Sports

The Tour de France is arguably competitive cycling’s most famous race. The men’s tour is an almost month-long event that winds through the French countryside every July.

However, most people might not be as familiar with the women’s tour. That’s because this year was the first time in over three decades that women have competed.

While the men’s Tour de France is a several-week event with over 21 stages, the women’s course is scaled down in comparison, with eight legs stages.

Homer-grown cyclist Kristen Faulkner, who participated in her first Tour de France last month, believes there are several reasons for that.

“I think the organizers still have kind of this traditional mentality in Europe, that women can’t do as much as men,” she said. “I think the second factor is the finances that are required in the upfront investment. And right now they’re not willing to invest so much in women’s cycling until they know that there’s actually people willing to watch it.”

Faulkner first considered professional cycling while working in New York City as a venture capitalist.

Although she was athletic, she said cycling wasn’t on her radar. The then 23-year-old had just finished college at Harvard, where she majored in computer science. While in school, she broke records for rowing and held the school’s best time for indoor rowing in her weight class.

Before that, Faulkner said her cycling experience was limited to riding her bike down the Homer Spit after swim practice to help her family with housekeeping work, more than a decade ago. Her parents, John and Sara Faulkner own and operate Lands Ends Resort, a year-round hotel and restaurant at the tip of the Homer Spit.

It wasn’t until she took a class on cycling in New York City in 2016 that she fell in love with the competitive sport for both its individual and team components.

“Cycling is both a race and also a game,” Faulkner said. “You have the effect of drafting, which is when you ride right behind your teammate, and you’re able to save energy, because you’re not in the wind the whole time. And so teams use this dynamic. If you’re the sprinter, your teammate will go right in front of you, and kind of ride in front of you until the finish, and then at the very last minute sprint around them. And so that teamwork plays a big role in how riders race.”

Twenty-nine-year-old Faulkner says she had high hopes going into the Tour de France last month. The French race is one of three major stage races that make up what’s called “The Grand Tour,” which she’s hoping to complete. Faulkner already competed in one, the Giro Rosa d’Italia, successfully in early July.

During the Giro Rosa, she said she won two out of the 10 stages and also got to wear the coveted polka-dot jersey. It’s given to the strongest climber in the race, known as “The Queen of the Mountain.” But then, just before the Tour de France, Faulkner got sick.

“[The Giro Rosa] was one of my best races all year,” she said. “I was just really excited going into the Tour de France, [thinking] I might actually have a shot again on the podium or even winning. And then the day after the Giro, I came home and I tested positive for COVID. And I had COVID for the next 11 or 12 days. I tested negative the very last day that I was allowed to test negative and be able to race for the tour.”

But COVID wasn’t the only challenge, she said.

“So there were three crashes that happened right in front of me and there was really no way I could avoid them,” she said. “There were really big piles of crashes. And I have a lot of road rash on my legs and I hit my elbow and so it was really hard on my body. I actually didn’t know if I was gonna be able to finish the race.”

But she did finish.

Faulkner says she’s hopeful for two upcoming stage races later this summer and for the World Cycling Championships in September.

Faulkner said she plans on racing in next year’s Tour and hopes to make it to the podium this time. She said she’s hopeful for the future of women in the sport and wants more people to participate in cycling.

“I just encourage more people to get on bikes,” Faulkner said. “I think it’s a really great form of exercise. It’s fun. It’s sustainable transportation. And I’d love to see more women on bikes. It’s a really male-dominated sport. And if we can get more women on bikes, I think we can support more women’s sports in general.”

Sunday’s race in Juneau was the first Ironman triathlon in Alaska. More than 700 athletes finished the race.

The first across the finish line was Alex Whetman of Riverton, Utah. It took him 9 hours, 11 minutes, 17 seconds to swim 1.2 miles in Auke Lake, bike 112 miles on Glacier Highway and run a full 26-mile marathon through the Mendenhall Valley.

Liz Cullen of Gibson, British Columbia, was the top female finisher with a time of 10 hours, 23 minutes, 3 seconds.

The first person from Juneau to finish was Will Coleman, who was 14th overall. Beth Gollin was Juneau’s first female finisher and 13th female overall.

John Bursell was Juneau’s second finisher. He has completed several Ironman races in the past, and met his goal this time to qualify for the Ironman World Championship event in Hawaii in October.

“It was a great experience overall,” he said. “I think Ironman did a great job. I was super-impressed and proud of Juneau. You know, the way people turned out – the support was incredible, the volunteers were incredible. And we heard that over and over again from people who came from out of town to compete. This was basically the most supportive community they’ve ever raced in.”

