Seattle cycling legend Rebecca Twigg: From Olympic Gold to sleeping on the street
SEATTLE — Seattle native Rebecca Twigg is among the most elite athletes women’s cycling has ever known.
Shortly after becoming a student at the University of Washington at the tender age of 14, and then being kicked out of her home by her mother at 15, Twigg started racing competitively. She had found her calling, collecting championship medals right out of the gate. When women’s cycling was first introduced into the Summer Olympics at the 1984 Los Angeles games, Twigg missed capturing the road race gold medal by a hair’s breadth in striking silver. Eight years later at the Summer Olympiad in Barcelona, Twigg competed in a different bicycle racing event, the 3000-meter pursuit, and earned the bronze medal.
It was in pursuit where Twigg really dominated, winning six World Championship gold medals, all the while laying waste to existing world record times. On three straight occasions she won the Ore Ida Women’s Challenge, an American stage race equivalent to the prestigious Tour de France.
But then things would take a dramatic turn for Twigg. In the direction of a devastating downward spiral.
Twigg suffered several horrendous high-speed crashes. One of them resulted in a concussion. She pulled out of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. Then, after butting heads with her coaches, stubbornly refusing to ride a “super bike” of which she didn’t approve, Twigg walked away from cycling following the 1997 World Championships. The hiatus would prove to be a permanent one. The relentlessly torturous training regimen she had attacked full force for years had finally, and forever more, taken its toll.
Twigg spent years toiling in a series of dead-end desk jobs, struggling to make the next one her last. It was at this time that she began battling crippling bouts of anxiety. She even thought of suicide.
Twice divorced and the single parent of a young daughter, Twigg quit working. She surrendered her child to relatives to care for. For a while she crashed on the floors of friends. As time slipped away, there became nowhere else to go. Desperate, she turned to sleeping underneath bin bags on the streets.
Once considered the world over to be the greatest in her sport, she had hit rock bottom.
Twigg opened up about finding herself with no place to call home in an interview with The Seattle Times.
“Once you’ve done something that feels like you’re born to do it, it’s hard to find anything that’s that good of a fit. Anything else that feels that way. I had this feeling of not really belonging anywhere. I just had my head really mixed up, totally confused about what I should be doing.”
In a symbolic and heartbreaking goodbye to a once glorious and promising past, Twigg parted ways with her bike, any notion of racing on it again having been rendered impractical.
“Some of the hard days are really painful when you’re training for racing but being homeless, when you have little hope or knowledge of where the finish line is going to be, is just as hard.” she told The Times. “I was shivering, partly from fear, and partly from cold.”
Twigg maintains that she never topped more than 50,000 dollars in annual income, even in the thick of her career. Still, she will not accept housing, believing that there are those who need it more than her.
Earlier this year, Twigg finally asked for help. A relative agreed to take her in as she fell very ill with the flu. She continues to push tirelessly for the federal government to create more affordable housing for the nation’s vast homeless population.
But, as she made it clear to The Times, Twigg doesn’t expect help merely because she once was an international bicycle racing superstar.
“Shelters are great, but there has to be a next step. The point is not so much that I need help, it’s that there are a bunch of people who need help-12,000 in this area, half a million in the country. Help should be provided for everybody, not just a few.”
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