In August 2008, Jim Miller was on his computer, checking race results. The USA cycling director of athletics calls himself a "chronic result watcher," and one of his many jobs is to spot rising stars, to identify and nourish young talent. It's not as simple a task as picking out future LeBron Jameses and Peyton Mannings. Greatness in team sports usually announces itself early and loudly, and is marked by bold headlines and breathless hyperbole. Unknown but promising cyclists, at least in the United States, don't inspire headlines at all; they don't often attract the attention of quasilegal agents or inspire major university scholarship wars. No one offers to buy them SUVs.

 

 

To find talent, if you're USA cycling director of athletics, you scroll through computer pages and you look at race results. Miller noticed an interesting one. It was from the Green Mountain women's race, in Vermont. One of his USA cycling team members had won the elite/pro division, which wasn't extraordinary, but when Miller checked out the Women's Cat 3/4 race—the near-novice level—he saw that the winner's time was four minutes faster than the pro's.

 

 

"And I thought," Miller remembers, "hmmm."

 

 

There was a story circulating on cycling chat boards about that race. According to the tall tale—it had to be a tall tale, it was so ridiculous—the woman who'd posted that surprising result had been racing for all of a month, worked full-time on Wall Street and had done most of her training inside, watching television. And according to the rumors—and they had to be just rumors, because they were so outlandish—the most absurd and delicious detail of that performance was that on the final, long climb the rider had left her race completely behind and ridden all the way up to the pack of elite and pro cylists, who'd started five minutes before. Some of the best women riders in the country, on their custom-made machines, had looked up to see a tiny, brown-haired investment banker on a cheap maroon bike, using her granny gear, pass them by. It was a wonderful fairy tale. It turned out to be true in every detail.