Alec Pasqualina, Director of Mountain Bike at USA Cycling, describes life with Bentonville, Arkansas being the official home of the U.S. National Mountain Bike Team. His goal is for every development mountain bike athlete to train and compete in Bentonville before racing internationally. Hear about how partnerships contribute to Team USA’s success and how having a homebase in Bentonville is helping shape the future of the team. Follow along on the road to Paris and L.A. Olympics on Instagram.
Alec Pasqualina, Director of Mountain Bike at USA Cycling, describes life with Bentonville, Arkansas being the official home of the U.S. National Mountain Bike Team. His goal is for every development mountain bike athlete to train and compete in Bentonville before racing internationally. Hear about how partnerships contribute to Team USA’s success and how having a homebase in Bentonville is helping shape the future of the team. Follow along on the road to Paris and L.A. Olympics on Instagram.
Hello and welcome to Visit Bentonville's A New American Town podcast. I'm your host, stevie, and today's episode is sponsored by Oztrails. Joining me is Alec Pasqualina, the Director of Mountain Bike at USA Cycling, the national governing body for bicycle racing in the United States. Hey, alec, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 2:Hey, stevie, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Absolutely so. First, I want to start off by talking about your role at USA Cycling. What does that encompass? What does Director of Mountain Bike mean?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the easy way to describe it is if we think about mountain biking as a business. The sport is a business in the US. It's my job to cultivate and support the growth of that business, and that for us, starts with the Olympic movement. So it's talent development at the highest level.
Speaker 1:And you live in Colorado, but this is not your first time ever in Bentonville, Arkansas. What have you and your athletes been here for the past and what were you here for this time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the first time I came to Bentonville was in 2021 and immediately I was blown away about the with the mountain bike infrastructure that's here and basically I've been coming back at every chance I've had since then. So throughout 2022 we ran a bunch of camps here, and into 2023 as well, and most recently we just finished up yesterday a 12-athlete U23 mountain bike development skills camp for all of our U23 national team athletes.
Speaker 1:That camp sounds awesome, taking place right here in Bentonville, Arkansas, and can you tell us more about your background? Were you a mountain bike racer? You know how did you get to this point?
Speaker 2:Absolutely yeah. I grew up mountain bike racing. I grew up in Northern California, in the Bay Area, and so I had the awesome opportunity to be a part of a 60 athlete high school mountain bike club at my high school and we raced the NICA NorCal series. So I grew up racing NICA mountain bikes.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. We have a really involved presence or, I guess, involved chapter of NICA here in Northwest Arkansas. It's really awesome to see those athletes getting to develop and getting that race experience all over the state.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, and big credit to NICA. And now that we've seen lots of different high school leagues grow beyond NICA and with NICA, I really attribute mountain bike, the discipline of mountain bike as a whole growing in the US to NICA. They've done an amazing job and that's how I found the sport and ultimately I ended up doing pretty well at NICA races. Growing up that I figured out that there were races at the national level as well, and that's how I got into the sport and continued racing. Uh, was able to race a little bit during college, but ultimately decided to go to a non-cycling school. So I always tried to balance kind of racing my bike with other ambitions that I had. Pretty soon after college I realized that I wasn't a mountain bike racer that maybe I dreamed of or wanted to be, and so ultimately I started to build a career in cycling, but not on the bike, and that's how I got to USA Cycling in early 2021 and became the mountain bike director just at the end of 2023 here.
Speaker 1:And here we are in 2024. And it was announced in December 2022, that the US National Mountain Bike Team would have its official home here in Bentonville, arkansas. A little more than a year later, what does that look like and how has that evolved?
Speaker 2:Yeah, originally for us, having a presence here in Bentonville offered us so many different resources the trails to train on, the access to high-level race courses in Fayetteville it was a really great decision for us to be based here originally. What that looked like in the first couple of years of our partnership was a few national team camps and a few development camps, was a few national team camps and a few development camps. Where we ultimately see that growing and where we want our presence to continue in Bentonville is for me as thinking about the development of our athletes. I don't want an athlete to go overseas to race with USA Cycling before they've been to Bentonville. I want Bentonville to be the base level of all of our national team programs. So what that looks like is any athlete who succeeds in their racing and gets kind of the nod towards being on the national team program.
