BEIJING — Dellys Starr was sitting in the Athletes Village Wednesday when she started thinking of her late brother. Starr thinks of her brother a lot, but even more now. Through all the training rides on Lookout Mountain and along the mountain bike trails of Green Mountain, Apex and Chimney Gulch, he was never far away.
When her brother, Dale, died in a plane crash right before the 2006 Commonwealth Games, she nearly didn’t compete. At last she decided to forge on and shoot for the Olympic Games in his memory.
“You know my brother Dale loved my racing,” she said. “He would always brag to his mates that his sister was a crazy mountain biker.”
She made it here, giving the Denver area a mountain bike representative in Friday’s competition, even though it is for Australia.Starr, 31, was in the U.S. in 2001 competing in the old NORBA national mountain bike series. She was staying with another Aussie, Mary Grigson, who was training out of Wheat Ridge.
During a training ride, she met Dale Starr, hit it off and wound up having a first date mountain biking up Apex Travel. They wound up marrying in 2004 and moving to Lakewood.
If you missed her over the winter, her native Australia has perfect weather during the Colorado winters. She won the Australian national title for the Olympics berth in January, competed in the Oceania Championships in New Zealand in March then bounced between Lakewood and Europe three times taking part in the World Cup season.
“Lakewood and Golden are absolutely awesome for mountain biking and road training,” said Dellys, 37th in the last World Championships. “The only reason I went back to Australia for five months was so I could escape the winter.”
If this training and traveling sounds grueling, it’s nothing compared to what Starr had done before. She came to mountain biking from modern pentathlon, that odd sport combining fencing, swimming, equestrian, shooting and running.
“I left modern pentathlon because I was tired of trying to train in five different disciplines,” she said. “Swimming was my worst leg and I was told I needed to spend a lot more time in the pool if I was to improve.”
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
