he told my dad. “Let’s see how she does in the next moto!” He too, like so many at Loretta’s that year, was surprised to learn that I was deaf. Keith called Bill Savino—the man in charge of American Honda’s amateur program—and convinced him to come and watch my third moto. Afterward, Keith and Bill both caught up with my father. “We’d love to help Ashley out,” they said. Neither my dad nor I knew what they meant by that exactly, but we were thrilled by the attention.
A few months later, on a regular weeknight evening, the phone rang at our house in St. Augustine. My dad picked up—it was Bill Savino on the other end. I remember popping my head into the family room. My dad was pacing around, as he always does when he’s talking business on the phone. “We’d like Ashley to be part of our amateur program and part of American Honda,” Bill told him. They wanted to supply me with bikes and parts (they gave me two Honda CR85s). And most important, manufacturer support was always the first real step toward a professional career.
Immediately after hanging up, my dad grabbed my mom and me, sat us down, and shared the good news.
Excitement welled up in my chest, tempered by a sense of bewilderment. Things were happening so quickly. It felt surreal. Watching my parents’ animated faces, their lips and hands moving at hyper speed, I felt oddly distant from it all. Just keep working, keep racing, keep winning, I reminded myself. Those were things I could understand perfectly well.
Going to Japan
Each year, the American Motocross Association (AMA) would send the two top girls from Loretta’s to the All Japan Motocross Championship. In it, top amateur women from ten different countries were invited to race against the best Japanese riders, on one of the biggest tracks. The competitors had such great names—Larissa Papenmeier, Elien de Winter, Saya Suzuki. I went with my dad, who would become my international chaperone in years to come (my mom would normally stay home and hold down the fort with Kicker). This would be the first overseas trip I had ever made, and likewise for my father. It marked the start of my new life as a frequent flyer.
Our flight to Japan, from Jacksonville via Atlanta, took a good sixteen hours. My dad and I decided we should try to stay awake for the whole flight. That way we’d be on the same clock as the Japanese when we arrived. By the time we touched down in Tokyo I was not only exhausted, but a ball of nerves. I was only thirteen, one of the youngest girls to be invited. Was I out of my depth, agreeing to race against all these riders with exotic names from around the planet?
“They wouldn’t have invited you if they didn’t think you were good enough!” my dad reminded me, and I knew he was right.
All we wanted to do after landing was get some food and pass out. The hotel had given us coupons for a complimentary dinner in the lobby restaurant, so we decided to take advantage of them and I ordered a steak, a classic Ashley favorite. In my quasi-delirious state, everything seemed funny—especially the steak once it arrived. It was the thinnest little thing I had ever seen in my life, about as wide as a quarter. “I guess they don’t have much room for cows around here?” my dad signed, and I could have died laughing.
The next day we took a bus with all the other motocross racers to Sendai, a city in northeastern Japan. The FIM had arranged a luncheon to welcome us and I was giddy with excitement, not only to spend time in the same room as all these incredible riders, but also to try the weird and wonderful foods at the buffet table.
The next day a bus came to the hotel to pick us up and take us to the track. Tons of media and fans greeted us as we arrived, taking photos of us as we got off the bus. I felt like Hannah Montana. I had never had so many people wanting to meet me before—or any other female motocrosser. My dad and I exchanged raised eyebrows—I guess we weren’t in Kansas anymore.
Thumbelina
The race was at Sportsland SUGO, one of the biggest motor-sports facilities in Japan, with a spectator capacity of fifty thousand. As we wandered around the track I noticed that the media folks were pointing and laughing at me. I asked my dad to find out why. “Apparently it’s because you’re so small,” he told me. “They can’t believe you’re racing against all these bigger girls.” I was probably four feet five inches tall and was riding a little Honda CR85 at that time. The president of the FIM’s motorcycle division in Japan told us that for the race, I would be riding a big-wheel bike instead, which lifts you three inches higher off the ground than a regular sixteen-inch wheel. Apparently all the other girls would be racing big wheels.
“But we don’t ride a big wheel,” my dad said. “We ride the standard wheel.”
He laughed. “It’s OK, why don’t you just try it? It’ll be fun.”
“We’re not here to have fun,” said my dad. “We’re here to win.”