Speaker 2:I'd like to bring them to Bentonville for some skills and education and the opportunity to get acclimated to working with USA Cycling, and that all would happen in Bentonville. Once we've established that baseline, we've learned a little bit more about the athlete and the athletes learned a little bit more about USA Cycling, the way that we operate. Then that athlete would then be ready to go and race overseas with us and ultimately it's USA Cycling's main objective to help as many athletes reach a international trade team level as possible. So we want as many of our athletes to graduate to Trek factory racing or to specialized factory racing and all those top trade teams that we see overseas that are racing the World Cups. And so where I see our partnership with Bentonville growing and our presence in Bentonville growing and our presence in Bentonville growing is every athlete. Before they get to that level, bentonville is the first step that they take towards getting that top level race experience and those top level race results to ultimately reach that level.
Speaker 1:We know, here in Bentonville we welcome all those athletes with open arms. And speaking of bringing everyone here, you know, first in their kind of journey to their international racing. What are some ways that people in our community can engage with and support the team whenever they're here throughout the years?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I think the most fun thing for us to do when we're in town is to join in on some of the local events that happen. We've done the Thunderdome Throwdown race at Kohler where the whole team has kind of jumped in and been a part of the brackets. We love connecting with the community and events like that. We've also done a bomb squad event, the Senders Union, where they had a high-speed challenge at Jesse's Last Stand last year.
Speaker 2:We love to go and be a part of the Bentonville community events because ultimately, when you've got a drone flying down Jesse's Last Stand and live streaming to a TV that's right on the Razorback Greenway, that is like the epitome of local bike racing and local fun and we want to be a part of that and we want to enjoy Bentonville for all that it has to offer. So first and foremost, we'd love to see you out in the trails in that capacity and when we're in town we will be at as many of those events as we possibly can, because they're just as much fun for us as they probably are for you too. The next piece of how you might be able to connect with us and kind of visit us while we're here is to reach out. We would love to come visit a school or be a part of your community event, even if it's not a really cool dual slalom race at Kohler, so I would just encourage people to reach out.
Speaker 1:Maybe go out to a school meet some students, show them your cool.
Speaker 2:You know medal winning bike that one of the athletes rode on a course or something I don't know.
Speaker 1:That sounds fun. Absolutely. I want to be a kid here in Bentonville man. Me too. I feel like I missed out on a lot, not being able to grow up here.
Speaker 2:Well, it just seems like every single part of the grassroots pathway is covered. You've got buddy pegs from like the early, early stages. Then you can work through each different age group with Bike School, bentonville and Thayden School, and the amount of programs that I just hear about is incredible. So, beyond just having access to the coolest trails, there's a lot of different programs and a lot of different people in this community supporting the growth of our young people.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. And do your athletes really enjoy when people come up to them and say, hey, can we take a picture? Or you know, hey, my name is XYZ and I love watching you race.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, I'd say. In the US mountain bikers are not as cool as NBA players and so for when you think about you know, fandom and fame in the U? S mountain bikers are a little underappreciated in my opinion, because it's not as mainstream of a sport. So we kind of creates this cool approachability of these athletes, and a lot of these athletes don't get that much recognition or or attention, and so when they do get it, they're excited about it, they're willing to ride with you, they want to sign whatever that it is that you want them to sign and they're willing to have a conversation with you. They're down to earth, they're approachable and more of them than you might think came up the same way all of y'all are riding is through NICA, through local trails, through maybe less high-tech versions of the Thunderdome Throwdown that you're used to in this community.
Speaker 1:So yeah, and Alec, you touched on this a little bit before, but I want to ask you this specific question and see if anything else comes to mind how does having this home in Bentonville, arkansas, fit into the strategy and goal of winning gold in Los Angeles 2028?
