RIDING AT THE TOP

Jill Kintner is always striving. While most athletes work for success in a given event and put it in cruise-control mode once they get there, Kintner continues to look beyond, eager to take her skills to new arenas, to always evolve, and to consistently challenge herself rather than rest on her triumphs. By the time she was 20, she had built an impressive career as a BMX racer, with the NBL National Title and the ABA World Championship Title already under her belt. She was dominating the scene, but the relatively new mountain bike discipline of Mountaincross had caught her eye, and a new set of challenges presented itself. In Mountaincross (or "4 Cross"), four athletes charge down a slope head-to-head, trying to out-think each other and out-maneuver a gnarly, obstacle-ridden course. It was a totally new discipline, and Kintner was destined to be its queen.

BMX – THE START OF A DREAM

As she was growing up in Washington State (where she was born in 1981) Kintner played at an elite level in soccer and tennis, and bikes were always part of the picture, too. “I was the only girl in our neighborhood, and I would go on bike missions with the boys,” she remembers. By the time she turned 8, racing had become an outlet for Kintner’s competitiveness. “We had a BMX track about ten minutes from our house, so it was a pretty accessible thing for my family to do together,” she explains. “Eventually my brother and I became full-fledged racers on the National circuit.”

Kintner started competing with pros at age 14. “I’m really competitive, and I put my heart into everything,” Kintner claims. “I see things as all-or-nothing. If I am going to do something, I want to be the best at it.” She graduated high school when she was 17 and then moved in succession to Florida, New York, Washington State, and California to pursue various interests. Her primary focus, however, was on continuing to ride while also studying fine arts and design (she did all the graphic design on her web site at www.jillkintner.com).

“After a while, I’d won pretty much everything in BMX,” Kintner says matter-of-factly, “including Nationals and the World Championship. But ever since I was a kid, I had this vision of racing a mountain bike. It always seemed like the most challenging and rewarding type of bike riding – the kind that keeps you scared and pushes the limits.”

MOUNTAINCROSS DOMINANCE

Kintner made the switch from BMX to 4X in 2002, and after financing her own World Cup chase, she signed with GT Bicycles in 2005. Kintner is now regarded as the undisputed queen of 4 Cross, a fast, furious sprint—mountain bike’s version of boardercross.

In 2005, she won three major titles in three weeks: the International Cycling Union (UCI) World Champion, the World Cup Champion, and the US National Champion. She won almost every race she entered in the summer 2006 season, including four out of five world cup events. She's the four-time US National Champion, and in 2007, Kintner won the UCI 4X World Championship title – her third in a row.

REINVENTING THE WHEEL

Again, rather than rest on the supremacy she had established in mountain biking, she decided to make the difficult switch back to BMX to achieve what was once an impossible goal. It was her biggest challenge yet; the two bikes handle in completely different ways. "It's easy to switch from a BMX bike to a mountain bike, but it's tricky to go the other way," she points out. "Mountain bikes are more stable and roll smoother; you can hit jumps without being perfect, but on a BMX bike you have to be perfect."

Despite the differences and a knee injury resulting from a training crash, Kintner once again proved her mettle. She added another career highlight in the form of an Olympic bronze medal, and currently has both the worlds of BMX and Mountaincross laid out before her. She may be poised to make a different kind of impact on the cycling world, however: promoting both of her sports for young women. “I’d like to use my design skills to make something cool and also give something back to the sport," she says. "I'd like to help get some girls back into it.”