There are some special people here

Boulder Sports Hall of Fame inducts four new members

0

If you want to be on the silver screen you move to Los Angeles, and if you want to break into musical theater you head to New York City.

But if you want to be a professional athlete, Boulder is your destination.

The temperate climate, high elevation and stunning views attract athletes from around the world to train: former speed skater Apolo Ohno trained for his first Ironman here, and four-time Ironman world champion Chrissie Wellington rents a home in North Boulder.

But many athletes decide to put down roots and call Boulder home for good, and for those folks, the city is more than just a place to train — it’s a community that nurtures the competitive soul.

At least that’s how long-distance runner and sports journalist Michael Sandrock feels. In 2011, Sandrock founded the Boulder Sports Hall of Fame to honor the city’s athletic legacy. On Saturday, Sept. 26, the Hall of Fame will get four new inductees: climber Lynn Hill, cyclist Dale Stetina, triathlete Tim DeBoom and marathoner Benji Durden.

Procceeds from the induction ceremony support One World Running, an international program founded by Sandrock that promotes health, fitness and nutrition by providing running shoes to those in need in the United States and around the world.

This new collection of inductees carries on the Hall of Fame’s tradition of paying tribute to the best athletes in these four disciplines who call Boulder home.

“Over the years I realized — and I’ve lived here since 1976 — that Boulder is unique. It’s a special place, and the people who get inducted represent that,” Sandrock says. “That spirit of excellence and that commitment and drive to be the best they can be, to excel not for monetary gain — or they would have been football players — but for it’s own sake. The best climbers are here, the best triathletes, the best runners, some of the best cyclists. Taken all together you just step back and say, ‘There are some special people here.’” 

And within the climbing world, there is perhaps no one more singular than Lynn Hill.

Hill’s career is bursting with firsts: in 1979 she became the first person to free climb Ophir Broke in Colorado, rated 5.12d. While in college in New York, she performed an on-sight first ascent of both Yellow Crack and Vandals, rated 5.12c and 5.13a, respectively. In the early ’90s she was the first woman to climb routes rated 5.14 and 5.13b.

But it was her free ascent of “The Nose” on El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, California, in 1994 that stunned the world. Hill was the first person, man or woman, to free climb The Nose, and it was nearly 20 years before Tommy Caldwell replicated the feat.

For Hill, the ascent was a message to the world.

“In the end your motivation is really important,” she says. “You have to have the skills that you train for and all that, but just knowing that my entire life I felt like girls haven’t been given the same opportunity, not treated the same, not viewed as being capable of doing and achieving… as a child it gave me great happiness in doing activities that little girls weren’t viewed in doing positively. It was always something I felt was an injustice. My free ascent of The Nose was an expression of that: This is what’s possible if you have vision and believe in yourself. It’s probably the biggest achievement of my entire career.”

Local climbing legend and free-ascent pioneer Roger Briggs was inducted into the Boulder Sports Hall of Fame in 2012, and as such was a part of the committee that chose Hill to be this year’s climbing inductee.

“What Lynn did back in the early ’90s as a woman was like winning an Olympic gold medal in a men’s event,” Briggs says. “It’s never happened in any sport. And yet she clearly wasn’t just almost as good as the men, she was maybe better than anyone at that time. It’s far beyond climbing.”

And for Briggs, it’s far beyond gender. 

“I hate to make too much about her being a woman in a way because she’s a human being that’s performed at an astounding level, and she’s inspirational to all of us,” he says. “Being a woman is almost secondary.”

But there’s no shortage of inspirational figures in this year’s group of inductees. Cyclist Dale Stetina’s story is the kind that makes mere mortals straighten their backs, grit their teeth and dig just a little deeper than they thought they could to persevere over a lifealtering situation.

Through the 1970s and ’80s, Stetina was a U.S. national team cyclist and two-time winner of the Coors Classic. He also holds winning titles for the Mt. Washington Bicycle Grand Prix and the Tour of Costa Rica. He was the record holder for the Mt. Washington Hill Climb event for 20 years.

After 18 years, Stetina retired from professional cycling in 1983, but continued to nurture the next generation of professional cyclists by coaching Team 7-Eleven.

But in late August of 2013, Stetina was involved in an accident on Lefthand Canyon that left him with a traumatic brain injury. His wife Anne says doctors didn’t expect him to live through the first few days, but, as always, her husband didn’t give up.

“Dale came out of it just incredibly positive and knowing that this would maybe slow him down a little bit, but not much,” Anne says. “The rest of us questioned it, including the doctors. The doctors said they didn’t want him on a bike for two years, and that would be now.”

But Stetino has been back in the saddle since his days in rehab at QLI Rehabilitation Center in Omaha, Nebraska, just months after his accident.

“One of his therapists rented a tandem bike and they would take him on the grounds of the facility because he wanted to feel the wind in his hair,” Anne says.