No one really believed we meant business until we lined up for the race qualifier the next day, sixty of us girls, from Japan and around the world. Saya Suzuki, the Japanese champion, was expected to win. As for me, everyone had discounted me because of my size. But as soon as the gate dropped, they reevaluated. I had been nervous, but my dad’s faith in me had erased any self-doubt I may have had, and I pushed forward ahead of most of the girls, into fourth place. I passed Elien de Winter, a well-known mini rider, and made what some Japanese commentators later called “an aggressive pass” on one of their champions. I caught up to Saya Suzuki, and by the end of the race I was right on her back wheel. I finished just inches behind her. No one could believe this tiny deaf girl on her 85 cc bike had come so close to beating the mighty Saya Suzuki.
That night, during dinner, it started to rain. And by the time we got back to the track the next day, it was a muddy mess. I didn’t fare quite so well in the race this time. Slipping and sliding in the quagmire, I crashed a few times and wound up finishing in eleventh place—still not a bad result, but not as newsworthy as my second place the previous day. “Don’t worry, Ashley,” my dad said. “Anything can happen in a mud moto. It’s not your fault.” In the end, Saya Suzuki ended up winning for Japan.
On the plane back to Florida, I was still buzzed from my experience. I didn’t fully appreciate that this was going to become a way of life for me—traveling the world and experiencing different cultures. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends at school about it all—the skinny steak, how I almost beat Saya Suzuki, and how we were treated like rock stars at the racetrack. But my stories fell on deaf ears (pardon the pun!). “Oh, who cares, Ashley,” said one of my friends. Most of them reacted the same way—they didn’t want to know.
I did have a couple friends from FSDB who would occasionally watch me race or spend weekends up in Georgia when I trained. But at the end of the day, no one really understood why I thought dirt bikes were so cool. It was a hard lesson for me to learn—the kids I had spent the last eight years with at school, from 1998 until 2006, couldn’t relate to the most important thing in my life.
Not long after I returned from Japan, in the middle of ninth grade, I stopped going to FSDB. I had already been missing so many classes because of my schedule—it had gotten to the point of “go to school, or ride.” My closest bonds at that time were with hearing people in motocross, not my deaf friends at the school. So it wasn’t a difficult choice. My parents started homeschooling me, and it felt like a weight lifted from my shoulders.
In hindsight, I think pulling away from my deaf life at that point was all about my search for identity. Since then, I’ve come full circle—I am just starting to become involved in the deaf community again, and likewise, the deaf community has just started to take an interest in me. But at that point in my life, leaving school was a statement I had to make—not just to my friends, but to myself. “This is me—motocross is what I am,” I told Mandy, one of the few friends at the school who had tried to understand my obsession with motocross. “I am doing this because, one day, I am going to be a professional motocross racer. My mom and dad belie
ve in me, even if no one else does.”
For years, my parents had been balancing my school schedule and my race schedule. I hated having to pick which races to do; now I could compete in them all. I committed to a life on the road, a life with no routine or certainty, where pain and injury lurked around every turn—but it was the life that I felt happiest leading. We planned to have me race about fifteen times a year—less than many amateur motocrossers—but eight of those races would be amateur nationals, the most prestigious races in the country.
Now that I didn’t have to go to school, I was able to focus totally on my motocross program. I would start my day with an hour of cardio training. Then some schoolwork. Then I’d spend hours doing fundamentals on the track, followed by the gym for strength training and more homework. When I was at FSDB, I was able to stay in shape by joining the cross-country and track teams. Now that I was homeschooled, I had to develop my own fitness regime. We consulted a few different trainers, who came up with tailor-made fitness schedules for me, incorporating daily cardio and strength-training exercises. I became very good friends with my stationary bike at home and our rowing machine. And when we were on the road, my trainer, Robb Beam, would be on the other end of the phone with advice on how and where to exercise. Running up and down any available staircase, for example.
Warming up for a race. Carl Stone
The WMA Is Born
Just as my career was starting to take flight, Miki’s hard work behind the scenes was beginning to pay off. In 2004, out of the ashes of the Women’s Motocross League, she founded the WMA, the Women’s Motocross Association, a sister body to the AMA. Technically the AMA was supposed to represent both men and women, but for the longest time the AMA wouldn’t recognize women as professionals or offer a women’s professional class. Under the WMA, Miki could create a women’s pro class and manage all women’s pro racing.
Kicking Up Dirt Page 7