Bursell says locals volunteered, loaned out their own personal bikes, opened up their homes to house athletes, even offered free car rides around town. According to a press release from Ironman, more than 1,400 people volunteered.

The event had a lot of challenges. Race officials cut the swim portion in half, due to the cold water temperatures in Auke Lake.

Before the race even began, logistics issues drove down turnout. In a press release, Ironman said “approximately 1,000” athletes came to Juneau for the event. An official list dated from April had identified more than 1,300 participants.

Juneau’s destination marketing organization, Travel Juneau, worked closely with race organizers. Executive Director Liz Perry says there will be a full debrief to work on making the second Ironman Alaska event go smoother. Perry says there’s a three-year contract, meaning Ironman Alaska will be back in Juneau in 2023 and 2024.

Andrew Simmonds walked out onto Petersburg’s Sandy Beach at 8:00 a.m. on July 30. He wore a hooded wetsuit, gloves, booties, goggles and a fluorescent green swim cap. He had a diving knife and a waterproof radio strapped to him.

He was about to try to swim across Frederick Sound — almost six miles from Sandy Beach to the mainland.

“There’s no good reason for me to do this. This is a bunch of nonsense,” Andrew Simmonds said. “But this is what one does when one has nothing else going on in their life. It’s pretty simple. They do things like this.”

He didn’t know how far his body temperature would drop over several hours in 51-degree water — or which way the currents were going. The farthest he’d ever swum before was two miles in a pool.

And he’s 60 years old.

“If I was married, do you think I’d be out here doing this?” he asked.

He waded out into a thick fog and started up a slow, steady stroke.

Simmonds is a physical therapist at the Petersburg Medical Center. He’s originally from New York and says he spent the first 55 years of his life within a 100 mile radius.

When his son went to college, Simmonds joined the Peace Corps and began to travel — South Sudan, Haiti, then Sitka and Hawaii.

He swam in the big waves in Hawaii and liked it, so when he came to Petersburg in November 2021 he started training in the pool to improve his freestyle stroke.  A few months later, he got the idea to swim across Frederick Sound.

Josef Quitslund agreed to spot him in a boat. “I thought he was crazy,” Quitslund says, “but I knew that he could do it.”

When they started crossing the Sound, everything went smoothly. It was flat and calm. They could hear each other well. Around halfway across, Simmonds started thinking that maybe this would be a piece of cake.

But by about six hours in Simmonds, who weighs about 155 lbs, was getting seriously cold.

“Once we got into the iceberg area,” Simmonds says, “I bumped into a piece of ice, which freaked me out a little bit because I thought it was a marine mammal coming to eat me.”

They had reached just northeast of the McDonald Islands, and chunks of the LeConte Glacier were floating by. Simmonds swam harder to warm himself up. He could tell he was losing function and mental clarity.

A strong offshore surface current was pushing against him. On the boat, the GPS showed they were in fact moving backwards. But the shore was less than three quarters of a mile away. Simmonds didn’t want to stop.

“I was pulling harder at that point than the whole time over,” he says. “I was kicking harder, pulling harder and going — nowhere.”

Finally, after seven and a half hours in the ocean, he decided to climb up the ladder onto the boat while he still could.

“He was at the point where he really needed to come out, but he was still coherent,” Quitslund said. “And you know, he was under his own power.”

Simmonds drank some hot cocoa, and when he got home he celebrated by listening to some hard rock. He says he feels like a million bucks.

“The target wasn’t hit, but it was a success,” he said. “I faced the demon, I faced the dragon.”

Simmonds is already planning his next attempt, deconstructing the factors to determine what to adjust. He has no interest in trying a shorter or easier route.

Many Ironman Alaska athletes are scrambling after Alaska Airlines notified them that bicycles shipped through them may not arrive in time for the triathlon in Juneau, which is less than two weeks away.

In an email to customers on Tuesday, Alaska Airlines said that applies to bikes checked as baggage or shipped by Alaska Air Cargo. The airline steered athletes to the Ironman organization to find other shipping options.

Suzanne Rinehart is a college administrator in the Chicago area who’s been doing Ironman races for a decade. Now 51, she said she was looking forward to doing her last, full-length Ironman in Alaska.

“I invested a lot of training — it’s a little frustrating to think of all the training I put in,” she said. “And now I’m this close, and then everything kind of raveled and fell apart at the last minute.”

After she got the email from Alaska Airlines, she looked into last-minute couriers. The options are limited and expensive. Some require disassembling the bike. Alaska Airlines offered her an earlier flight to Juneau to beat the rush, but that would mean spending a lot more on accommodations, taking more time off work, plus extra headaches coordinating with her travel companion.

