If this Utahn wins an Olympic medal, it could start a revolution (2024)

Park City’s Haley Batten is a “Utah idol” to the young girls who watch her race.

Midway • Haley Batten has been surrounded before, many times in fact. Her specialty is finding ways to squeeze her mountain bike through narrow openings, then using bursts of speed to escape the pack.

But this isn’t a pack the Park City racer wants to escape. This pack is a glowing orb of freckled faces and teeth with braces, all chattering at the same time. It’s teenage girls who raced against one another at Soldier Hollow earlier that day, then crowded together that evening to see just how much faster Batten would take the same hairpin turns.

“She’s the person I look to when I think about mountain biking. She’s an inspiration,” said 15-year-old Addison Furniss of Morgan, one of dozens of girls to surround Batten following her short-track victory in the Pan-American Championships in May. “As I started going mountain biking, that’s who I thought about when I was getting ready for races.”

So when Batten rolls her knobby tires up to the starting line Sunday for the Olympic women’s mountain biking race, her competitors won’t be the only ones keeping a sharp eye on the racer in the Stars and Stripes jersey. Utah’s next generation of mountain biking girls will be watching to see what she, and they, are capable of.

But this journey to greatness — perhaps even to an Olympic medal — is not a one-way trail. Batten, 25, said she is equally inspired by the young talent that literally surrounds her.

“Our Utah idol”

Batten started racing National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA) races as a Park City High School freshman. That year, she remembers, the varsity division consisted of just five girls. In the decade since, NICA has erupted in popularity, particularly in Utah. The state now has the largest league in the nation, with six divisions and more than 5,000 athletes. Instead of five girls total at the start, five girls from the town of Morgan (pop. 4,450) alone might roll up.

Most are keenly aware of the big wheels they’re following.

“Her name has just been mentioned, like, our whole lives,” said Aspyn Bond, a 16-year-old NICA racer from Morgan.

Kennedy Zimmerman, 15, of Pleasant Grove agreed.

“It’s cool to know she started at the same position we did. She’s our Utah idol,” Zimmerman said. “It’s kind of, if she can do it, you can do it, too, because she started in Utah and did the whole NICA thing.”

Zimmerman is dazzled by Batten’s bike skills and for good reason. Batten leads the UCI World Cup standings and will be the top-rated racer at the Games. She also has Olympic experience. At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 she placed an encouraging ninth.

What Zimmerman takes away from watching Batten’s races isn’t necessarily how she handles her bike, though. It’s how she handles herself.

Leader of the pack

“I feel like it’s a good example of how we should be with others,” Zimmerman said. “How you can be so competitive and strong but be able to be friends afterward.”

Batten said that’s part of what she loves about mountain biking. She believes that camaraderie stems from the sport’s early acceptance of women, at least in her experience. Nearly from the beginning efforts have been made to give riders of both genders equal race distances, time on course, prize money and support.

With that as a foundation, Batten said she can feed off up-and-coming riders rather than feasting on them.

So when she finds herself surrounded by young fans after a race, Batten’s not seeking an escape route. She sits back and soaks in their energy.

“For me it’s kind of surreal. I don’t see myself as this star,” Batten said of the dozens of girls who swarmed her after the May race. “I’m so focused on my own journey and goals. For people to come up to me seems crazy, but it’s actually so motivating and exciting for me. I think what empowers me as a racer and a female racer to train harder and accept bigger goals is just to see the depth and the number of young women coming up.”

And when she breaks away from the Olympic pack, which she hopes to do early in Sunday’s race, she’ll still feel their energy behind her. And someday, another Utah racer might harness that same energy and use it to not only follow Batten’s path, but to go even farther.

“My goal is to keep breaking boundaries,” she said, “so that they can keep breaking even more and get stronger and stronger every generation.”