Sarah Scores Cover-Shot #3!!

Hammer Time

by Don Norcross

Everyone, it seems, tells their favorite watch-Sarah-Hammer-suffer story. For Neil Browne, executive editor of Road Magazine, it was the day five months ago when he chronicled Hammer training at the Carson velodrome. After knocking two seconds off her 2K personal best, Hammer stepped off the bike, wobbled and promptly puked. Every training session for her is deadly serious,” Browne says. “No wasted time. No wasted energy.”

For Hammer’s father, Cliff — who used to take his then 7-year-old daughter on these leisurely rides from Redondo Beach to Manhattan Beach and back, stopping at the pier for a churro — it’s almost anytime Hammer, now 23, steps inside his garage for a two-hour weightlifting session.

“I’ve seen her legs shaking so hard,” says Cliff, “I thought she was going to fall down.”
Then there’s Andy Sparks, 32, Hammer’s fiancée/coach. After taking an eight-month burnout break in 2004, Hammer returned to riding that October, joining Sparks for a two-and-a-half-hour workout in Colorado Springs, where the couple met as resident athletes at the Olympic Training Center.

Woefully out of shape by her standards, Hammer nonetheless kept throwing these climbing attacks at Sparks. “She was riding way over her fitness level, would detonate, recover and kept doing that, trying to hurt me — although she was hurting herself more,” Sparks remembers.

Here, Sparks paints a picture so vivid you shake your head in awe. “She goes on one last attack and completely detonates,” says Sparks. “She’s not able to ride in a straight line and crashes. Then she gets back up and tries to do it again. That ride totally encapsulates her mentality toward training.”

It has been 15 years since an American woman won an Olympic medal in cycling — Rebecca Twigg earning bronze at the 1992 Barcelona Games in the 3,000-meter individual pursuit, coincidentally, Hammer’s specialty. But come August 2008 in Beijing, Hammer, who lives in Temecula, Calif., is expected to end that drought. She is the two-time-defending individual pursuit world champion. Her 3-minute, 30.213-second winning time on March 30 at the world championships in Spain is the fastest time ever in the event, outside of times on the Athens track used at the 2004 Olympics. Shy and private by nature, Hammer nonetheless does not feign modesty and lets the world know what she expects of herself.

Logon to her Web site, http://www.sarahhammer.us/, and right there below her name, next to a picture of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Hammer biting one of her world championship gold medals, it reads “World Champion Cyclist and Future Olympic Gold Medalist.”No American woman has won a track cycling Olympic gold medal.

Of her gold-medal pursuit, Hammer says, “That’s what I think of anytime I’m putting my leg over the top tube. And I’ll do everything in my power to actualize that goal.”

The rest of the story can be seen here: http://www.competitor.com/article/?Guid=5785fe51-e55b-4b31-b0c8-6daac4ff5a33