When Stetina got back home to Boulder, Michael Sandrock brought him into a fold of runners as a kind of informal physical therapy.

The running group was good for Stetina, but it was equally important for his wife.

“It was just amazing, that outpouring of support that we got from the community, especially the athletic community in town,” Anne says. “I don’t think I could have done it without them. As the caregiver of someone who has a traumatic brain injury, it’s been essential to have the support I’ve had. Dale needed to be kept busy and he needed this physical outlet, and to have these people step forward and say, ‘We’re going to come over and go run with him and we’ll pick him up and we’ll bring him home,’ it’s phenomenal. We’ve been very blessed.”

Stetina’s brother Wayne, a former pro cyclist himself and the current vice president of Shimano USA, got his brother involved with Ride 2 Recovery, a bicycle rehabilitation program for wounded veterans. Many of the vets have injuries similar to Stetina’s. Anne says her husband started out on a tandem bike and is now able to ride solo. He’s done rides from Washington, D.C. to Virginia Beach.

Unfortunately, Anne says, her husband will have to miss the induction ceremony at the Boulder Sports Hall of Fame — because he’s riding in the World Cycling Championships in Richmond, Virginia.

Stetina will be honored in person at a later date.

Representing the triathlete discipline at this year’s Hall of Fame is two-time Hawaii Ironman world champion Tim DeBoom. No American has won the Ironman world championship since DeBoom scooped up his second consecutive victory in 2002.

And while his world championship wins were the crown jewel in DeBoom’s career, there was little doubt he would achieve such greatness: He placed in the top five at three other Ironman world championships, won numerous other full and half triathlons and took the bronze medal at the 1999 Pan American Games.

Just this year DeBoom took on a new challenge by retiring from the pro triathlete scene and focusing on other aspects of his life, namely his life at home with his wife Nicole, a triathlete herself, and their daughter Wilder Jette DeBoom. On top of that, he went back to school to complete his degree in exercise physiology and anatomy.

(Boulder Weekly was unable to connect with DeBoom before press time.)

Rounding out this year’s inductees is marathoner Benji Durden, who considers himself something of an accidental runner.

“I was a very good student and one of side effects of being a good student is that your peers don’t appreciate you very much,” Durden says.

So he started looking for a way to overcome that feeling of ostracization, and naturally, he says, he turned to sports.

“I was quick, so football initially would kind of work, but I didn’t like getting hit,” he admits. “Baseball, well, I didn’t like a ball coming at me at 60 or 70 miles an hour. Basketball wasn’t an option; I never got tall enough.”

Then he found pole vaulting. Durden was about 80 pounds at the time, and the event still used bamboo poles as opposed to today’s fiberglass or carbon fiber poles. With bamboo, Durden says he was competitive — he couldn’t win, but he could place.

He moved up in weight class and continued to enjoy the sport. That’s until the switch to fiberglass poles.

“This was the mid ’60s and back then you landed in raked sawdust, not the foam pads they have now,” Durden says. “This kid, his father had bought him a new fiberglass pole. They were kind of fragile when they first came out. Any defect and they shattered. He came up and he came down and broke a collarbone and I became a runner.”

And quite a runner he became — he completed 25 sub-2:20 marathons in less than a decade. His career was crowned by a qualification for the 1980 U.S. Olympic marathon team, but it wasn’t meant to be; that was the year the U.S. boycotted the Olympics in Moscow.

The following year, Durden began advocating for a professional status for runners. He and another dozen-odd runners of equal caliber formed the Association of Road Race Athletes. Their first event as a group was the 1981 Cascade Run Off in Portland, Oregon. At the completion of the race, Durden and other top runners from the association defied a sport-wide ban on openly accepting prize money. Their rebellion made running a professional career where top performers no longer needed to depend on under-the-table payments to make a living. It also opened the door for professional basketball and hockey players to compete in the Olympics as professionals, not just as amaetur athletes.

The Georgia native moved to Boulder in 1985 to run the Bolder Boulder, but he said he immediately felt like he was home. He’s been here ever since.

“Here’s an interesting anecdote,” Durden offers. “The first year I’d been here I was running down the road, down Folsom and Alpine, and I looked up and coming at me from the other direction was the 7-Eleven [cycling] team guys. Coming down Alpine was an Olympic Nordic skier, a guy in the sky above me was hang gliding and another guy was parasailing. You can’t do any better than this. Sometimes people forget what a special place Boulder is.”

While tickets are a suggested $20, Sandrock says that no one looking to attend will be turned away.

ON THE BILL: Boulder Sports Hall of Fame Induction Class of 2015. 5 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 26, Avalon Ballroom, 6185 Arapahoe Road, Boulder, 303-440-8303. Purchase tickets at bouldersportshalloffame.com or by calling 720-675-8923 or 303-545-6147. Tickets can be purchased for $20 each, which includes two drinks.