The Accidental Cyclist : Henry Paid a Painful Price to Ride for U.S. National Team

Her words are spoken with a nonchalance befitting Evel Knievel.

“You crash, you get hurt. You have to expect it.”

So says Amanda Henry, who is neither a stuntwoman, roller-derby queen nor driver’s training instructor.

She is one of the nation’s rising young stars in cycling, and she has the scars to prove it.

Henry, 20, a resident of Thousand Oaks, has degenerative joint disease in her back, chronic problems with both wrists and, occasionally, sprained limbs, pulled muscles and unsightly blotches of adhesions she calls “road rash.”

Some of Henry’s injuries can be attributed to her passion for wheeling a bicycle around an oval, banked track at a blur. Others can be traced to her previous career as a gymnast.

“Have you ever watched a gymnastics meet and noticed that every one of those little girls has something taped?” Henry said. “I broke my hand, sprained my back, sprained my arm and sprained my ankle. You tape everything.”

Cycling, said Henry, a member of the U. S. women’s “B” national team, is considerably safer.

“I’ve had a few concussions,” she said. “You go down, you hit your head. It’s kind of acceptable. Everyone crashes, but real bad ones? Well, I broke my collarbone back in October of ‘87, and I had a couple of real bad mountain-bike crashes, but those don’t count.

“Really, I’ve been very lucky. Not very many things have kept me off a bike.”

Henry took up cycling four years ago after attending races at the Encino Velodrome with her family. She went to watch a family friend, but it was the performance of Janie Eickhoff, a girl of similar age, that grabbed her attention.

Eickhoff, 21, is now a member of the U. S. “A” team competing in the Pan American Games.

“I watched her race and she was amazing,” Henry recalled. “We were basically the same age and she was just walking away from these women. And then I found out they were giving free classes. Basically, I was in the right place at the right time.”

Henry took advantage of instruction offered at the velodrome, instruction paid for with Amateur Athletic Foundation funds generated by surplus money from the 1984 Olympics.

“It was ‘Learn how to ride for free. We’ll give you the bike, a helmet, gloves and free instruction,’ ” Henry said. “It was the perfect thing.”

Henry had given up gymnastics two years earlier after a series of injuries left her frustrated and scared.

“I found myself not able to do things I could in the past,” she said. “I was growing up and learning that I should be afraid, I guess. It’s amazing the things you will try when you’re a little kid, doing double-backs and falling on your head. I was afraid I was really going to hurt myself.”

In between leaving one sport and discovering the next, Henry said she did little but “get fat.”

“At first I was like, ‘Cool, I can be a kid.’ But I never would have made it as a teen-ager,” Henry said. “I was never meant to be a social high school person. I always preferred to be around adults, or people who acted like adults.”

While the majority of her Westlake High classmates attended the prom, Henry raced in a grand prix at the Olympic Velodrome at Cal State Dominguez Hills. “I was happy. I made $450 that weekend,” she said. “Better than spending that much, right?”

When she celebrated her graduation from high school, Henry was accompanied by one of her cycling coaches. “This 27-year-old man went to grad night with me,” she said.

In competitive cycling, Henry continues to run with an older crowd. Top cyclists usually peak in their late 20s.

At the national championships in Seattle early last month, Henry placed third in the women’s 1,000-meter race and a surprisingly strong fifth in the sprints. She is considered strongest in the 3,000-meter pursuit but failed to place and had a disappointing time of 4 minutes 7 seconds in the nationals.

“By placing, I didn’t earn myself back a position on the national team, but I think they still have enough faith in me as a rider that they will keep me,” Henry said. “Now that I know what I have to do I just have to pull out all the stops and do it.”

Her showing at the Olympic Festival last month confirmed her potential. Henry won the 1,000 meters in a track-record 1:14.923, was third in the points race and fifth in the sprints.

A compact 5-foot-2, Henry is capable of great speed. What she lacks is endurance, something she will spend her off-season winter months trying to develop.

The local velodrome season ends in September, after which Henry plans to turn her attention to training and school. If she can enroll in the classes she wishes, she will have a 22-unit class load at Moorpark College in the fall semester.

Henry will attempt to hone her academic skills in one semester because in the spring her time will be devoted almost entirely to racing.

Cycling is, after all, the subject in which she would most like to improve from a “B” to an “A.”