Kicking Up Dirt

by Ashley Fiolek

  With Miki in charge, we knew opportunities for women were going to start opening up. She had a good track record—she had guided the career of Heidi Henry, America’s first female freestyle motocrosser, whom she persuaded to freestyle when no other women were. She’s helped girl racers get on ESPN and has gotten them featured in women’s magazines that wouldn’t normally touch motorcycles with a ten-foot pole. Miki rides too, for fun—but working on behalf of young female riders like me is probably a full-time job.

  Getting women’s pro racing fully recognized has been an uphill battle. And she’ll have to start from scratch to get pro women indoors for supercross (the only times girls get to race supercross is at the X Games) since supercross promoters tend to have the same attitudes that many of the outdoor motocross promoters used to have. In case I haven’t already mentioned it, this isn’t a girls’ scene. Not all the other girls are interested in this side of things—the business side, the PR side, getting the exposure necessary to grow our side of the sport. For me, it’s crucial. Yes, winning is important—but so is making this sport more balanced.

  Stefy Bau, a pro racer from Italy who gave me lots of good advice between the years of 2003 and 2005, urged my dad and me to stick to our mission. “When you become a pro, make sure you get paid by sponsors,” she told him. “Don’t just settle for free product. That will help women’s motocross grow—if everybody sticks together and demands the same things.” Her words have stayed with me and my dad to this day.

  With Stefy Bau, who’s now manager of the Fédération Internationale de Motorcyclisme Women’s motocross world championship.

  Once I went pro, that would be it—no more amateur racing, no matter how tempting the cash rewards were. We believed the two should be kept separate, so that amateur kids could get a chance to shine and the sport as a whole could grow for women. That’s why we had to think very carefully about when I was going to finally go pro—the timing had to be just right.

  “A Lot of Work, a Lot of Money—a Lot of Everything”

  Between 2004 and 2007 I raced pretty much all the amateur nationals, trying my best and winning as many as I could. In all I took home twelve more national championships and became one of the top girls in girls’ amateur motocross. I won the GNC, the Lake Whitney Spring Classic, the World Mini Grand Prix in Las Vegas, the Mini Olympics, and the Ponca City National Championship. Most of them more than once.

  With my friend Lindsay Myers—and our enormous trophies!

  In 2005, we went to a track called TMT in Tennessee to train for Loretta’s. I had high hopes of another win that year—there was no reason I shouldn’t. Then in the first weekend of training I came off my bike hard—so hard I was knocked out. I was carried off the track and taken to the hospital. When I came to, my parents sat me down and tried to explain to me what had happened, but every time they told me anything, I forgot it a second later. The effects of the concussion lasted for a couple hours. In addition, I had separated my AC joint—basically, I separated my shoulder blade from the collarbone. The doctors told me I’d be out of action for “quite some time.”

  “No way,” I said. “I have to race.”

  I took a week off and got back to training. I didn’t care what anyone said. There was no way I was missing out on Loretta’s because of an injury.

  Because I was fourteen years old at this point, I had graduated into the women’s class—which meant I’d be racing against big 125 and 250 motorcycles on my little 85. Most of the other girls were older than me—aged sixteen to twenty-two. I ended up in seventh place overall, and as far as we were concerned, it was actually a great result. The six girls ahead of me all had WMA pro licenses and in spite of my injury, I was the first amateur to cross the finish line. So the way my family saw it, I was the winner.

  You’d think that after winning Loretta’s, getting support from Honda, and winning all these amateur races, money would have started rolling in. Strangely enough, the more success I enjoyed, the tougher things became—emotionally and financially. Yes, we were getting all this free stuff—free motorcycles, free parts, and free gear—but suddenly I was feeling all this pressure to appear at every single amateur race. Before, we were only hitting one or two of them each season, maybe. Now we had to be on the road, away from home, for weeks on end or risk losing support from the industry the following year. So all the money we thought we’d be saving by getting free bikes and gear went straight back into my program, paying for gas, and keeping us on the road.

