Team TIBCO's Brooke Miller Retires

Brooke Miller made it official....she announced her retirement. She was the 2008 US National Crit AND Road Champion...she won the Sprint competition in the Tour de l’Aude this year...and has simply won too many races to mention here. Her announcement was very graceful and moving. I am going to miss her fierce competitive racing and chatting with her after a race. Win or lose...she was the ultimate professional....she always made time to chat.

She was the face of the American women peloton for years...and will be seriously missed.

I wanted to share her retirement thoughts with the Cafe....

"I had not really realized just how long it has been since I have written in my blog. I pretty much felt that no one bothered to read it anymore so I had left it quietly slumbering since last June. I was so touched to open it and see so many comments! Thank you for those who didn’t forget me. It seems fitting that my last post was in honor of Memorial Day and now we are heading into the close of the summer holidays... post-Labor Day, and it is also the close of my cycling career. I have decided to retire. This is not breaking news- some people have known for a while and the cycling news websites have formally known since last weekend when I raced my last professional race.

I have had a lot of people ask me why. I guess that is the obvious question to ask when, after all, as a pony, I would not be dragged off to the glue factory quite yet. I could keep on racing. But no. I decided that this was my final season. Last weekend was my final curtain call, filled with unexpected tears on the start line and this week has also swum in some occasional spontaneous tears. I am, after all, ending a very important chapter in my life. So why now?

For me, my entire career has been focused on the Olympics. When I first decided to take cycling seriously, it was with that tantalizing fruit of the Olympic dream dangling in front of me. It was my trip to the Olympic Training Center, being picked up and carried by that beautiful spirit of pure sport, which helped me decided to take my cycling seriously. It was there that I decided to take my fun game of cycling and see what I could do with the sport and where I could go. It was always about the Olympics. For me, that was the pinnacle. THAT was the dream. That was the reason the rest of my life was put on hold. It was not for some small goal. It was not even for a national title- it was for the penultimate. It was for the dream.

But, I made a big realization this year... really big. I don’t want to go to the Olympics. It seems funny to see it written out in type. But that is where my thought process came from in term of coming to this decision. I • don’t • want • to • go • to • the • Olympics".....continued in....

Retirement - Facebook Post

Retirement-BrookeCycling Post go to Blog....then to Retirement

Photo: Christopher See, Brooke Miller at the Cascade Classic 2010.