Speaker 2:That's a really big question and I appreciate you asking and I probably won't be able to cover all that I could need to be training on and progressing on from a skills perspective, Having the group of people behind them, supporting them, appreciating what they're doing and the sacrifices that they're making towards this dream. The Bentonville really is the start for us on the road to Paris and we like to say this phrase internally at USA Cycling. But the road to Paris goes through Bentonville and the road to LA goes through Bentonville. Yeah, it does. We see Bentonville as the road and the progress path for all of our athletes to get to those Olympic dreams and ambitions and that's why the partnership with us, with the community, works so well, because we get so much out of it and our athletes get so much out of it and our athletes get so much out of it.
Speaker 1:I don't know what travel looks like going into Paris, but how cool would it be if we had like a mountain bike team send off here in Bentonville.
Speaker 2:It's our full intention to have an announcement where Bentonville is the first group of people to know about our Olympic team for Paris.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. Oh, that would be so fun. Uh, you spoke a little bit about some camps and some plans for athlete development in Bentonville. What are some upcoming USA Cycling camps taking place here and who can participate? I know you guys have a lot on the schedule coming up.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. Um, ultimately, from the national team perspective, uh, we just finished our U23 skills camp. We're going to have a junior skills camp here as well, and that's going to happen at the end of April. Of course, we'll have a lot of athletes in town for the Fayetteville racing that's not necessarily a specific camp and then our junior camp that's happening at the end of April is going to be invite only. It's going to be based on who's showing the most progress in form from our junior group 17, 18 years old at the beginning of the season. That's it from a national team programming perspective, because as soon as we're done with that, it's right to the races in Europe and off to the Olympics and World Championships.
Speaker 2:To finish out the year, it's the intention to have a fall camp, kind of a bringing the athletes home fall camp at the end of the year to make sure that when our Olympians are done and rested from their experience, they can come back to Bentonville and kick off their 2025 season here. And that's an important part of our program at the national team. But right now, all that's planned is the junior camp coming up From a grassroots perspective. We don't have any development camps this year. We do have a gravel camp that we're running with Thayden School that I'm super excited about. So it's within that off-road discipline not necessarily mountain bike and then once the Olympics are over in this year, we want to reset in the next Olympic quad, so from the end of Paris to the beginning of LA 28,. We want to build a grassroots system of camps and programs that are based here in Bentonville specifically for mountain bikes.
Speaker 1:So I know you're talking about wrapping up this Olympic season and heading into the next four years, but Paris 2024 really is right around the corner. Now it's the middle of March and the end of July is going to come up quick. What are you anticipating that will look like for you and your team and athletes? What are you anticipating that will look like for you and your team and athletes.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, right now, everything that we're focused on is qualifying a second men's spot. So the way that the nation's ranking works is the top eight nations get to send two athletes, so we're ranked well within the top eight nations for women. So we'll have two female mountain bikers, and our elite women have really been nailing it. They've been doing super well, so that's super exciting. We're going to have two female Olympians on the male side. We're right, we're teetering on that edge. We're right in the top 10 and we need to be in the top eight. So we're putting a ton of resources towards getting points and securing that top eight position to be able to send four Olympians instead of three. So that's everything we're focused on right now. We're calling it the USA Cycling Points Chase, so stay tuned on that. And then, once we've got the team positions sorted out, then we get into team selections and this is a very comprehensive process with a lot of data.
Speaker 2:Ultimately, what's going to happen is at the end of the third World Cup. So we have two World Cups in April in Brazil and then we have one World Cup in May. That's in Novomesto, czech Republic. After the Novomesto World Cup, we're going to gather all of our data and make a selection to choose our Olympians. Those Olympians will continue their season. We'll get together with those Olympians and our Olympic staff in Annecy, france, for two weeks and then all travel to Paris together, do a week of prep in Paris and then, of course, have the games.
Speaker 1:Totally off script. But how do you keep up with all these time changes and traveling all over the world? I'm not a very worldly traveler, so every time I hear people talking about things like this, it just blows my mind. How do you guys do it?
Speaker 1:It's a lot to keep straight, and that's ultimately how we want to evolve our partnership with Bentonville is we want to have more people working on all of the logistics and all of the behind the scenes work here in Bentonville and then you know. Once that's taken care of, I presume the athletes can solely focus on what it is they need to focus on resting, fueling, nutrition, performing.