  My dad was somehow managing to work his job as a software developer for a health insurance company in Jacksonville on top of being my coach. The house needed work, of course, because we’d been on the road for so long, and both my parents drove beat-up trucks. Yep—we were broke, overspending on travel costs and living paycheck to paycheck. Some of my parents’ friends were baffled—why would we put ourselves through the hardship?

  “It’s like training an Olympic athlete,” my mom would say to anyone who thought we were crazy, living the life we did. “It’s a lot of work, a lot of money—a lot of everything. But it’s our way of life, and we love it.”

  * * *

  Money

  Amateurs don’t win any prize money, not even if they win Loretta’s. Amateurs can only hope to score enough sponsorships and manufacturer support to be able to stay on the road. As an amateur you do get paid what’s known as a “contingency” by your bike company, depending on how well you do in a certain race. If you ride a Honda, for example, you can claim a certain amount of money from them if you win a race. The amount awarded per race is determined by the manufacturer, and each one is different. Honda tends to have better contingencies than the other manufacturers.

  In pro racing, girls get $600 per moto win from MX Sports. If you win both motos, you get $1,200. Pros also get paid a salary by the manufacturer that sponsors them—but the size of that salary all depends on their contract.

  The X Games pay very well—$40,000 for the men’s and women’s winners. In 2008, the first year women competed in the X Games, the prize purse was $10,000, then they upped it to $40,000 the following year, in the name of equality.

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  First Love

  I met fellow racer Trey Canard in January of 2006. What can I say…he was definitely a cute boy, a cute boy who would become my first boyfriend. Trey is from Elk City, Oklahoma, about five foot seven with reddish hair and pale skin. I was fifteen when we started dating. Trey was always sweet to me—the only times we argued were when our competitive natures clashed. Both of us wanted to win, both of us wanted to be pros, which led to a little friendly competition and ribbing. Whenever my father compared my riding to Trey’s, for example, there’d be fireworks. I hated that. And for a while in interviews, when anyone asked me what my goals were, I would say, “My goal is to beat Trey Canard.”

  For me, winning was about identity—it was a way I could express myself and break free of any stereotypes about what it meant to be deaf or be a girl. For Trey, winning was about something else. His father had introduced him to motorcycles, and Trey wanted to make him proud. But before Trey had a chance to make it as a pro, his dad died, on a tractor. The accident happened about two years before we got together. For Trey, winning was about fulfilling his dad’s dreams as well as his own. Trey’s mom was an inspiration to us all—after Trey’s dad died, she didn’t miss a beat. She got her son back on the road with a mechanic, and in his rookie year as a pro, 2007, Trey won the national supercross championship. Which tells you a lot about the Canards.

  Trey and me.

  I remember the first time I actually talked to Trey. He was in Florida training and I happened to be at the same track. A sponsor we both knew introduced us and we got to chatting. He was homeschooled like me, and he loved winning. We exchanged cell numbers and started texting. I taught him how to sign and finger-spell a little so we could communicate more easily. The best thing about being with Trey was that he understood the pressures of being in motocross.


  On my sixteenth birthday Trey called up a graphics company to order some vinyl decals for my bike.

  “Who are the stickers for?” asked the voice on the phone.

  “Ashley Fiolek,” said Trey, not even thinking about it.

  “Really? Ashley Fiolek? And who is this?” He gave them his information.

  “Yeah, nice try. You’re not Trey Canard. Hey, I guess you know those two are dating, then?” I guess word had spread of our romance.

  We rode together a lot in 2006 and 2007, and I’ll admit, I learned a lot. Trey, Ryan Dungey (2009 men’s motocross champion), and I were training with the same coach, Shannon Niday, at that time, and working alongside such driven racers pushed me to new levels. After a long day on the dirt, we would go back to our families’ respective motor homes, parked at whichever track we were training at, and get cleaned up. At night I might walk over to Trey’s motor home and hang out, or he would walk over to ours and hang out with my family. It wasn’t like typical teenage dating, where you go to the movies and hold hands. For us, dates revolved around our dirt bikes.

