Katherine Maine has come a long way since the days when she, as a child, used to ride her bike in a park near Corpus Christi Elementary School on Lyon Street in the Glebe.
Next year, the 18-year-old athlete is off to the United States to join the prestigious women’s team, Optum Pro Cycling, as they compete in elite road and track events all across North America.
This giant step forward follows a successful career with the Centretown-based Ottawa Bicycle Club’s junior program until 2014 and, afterwards, with the Cyclery-Opus, a team that supports up-and-coming female riders as they bridge the gap from local to international competitions.
Although Maine had plans to attend Queen’s University in Kingston for the upcoming school year, the LCI graduate is packing her bags for California instead. She will be training in February alongside her new Optum teammates, including Jasmin Glaesser, who was part of the Canadian contingent that won bronze in the women’s team pursuit at the 2012 London Olympic Games.
According to Don Moxley, Maine’s former coach at the OBC, the young athlete is probably the first female rider to reach a professional level so quickly. He says it usually takes at least five years of hard work and dedication to develop an elite cyclist. However, it only took Maine three years to get there.
But for many people who are close to Maine, her speedy progression doesn’t come as a total surprise.
She has always been incredibly disciplined and willing to put in the effort, says Darius Arjang, who mentored the cyclist during her time at Lisgar.
“She was training nearly 20 hours every week for bike races on top of school practices,” he says.
In high school, Maine was on the track and field and Nordic skiing teams. She also played competitive hockey outside of school, but decided to retire from that sport in Grade 11 to pursue her cycling career.
Maine says she didn’t think it was fair to the AA hockey team that she was constantly missing practices in favour of cycling camps.
“I absolutely love everything about cycling!” she says, eyes lighting up as she gushed about the sport. “It’s so much fun that I hope to continue.”
But the athletic phenom didn’t start competing until three years later when she took up cyclo -cross racing, a sport in which participants have to ride and carry their bikes across courses of pavement, trails, hills and various daunting obstacles.
Maine won the Eastern Ontario girls’ under-17 title for cyclo-cross in 2012. Her stellar performance caught the eye of a race organizer who introduced her to Moxley, one of the top junior coaches in Canada.
“I was told she was top five in the senior category and wasn’t breathing very hard after going downhill,” Moxley says. “She obviously has talent and a large engine.”
Armed with these qualities, Maine closed her junior cycling years this September with a 13th place finish in the 64.9-kilometre race at the UCI Road World Championships in Richmond, Virginia.
The athlete also captured four gold medals at this year’s Canadian Track Championships in Milton, Ont. She was victorious in the two-kilometre individual pursuit, the 500-metre time trial, the team sprint, in which she partnered with Hillary Lowry of Hamilton, as well as the omnium, a multiple track racing event in which riders’ strength, endurance, speed and tactical ability are tested.
The young cyclist’s long list of accomplishments also includes being proclaimed junior and overall winner of the 2015 National Criterium in Montreal this fall.
Moxley credits Maine’s success to the 10 years she spent playing competitive hockey. He says hockey players make good bikers because they understand tactics and are used to coaching and discipline.
Jenny Trew, who coaches Maine at the elite level, says the cyclist’s positive outlook and willingness to learn also contribute to her ability to excel quickly.
Thanks to her impressive track record at so many events, Maine is rapidly riding the road that leads to her ultimate goal of performing on the world stage: the Olympic Games. This November, the young athlete was invited to take part in Canada’s Cycling NextGen program, where the organization will help Maine in her pursuit of gold at future Summer Games.