Speaker 2:That's the entire reason I exist is so that athletes can focus on exactly what they need to focus on and I can take care of all the details behind the scenes for them. Um, yeah, I'm a really I'm at the end of the day, the the photo that is my profile photo is me mopping the floor. Um, and I really love that photo, because to me, it's why I go to work every day is I want to be the ones mopping the floor so that our athletes can perform at the highest level.
Speaker 1:Incredible. That's so inspirational and you sound kind of like a type two Enneagram, just like me. Like to like take care of other people, help them succeed.
Speaker 2:That's how I get joy is is if I can help someone else succeed and I can live vicariously through them a little bit, but behind the scenes that's the most fun part.
Speaker 1:Amazing. Now for some athletic inspiration for any anyone who might be listening. If someone dreams of competing at the national or international level, what are the pathways to joining or being recruited for Team USA?
Speaker 2:Great question and I'd say there's no single path or way to do it. Everyone has the potential to be fast and to race at the highest level and, and ultimately, what I think that comes down to is loving the sport and loving the racing aspect of the sport. We're talking about really high level, high competition sport. If competing isn't what you live for and riding is more what you live for or or enjoying, you know training and that's okay too. But if you were to really focus on and dedicate yourself to the highest level of the sport, what that looks like is starting racing and racing more and more. So Nika is a brilliant outlet for that because it allows young people to start racing early and at a fairly competitive level, without any pressure. I should add. That's really important. But once an athlete gravitates to and really appreciates and loves the competition part of that, the more that they can compete and at the higher level that they can compete.
Speaker 2:And remember, athletes need to gravitate towards this.
Speaker 2:Naturally it cannot be forced upon them, because there's so much dedication involved at the highest level of the sport that they need to go that direction on their own.
Speaker 2:But once they're in that direction, it's finding the next level of opportunity that's going to allow them to challenge themselves and to compete at a higher level. So what that looks like right now, very simply and plainly, is competing locally, competing regionally and competing nationally. And you can interpret that different ways because our country is very big and there's lots of different local entities and that pathway might differ based on where you live. However, ultimately, at the highest level, you have a national level race scenes called the Pro XCT series in the US, and there's national series races that are all designated and recognized by the UCI. Uci is our international governing body. Those races are essentially offer opportunities for an international ranking and that national level race series is kind of that next step that a lot of athletes look to. And once they start performing on that national series level, I will for sure take notice of them and will for sure be in touch.
Speaker 1:Now I have an immense amount of respect and admiration for those individuals who you mentioned are super competitive. It's, on their own terms, like they are out there. They want to be competitive Because, whatever that is, I've tried, tried. I absolutely do not have it. And I see firsthand my family members and my close friends. They've all competed at the national level and it takes a lot and I have so much respect for them and all of those athletes have you know, having you on their side, it's a great way to build them up and build their confidence and help them succeed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the motivation comes from the person right as we talked about, and that's really admirable. But then you think about, in order for that one person to succeed with their motivation and their intention, it really does take a support system around them Parents, early sponsors I can think of the local bike shop that first took me under their wing and helped me fix things before I started to travel. It really does take a massive support network, familial and in the community at large. And even if racing is not your thing, you've probably trained with the person that you know who uh is. The racer could help them progress and succeed as well. So that's cool too.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Um. So, alec, as we wrap up here, uh, can you tell our listeners where they can follow along on the team's journey to Paris 2024, la 2028 and beyond, social website, et cetera.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the best way is to find us at USA Cycling on Instagram. We post a lot of content about our Olympians and you can definitely follow along there.
Speaker 1:Awesome. Well, I and all of Bentonville and all of your fans here in northwest Arkansas, we all wish you and your athletes all the luck this summer heading into the Olympics and beyond.
Speaker 2:Thanks, thanks. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Absolutely. Thank you so much, Alec, for your time in joining us on today's episode of Visit Bentonville's A New American Town podcast, and thanks to you, our listeners, for tuning in. Be sure to follow OzTrails, Visit Bentonville and USA Cycling on social media. We'll see you and Team USA out on the trails.