  One time, Trey came to Florida to stay with us after breaking his collarbone while testing bikes in California. He was complaining about the pain and as usual, I relished the opportunity to tease him. “Don’t be a crybaby,” I said, which made him really mad. At the end of the day, I know Trey wanted me to win, and I always wanted him to win. At the same time, I wanted to beat him, but he would never have allowed that to happen. It was the kind of friendly tension that can only push you to be a better rider.

  Training Day

  In 2006 my dad and I set some pretty tough goals that would require me to work hard—real hard. First of all, I wanted to qualify in the boys’ 85 cc, age fourteen through fifteen class at Loretta Lynn’s. If I did, I knew I’d be one of the first girls to do so. In addition, I also wanted to compete in the women’s class, as usual. Which meant I would have to compete in two different sets of qualifiers and regionals for Loretta’s.

  It was time to get some outside help.

  I started working with trainers, who supplemented everything my dad and I were doing. As I mentioned, we spent a couple months with Shannon Niday at his training facility in Texas, alongside Trey and Ryan Dungey. Shannon was an ex–motocross rider himself and had endured several knee surgeries as a result of his injuries on the track. Because of this, he walked with a limp. Shannon is among the best in the field, and what he taught me about getting out of the gate I still use today. It’s a secret technique, and maybe I’ll tell the world about it in ten years or so. But not just yet.

  I also trained with Colleen Millsaps (her son, Davi Millsaps, is my teammate at Honda). She is short like my mom and always wears a visor. She’d drill me and drill me, just like my dad does, and if there was a big jump, she’d say, “You better do it!”

  Ronnie Tichenor, one of the fastest supercross riders of the 1980s as well as one of the best coaches in the business, was the one who really started prepping me for life as a pro. Like Shannon, Ronnie also walks with a limp thanks to his dirt bike injuries. His instructions were very technical, and he used a lot of jargon that I couldn’t quite get my head around. My parents had to figure out how to sign words like “radius” and “traction” and used a pen and paper to explain them to me diagrammatically. As soon as I could visualize what he was talking about, it all made sense. Once Ronnie realized this, he brought a notepad out with him every time we met.

  In June of ’06 we visited with Taylor Johnson. Taylor was a really fast amateur but he injured himself a lot and eventually had to drop out of motocross. His dad, Kevin Johnson, had a training center in Pine Mountain, Georgia, where we stayed for a month and a half, working on everything we’d learned with Shannon, Ronnie, and Colleen. Much of our work with the trainers had focused on turns and corners, because that’s where kids lose all their time. Jumps—well, you can’t really teach someone to jump. You just have to be brave enough to go ahead and do it. You get better by doing it over, again and again. Working with Kevin Johnson at Pine Mountain, I was dirty and muddy for six weeks straight.

  May the Best Girl Win

  Sarah Whitmore and I had grown very close by this point and were always joking about the day we’d have to race against one another. In truth, she was the one person in the world I didn’t want to battle on the track.

  “One of these days, you’re going to beat me,” she would say. I told her no, I would never beat her, and I never would want to pass her. She shook her head.

  “Ashley, you’re going to beat me—and if anyone’s going to beat me, I want it to be you.” We decided that on the track, the rule would be “May the best girl win.” Off the track, there is no best girl—just best friends.

  In 2006 we finally lined up together, at the biggest amateur race of the year, no less—Loretta Lynn’s. I had gotten a really good start on my little bike, and we were headed toward a big tabletop jump in the middle of the track. I was in front of Sarah and almost did the jump, but then decided not to at the last minute. Behind me, Sarah had assumed I was jumping. When she realized I wasn’t, she hit her brakes and ended up half-jumping, landing hard and ramming right into me.

  “I’m sorry! I’m so sorry!”

