|
A glamorous presence in the rough-and-ready
world of mountain biking, Niki Gudex backs up personal appeal
with athletic prowess.
By rights, Niki Gudex should have had her
licence to enact thrills and spills revoked some time ago.
For a start, she was knocked off her bike by a car as a teenager
while on an innocent ride to the shops. For another, she injured
her back snowboarding in Sweden four years ago. And anyway,
what’s a woman as glamorous as her doing hooning down
mountains? When she shed her protective layers for The
Sportbook, we almost expected to find a sticker marked
“fragile” slapped somewhere on her 50kg, 164cm frame.
You can think this way about the feisty
24 year old as much as you like. Just don’t say it to
her face, even though she’s grown accustomed to the stereotyping
that’s an inevitable consequence of being a) a sportswoman
and b) an object of desire. And as long as you put her bio
in that order, you should be fine.
“You can still be feminine and race
bikes,” insists the multilingual student, who was born
in England and had spells living in New Zealand, the USA and
Scandinavia before settling in Wollongong where she’s
completing a graphic design course. “It’s good to
be able to be yourself and still ride because a lot of girls
may get scared that they may have to conform to a particular
identity, but you can do whatever you want to do and a lot
of people in mountain biking allow for that, even encourage
it.
“I started modelling before I started riding and it’s
nice to do the two of them together because you feel more…
legitimate.”
I suspect that means she’s happy to
enjoy the attention that any attractive sportswoman generates,
on one irrefutable proviso: that she continues to excel in
her chosen field. Even though she wouldn’t have any trouble
milking her looks for all they’re worth – and that’s
plenty according to the readership of Inside Sport magazine,
who recently plumped for her as Australia’s sexiest sportswoman
– Gudex seems aghast at the prospect of Anna Kournikova-like
recognition for beauty rather than results.
“First and foremost, I’m an athlete,”
is the Gudex creed. And a damn fine one at that – she
is the nation’s second-ranked downhill rider and up there
with the best in cross country. But if the spin-offs from
her growing status as a – dare we say it – sex symbol
rebound positively on the sport, then more power to her prospects
as an ambassador, or as one writer put it, “the siren
of cycling”.
“I hope that the exposure I’ve
been getting lately will get mountain biking more accepted
and well known so that more people will try it or get interested,
because it’s a great sport. Everyone has access to a
bike, whether they borrow a neighbour’s or whatever.
It doesn’t matter what level you’re at, I think
it’s something that everyone can enjoy.”
The way Gudex paints it, mountain biking
shouldn’t need much of a hard sell anyway. It’s
a pursuit she doesn’t hesitate to classify as “awesome”.
To her, “it just feels comfortable”. “When
I get on a bike it’s like how a singer might feel on
a stage when they’re performing. I feel relaxed. It’s
fun and it’s something I feel passionate about,”
she says.
Gudex’s love affair with her sport
didn’t ignite until she was on the cusp of her third
decade. Fate intervened and offered a broken back as a valid
excuse not to go snowboarding anymore, and the addictive nature
of tearing through the countryside on two wheels took hold
rapidly. All that Gudex needed to do was decide upon the discipline:
downhill or cross country?
Nearly four years on, the jury’s still
out as she continues to excel in the twin regimes. “It’s
very draining to do both and that’s why not many people
do it,” she says, “but at this stage of my career
there’s so much I can learn from both. To combine them
makes you stronger and develops you in both, but in the long
term, I’ve been told that I’m better built for cross
country, so that’s probably where I’ll end up, especially
as I’m suited to endurance and I believe you get stronger
with age. For now though, I’m just taking it a day at
a time.”
Recent testing conducted by the Australian
Institute Of Sport adds weight to her theory. From over 300
athletes who were rigorously examined and scouted as potential
track cyclists, Gudex boasted the top power-to-weight ratio.
An average of three hours training a day certainly helps,
but she describes most of it as “raw ability”. “I
feel like I have a lot of room for improvement and I’m
learning something every day, which is very satisfying. I’m
extremely happy with how far I’ve come in a relatively
short time, so I’m aiming to keep improving along those
lines, while getting a lot of enjoyment out of it.”
Profile: David Rowlands. Photographed by:
Hugh Hamilton.
|