So she decided to cancel her whole trip.

“The bike thing was the last straw for me,” she said.

Mike Arabia is still headed to the race from southern California. He said he got quotes to ship his bike into Juneau through UPS and FedEx for around $1,000. But he was able to get an assurance in writing from an Alaska Airlines agent that his bike would arrive by Aug. 5 — two days before the race.

“I’m going to have to cross my fingers and hope that this agent that I chatted with … is correct,” he said. “And that my bike makes it there before race day.”

Like Rinehart, Arabia’s unhappy about the last-minute communication for a foreseeable problem. It’s too late now, but affordable, third-party options for shipping bikes are available with more notice.

“Shame on Ironman. Shame on Alaska Airlines for not coordinating early,” he said.

Ironman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement, Alaska Airlines said they’ve been communicating with the Ironman organization for the last year with a goal of getting important travel information to athletes. The airline said its email to customers about bike capacity was a backstop, “in the event they had not heard from the Ironman organization.”

Other athletes do appear to be opting for some of those expensive shipping options. Ken Hill owns the shop Juneau Bike Doctor. He saw a thread about the bike issue  on Facebook and offered up his shop as a shipping destination and storage spot for athletes sending bikes ahead of their flights.

“The phone’s been going crazy and our Facebook messages as well,” he said. “I literally can’t step away from my computer without it piling up.”

Within 24 hours, he said 30 to 40 people took him up on the offer. He said he expects bikes to start showing up on Monday.

Travel Juneau, Juneau’s destination marketing organization, has been working closely with the race organizers. Executive Director Liz Perry said the race organizers and airline are working together to smooth things out.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Alaska Airlines did not respond to a request for comment. The reporter failed to make a request.

Team Pure and Wild has won the 2022 Race to Alaska. The three-man crew from Seattle, aboard a 44-foot Riptide monohull, sailed into Ketchikan’s Thomas Basin Harbor Monday afternoon.

It was not close.

“I mean, they’re days in front of anyone else,” said Jake Beattie, the head of the Northwest Maritime Center, which organizes the 750-mile non-motorized, self-supported Race to Alaska. He says from the start, he knew there were two teams likely to stand out in the race: Pure and Wild and Malolo.

They took different routes. Pure and Wild turned right coming out of Victoria, British Columbia, sailing up the west coast of Vancouver Island in the Pacific Ocean. Malolo turned left, going up the traditional inside route east of the island. And that made the difference.

“The other one ended up hitting a log — like, a catastrophic log failure, essentially, on the back side of Vancouver Island,” Beattie said. “So for days, it’s been these guys’ race to either win or lose, and it looks like they’re gonna win.”

Among the couple dozen spectators gathered to watch the victors arrive is Libby Johnson McKee, the wife of Pure and Wild captain Jonathan McKee.

“I made the decision last night around 11 to get a plane ticket and come up here for the finish just to surprise my husband and to just be here as part of his triumph,” she said.

She says she’s been following the race closely.

“I have spent countless hours on Facebook, on Instagram and on the tracker, and I’ve gotten very little done over the last few days. I haven’t been able to tear myself away — 11 o’clock at night, still checking the tracker,” she said.

Pure and Wild team members Jonathan McKee, Matt Pistay and Alyosha Strum-Palerm crossed the finish line just after 3:30 p.m. They glide silently to the dock, stepped off, and rang the traditional bell.

McKee said it was a slow start for Pure and Wild and the two other teams who decided to take the outside route.

“I think at one point, we’d gone six miles and the lead rowers had gone 22 miles. So we were definitely way behind at the beginning. But then we got some breeze,” he said.

And they were off. The team sailed day and night — two on deck and one sleeping — and finished the race in just over four days. He says there were some tough conditions, including in Hecate Strait on the inside of Haida Gwaii near the end of the race.

“The combination of grit and preparation, I think, is what is necessary to finish this race,” he said. “And a little bit of luck.”

Pure and Wild’s Matt Pistay is the Race to Alaska’s first-ever two-time winner — he came in first with Team Angry Beavers in 2019, the last time the race was run. He says there’s nothing like the Race to Alaska.

“The adventure of doing this race will always bring me back to come and do this race again, and I hope to be able to do it more years to come,” he said. “And to be able to do it on a good boat with two other great sailors and teammates and friends makes it very special as well.”

Crew member Alyosha Strum-Palerm says the 750-mile journey is its own kind of reward.

“It’s so much more than a race for us. The whole journey of being together and being like a team and doing the things that we did that was just as valuable as winning the race,” he said.

But $10,000 in prize money certainly doesn’t hurt.

The Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District board on Wednesday approved an activities policy that would prohibit transgender girls from competing in girls sports. The action comes as federal agencies continue to affirm legal protection for people discriminated against based on gender identity.

Attempting to ban transgender girls from playing on girls’ teams constitutes illegal discrimination under the federal law known as Title IX, according to the ACLU of Alaska. Title IX prohibits sex-based discrimination in any education program or activity offered by a school that receives federal funding.

“The Mat-Su, and any other school board or district that’s considering this, is putting themselves in legal peril, and this kind of litigation has ended up being very, very costly in other states,” said Stephen Koteff, the ACLU of Alaska’s legal director.

“Rather than engage in this kind of legal showdown, I think that school districts should look seriously at what the costs are for this kind of exclusion when the real impacts just aren’t there. The fears and the myths that surround this kind of discrimination do not at all surface to the level of fact, and that’s unfortunate that we’re dealing with this kind of legislation when there’s no real problem to be addressed,” he said.

Last June, the U.S. Department of Education announced it would extend Title IX prohibitions on sex-based discrimination to include discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The action stemmed from the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County.

“Title IX prevents discrimination on the basis of sex,” Koteff said. “Bostock found that the term sex includes sexual orientation and gender identity.”

More recently, the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service issued guidance last month that affirms the Department of Education’s conclusion that Title IX’s prohibition on sex discrimination includes a prohibition on discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

Pushing back on legal protections for transgender individuals, Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor on June 14 signed onto a letter from attorneys general of 26 states asking the federal guidance to withdraw the USDA guidance.

Koteff isn’t surprised. “This state’s administration is continuing to persist in its opinion that trans youth are not protected by the provisions of Title IX,” he said. “But even without Title IX, these bans would still be illegal under both the U.S. and certainly the Alaska Constitution.”

Department of Law Communications Director Patty Sullivan wrote in an email the Alaska Department of Law is not aware of any law specifically addressing transgender individuals in Alaska.

“The reason the Attorney General signed on to this letter is we believe the federal government is taking the Bostock decision and applying it outside of the specific context in which it was decided and extending it in an unwarranted manner that attempts to tie states’ hands. We hope the USDA reverses course and stays within its lane.”

President Biden has issued two executive orders last year and on Wednesday that affirm rights of transgender people to not be discriminated against.

Most spoke against the policy change

The Mat-Su school board voted 6-1 to approve the activities policy revision, which states, “A student who participates in an athletic team or sport designated female, women, or girls must be female, based on the participant’s biological sex as either female or male, as designated at the participant’s birth.”

The revised policy prohibits transgender girl students from participating in girls sports and teams. The policy would impact teams and sports within the Mat-Su Borough School District; it would not apply to teams from other districts competing within the Mat-Su school district.

The decision followed testimony from about 35 individuals — around 20 spoke out against what most called a discriminatory policy, while 15 testified in support of it. A couple testifiers said they’d sue the district if it passed.

Alex Squires, a Mat-Su student going into 12th grade, said the school board should focus on “actual problems” rather than focusing on “made up ones.”

“We have many problems in our school right now – bullying, drugs, mental health problems, staff shortages, students not getting quality education. I see it every day. And many more problems. The school decides that it wants to promote sex equality, but this cannot be done by discriminating against transgender athletes,” Squires said. “Trans athletes deserve to have access to the same resources as other students in a way that they can be comfortable and safe in their environment.”

Declan Farley, a 2021 Palmer High School graduate and transgender athlete, noted the high rates of suicide rates for transgender individuals.

“Excluding these students from the joy of the things that they love most, such as sports, puts them at a higher risk of suicide,” he said. “I cannot change the way that I was born, but you can all change the way that you treat those different around you. Transgender people, such as myself, want to be treated with the same respect as everyone else.”

Supporters of the policy spoke about biological differences between male and females, and the rights of athletes whose biological sex at birth was female.

Keri Anderson told the board “I’m here to applaud you” for bringing forward the policy.

“Sports are such a blessing in the lives of girls. We must protect these opportunities for girls by not allowing male-bodied athletes the physical advantage that they do have to ever take their place,” Anderson said. “Please do not allow even one girl to experience exclusion on her playing fields and let a male-bodied athlete take her spot.”

During board discussion, board President Ryan Ponder said the policy is meant to “maintain fairness in athletic opportunities for women” and “ensure discrimination against girls and women does not occur.” He added the policy is supported by federal law and federal case law.

Of the 7-member board, member Dwight Probasco was the only no vote.

The new policy was first introduced June 1. It mirrors Alaska Senate Bill 140, which the Legislature failed to pass after it was tabled twice during the final days of the session.

James Brooks contributed to this report.