  Of course I had no idea she was saying anything, because I’m deaf. She remembered that a few seconds later and started signing.

  “I’M SORRY!”

  Sarah was getting sucked up in my back wheel so I turned off the engine and helped disentangle her.

  She was about to take off and reenter the race, but I was in trouble—I kept trying to get my bike up but it was stuck in the mud. I couldn’t get it to budge. Sarah bent down and helped me pull up my bike while a head honcho at Yamaha, Sarah’s sponsor, looked on in horror. He threw his arms up in the air as if to say, “What are you doing?” Helping out a rival rider during the biggest race of the year is a major no-no. She came in fourth and I didn’t finish—known as a DNF (Did Not Finish) in motocross speak. I just couldn’t get my bike to start again.

  And there was plenty more drama to come that year at Loretta’s. In the second moto of that women’s race I passed Jessica Patterson, a WMA champion and the fastest woman in the world, on my little 85 bike. She was riding a 250. People asked me how I had pulled it off and I think it boiled down to sheer hunger. But that was eclipsed by my performance in the boys’ fourteen-through-fifteen 85 cc class—forty-one of the best boys in the United States, and me. By the time boys reached their mid-teens, they were generally too strong and too fast for girls to be able to keep up. My goal had been to make the top fifteen in the boys’ class, and racing against guys like Blake Wharton (now a leading pro), Terren O’Dell, and Lowell Spangler—all the top boys in that age group—I managed to hold my own.

  The guys didn’t cut me any slack on the track. It was each racer for him- or herself. I hadn’t expected or wanted it any different. Boys always tend to race a little rougher than girls, and there was lots of jostling and pushing out of the gate. But I held my own, my eleventh place a significant finish given that everyone was expecting me to crumble under the boys’ heat.

  Coming in eleventh in the boys’ race and overtaking Jessica Patterson erased all the disappointment surrounding my DNF in the first women’s moto—suddenly everyone in the industry was wondering, Who on earth is this girl?

  Exhausted and muddy after my many races at Loretta Lynn’s, 2006. Andrew Campo

  Wrench in the Works

  A mechanic—or “wrench,” as we call them in motocross—is a must for riders like me who are on the road all the time. My dad was still working his job and it had gotten to the point where we needed someone to make sure the bikes were ready to go each race day. As we were expecting I would go pro the next year, a mechanic was a must.

  We had met Cody Wolf—everyone calls him C-Wolf—in July of 2006 when I was racing in Ponca City. One of my sponsors made the introduction and mentioned that Cody would be interested in wrenching for me. S
andy-haired and twinkly-eyed, he was only eighteen and still living in Wisconsin with his family. We text-messaged for a couple of months, and eventually my family invited him to come to the Mini Olympics in Florida with us. We spent a whole week together and my parents and I were impressed. My dad and I had talked to other kids his age, and they seemed more wrapped up in partying—but Cody was different. He seemed to understand our program and was a good representative for our family. Most of all, he seemed to enjoy himself too. We asked Cody to come move in with us in Florida, and he accepted. The Fiolek family had grown once again.

  A mechanic needs to know how to rip every strip of metal, every bolt, and every piece of plastic off a bike until there’s nothing left but a frame. Then he cleans everything and builds it back up to be a complete dirt bike again. That’s the only way you can be sure that everything has been inspected, maintained, greased, and lubricated. Cody treated the bike as though it were an extension of his body. He could take a complete engine, split the cases, change my valve assemblies, and inspect my carburetor in his sleep, pretty much.

  He set up his workshop at the back of our house in Florida, a twelve-by-fourteen-foot shed that my dad built with a workbench and plenty of room for storage. Like me, Cody is a perfectionist, and motocross is first and foremost. He understood all too well that if he didn’t do his job, I could get hurt. But we never had to worry about Cody being under-diligent—in fact we would joke that he had OCD, because he was so organized. His workshop floor was so clean, you could eat off it.

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