On the race course, you’ll find 16-year-old May Miller on her blue mountain bike, Cinderella Sparkle Princess. Her friend Ivy Wollenzien’s black-and-gold bike also has a creative name, but with a little more bite: Cash Money the Destroyer.
“Because, like, I don't play around,” she explained. “I'm fierce.”
The fiery competitors want to take their bikes farther, and Miller is leading the charge. She wants girls’ races to have the same number of laps as the boys. Mountain biking is a club sport in Utah, so they bike with the National Interscholastic Cycling Association. The league’s varsity girls often race three laps, and the boys four. It’s not unusual for men and women to race different distances across sports, though some, like cross-country skiing, have moved toward parity in recent years.
Girls work just as hard as the boys, Miller argues, and she loves the feeling of pushing herself on her bike.
“There's nothing like it,” she said. “It's the only place where I can just zone out and just go my hardest, and it feels so freeing.”
So she started a petition in March to equalize the lap count, and her pitch is that it would align with the association’s policy on fairness and equality. Wollenzien is all in favor.
“I put so much effort into my riding,” the 14-year-old said. “I feel like I want to go as far and as hard as I can go, and I don't want to feel like I'm, like, being held back.”
She’s had a huge range of reactions to her petition. The Maple Mountain High School club head coach and Ivy’s dad, John Wollenzien, thinks the community has accepted the status quo.
“I've seen girls that make my head spin as they go past the finish line,” he said. “So I think that they are very capable of accomplishing and competing on the exact same level as the boys.”
But when Miller posted her petition on the social fitness app Strava, she said she got flamed with comments like, “you’ll get hurt” or “you won’t have a social life anymore.” She scoffed at that.
“If we want to work that hard, we will work that hard.”
In fact, there’s a sticker by her bike’s handlebars that says, “Shut up, legs.”
“Because when you're racing, and you look down and your legs hurt, then you just see that, and you're like, ‘OK, they don't hurt anymore.’ Pain is just a mindset,” she laughed.
Miller is showing those boys, though, because her petition has made a difference. It pushed the National Interscholastic Cycling Association to scrutinize its courses, said Amanda Carey, the association’s national president and a former professional endurance mountain biker herself.
They set the number of laps by looking at past events and figuring out how many laps most racers can finish in 90 minutes. That time cap is for physical safety, but it can mean the boys get another lap because they’re usually faster.
If a competitor isn’t on track to finish in 90 minutes, they get pulled from the race to prevent riders from passing each other at high speeds. The association errs on the side of fewer laps so not as many girls have to be pulled.
“It's not only not a good feeling, it doesn't really meet any of our goals as a youth development organization for folks to have that positive sporting experience,” Carey said.
Because of Miller, Carey and her team went back through with a fine-tooth comb and found a Utah course that meets their criteria to equalize laps — Soldier Hollow in Midway. Carey doesn’t think they could have made that change just a few years ago, but girls are getting faster. At Soldier Hollow, varsity lap times from 2016 to 2025 improved by 26%.
“I think that participation is absolutely having an impact,” she said. “Because the more girls that come, the more they get practice, they get exposure, right? They get more competitive fields.”
In the last 10 years, girls’ participation in the Utah League has increased by 32% through a program called Girls Riding Together. That includes making races shorter if it means more girls finish and have a good experience, counter to the hyper-competitive nature of youth sports these days.
So while May Miller thinks the association’s approach is holding her back, it might actually be what has helped get — and keep — more girls in the sport. And now, she’s helping push them even more.
Carey said that Miller helped them see “that we have to continuously really look at that data from ‘How could we change this’ versus ‘We are doing it right.’”
Miller is happy things are starting to change, but she still wants girls to race the same number of laps as the boys on all courses — with more time to do it.
“They talk a lot about equity,” she said. “But really, they're kind of going against what they say ‘cause they're showing that we can't do the same as boys.”
Josh Miller, May’s dad and a Salem Hills High School parent coach of the club, agrees.
“Give them a little more time, let them decide if they're overwhelmed, don't put them in varsity if they can't handle it.”
May Miller hopes for more meaningful change in the future. Until then, she’s going to keep biking with everything she’s got. Her team, which follows the Girls Riding Together program — shortened on stickers as GRiT — has a sassy chant to hype them up, even if Miller confessed she thinks it’s a bit dumb.
“G-R-I-T, grit, we don’t take no sh… shortcuts!” The girls laughed.
Miller’s team will start practice for the season May 31, but she’ll have to wait to do more laps at Soldier Hollow. It’s not on the race schedule this year.
