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Rocky finish Error in judgment costs Dunlap in mountain race
FAIRFIELD, Australia (AP) -- Alison Dunlap went by the book. Right after the starting gun, she put herself in the lead pack in the women's mountain bike race. She maintained the grueling early pace. When rivals struggled, she muscled out the climbs and let her bike go on the descents. "I was up front. I was probably in fifth place starting the first lap. I starting passing people and then ... I started gapping them," Dunlap said. "It was good. I was really feeling good." Dunlap rode the race she needed for an Olympic medal. For almost two laps. Paola Pezzo of Italy won the gold medal Saturday, surviving a collision that dropped another racer on the fourth of five laps to successfully defend the Olympic title she won in Atlanta. Barbara Blatter of Switzerland, the world's top-ranked rider, took the silver and two-time world champion Margarita Fullana of Spain, the leader until she collided with Pezzo, got the bronze.
Dunlap, of Colorado Springs, Colo., finished seventh, mainly because of one tiny mistake. She misread her way through a rocky groove, briefly throwing her handlebars and hip into a tree. It was the second lap. Not a major crash. Just enough to spoil her race. "To be up there at the front, everything has to be perfect," she said. "Mentally, it threw me off. It took me a little bit for my legs to get going again. By then, the others were ahead." Dunlap finished almost 4 1/2 minutes behind Pezzo. Ruthie Matthes of Durango, Colo., was 10th, almost six minutes later. Ann Trombley of Golden, Colo., placed 16th, more than 10 minutes behind. Olympic medals often are decided by fractions of a second, and Dunlap's judgment was wrong only long enough to deny her a possible trip to the podium. She came into the race ranked third in the world. Dunlap knew she missed a good shot at a medal. "There were probably five or six of us who could have medaled, and I put myself in that group from the start," she said. "I wasn't going for top five. I was going for the win." Then came that nasty rock channel. "You can barely get through it," Dunlap said. "And I didn't get through it." Her concentration broke only temporarily, but long enough for the race to change. When the leaders came around for the third lap, Dunlap was missing. She appeared one minute later, grinding along in sixth place. After that, it was a different race. The climbs were steeper. The descents were longer. Her legs ached more and more. "You don't have that stride, that power," Dunlap said. "When you're riding well, you can get to the top of the hill and you punch it. When you're struggling, you just kind of pedal over." It was a sun-splashed day at Fairfield City Farm, a petting zoo where koala bears, emus, llamas, sheep and goats roam. They were caged for the event, but the Americans had joked beforehand about the wildlife in the nearby hills. During training rides, Travis Brown of Boulder, Colo., reported seeing a 6-foot lizard cross his path and Dunlap was attacked on one section of the course by a nesting magpie. None of those things could be blamed for the outcome. "You have to be, on the right day, riding your best performance," U.S. mountain bike coach Stephane Girard said. "Alison was almost there." Coming to Sydney, American cycling team leaders had targeted a few athletes for whom medals were considered genuine possibilities. Among them: track rider Marty Nothstein, who won gold in match sprint; two-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong in the men's road events; and Dunlap in women's mountain bike. "She's the best rider we have, no question about that," Girard said. "She's one of the riders who puts us at the front in mountain biking." But at the Olympics, it's often a matter of minuscule degrees, even in an event that doesn't rely on subjective judges to issue scores. The smallest errors can make a difference, even in mountain biking. Dunlap rode a good race. But afterward, she was the first to point out there was nothing to gain by feeling sorry about anything. "Who knows? If I hadn't hit the rock, maybe my legs would have blown anyway," she said. "You never know."
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