You have to have a good start. That’s so crucial on this course if you want to be a part of the lead group.
Haley Batten had studied the Paris Olympic mountain bike course with her coach and knew what she needed to do. But at the first time split, the American was in 15th position, while the French speed of Pauline Ferrand-Prevot and Loana Lecomte were leading in front of a home crowd.
When I messed up, I was like, ‘Oh really Haley. Like, come on.’
Batten has spent years on the mental side of her sport, working on what it takes to have a “champion’s mind” as she put it, and “get into flow state, to be focused, to overcome little mishaps in the race very quickly,” she told Escape Collective. So even after her unexceptional start, she did what she’s trained herself to do and simply let it go. And it was working: with four laps into the race, the 26-year-old who won her first UCI World Series XCO that April was in a trio with Laura Stigger and Jenny Rissveds, closing in on Lecomte, alone in the bronze medal position. Then, another setback.
I attacked the group I was in. I was cruising. I’d dropped them and then pushed on the downhill pretty hard.
I came into this rock garden just so fast. I hadn’t gone into that section at so much speed. I jumped it, almost the whole thing, just slammed my rear wheel on this rock.
She held her breath, but when the tire pressure dropped so did her heart.
‘Haley, really, why? Why did you do that?’
Just ahead, Rissveds and Stigger sped through the tech zone.
“Haley flat! Haley rear flat! Haley flat,” Rissveds yelled, alerting Batten’s mechanic, Jerome Alix, to the unfolding situation.
Batten skidded to a halt in the pit, the medals disappearing up the trail with Rissveds and Stigger. “Grab some water, breathe,” Alix told Batten as he began a wheel swap.
In that moment, for as much work as Batten has done to channel her inner champion, it was a reservoir of strength and resilience she had discovered in a darker time that she drew on now. She turned away only for a moment before she heard Alix screaming her name.
“Haley!”
The bike was ready before she was. She quickly jumped back on and sped off.
From then on, it was full speed ahead. “At some point I wanted it so bad and had so much adrenaline from that, I didn’t even feel pain in my legs,” Batten recounted two months after the race. “I just wanted it so bad, and I could just go as fast as I wanted. I had nothing to lose so I just raced all in from then on.”
That race mentality would see Batten slip past Rissveds during the final lap, sprint through the feed zone, and cross the line for a silver medal. It’s the first medal by an American mountain biker at the Olympics since Georgia Gould in 2012, and the best American performance, woman or man, ever.
The highs and lows of the 90-minute race in Paris – seeing the medals in reach and then slip away before having to fight back – is a perfect encapsulation of Batten’s career as a whole. While filled with race-winning highs, she has also fought concussion and injury. And it’s in all of those moments that she found the mental resolve to forge ahead into uncharted territory.
Haley Batten’s life began in Fort Collins, where she was born to Cathy and Patrick Batten on September 19, 1998. By the time Haley was nine, the family had moved west to Park City, Utah, where Batten’s mountain bike life began.
Park City is a haven for summer and winter recreation. Situated on the opposite side of Guardsman Pass from Salt Lake City, the town features panoramic views looking out on ski slopes and endless miles of singletrack. Living within eyesight of Park City’s Olympic ski jump, the Batten household was naturally an active family, from mountain biking and hiking to Nordic and alpine skiing.
Haley and her brother Nash would join their parents for outings, and it was mountain biking that caught Haley’s interest. Patrick was getting into racing in those years, joining Park City’s mid-week races and the local weekend scene along with his kids.
Cathy used the words resilient, positive, and determined when describing her daughter as a child. Haley also found a love for competition. “She was very motivated to be the best she could be,” Cathy told me during a recent phone call.
Haley was so motivated that she started lining up with the boys at races and even beating them. The boys respected her, Batten said. They would shuttle together, ride technical trails, and sprint sprint to the line, all of it feeling normal.
In 2012, the US Mountain Bike National Championships were held in Sun Valley, Idaho. Batten rode to victory in the junior 13-14 category, beating Hailey Swirbul by 7 seconds. Already riding the high of the win, the seeds of Batten’s Olympic aspirations were planted when USA Cycling’s London 2012 mountain bike team was announced at the podium ceremony. Gould and Lea Davison would represent at the Games the following month (and they went 1-2 at nationals), as would Sam Schultz and Todd Wells, also finishing 1-2 in Sun Valley.
“It was then when I realized, ‘Oh, the sport I love is also in the Olympics,’ and from then, I was like, ‘I want to go all-in and see if I can do that.’”
Batten only got faster. One year for her birthday, her parents reached out to Gould, who was living in Fort Collins, Colorado at the time, to ask if she would go on a ride with the junior rider. Gould agreed, and was quickly impressed by Batten’s fitness and skill.
“I have just such a vivid picture of looking over my shoulder and being like, oh my gosh, she’s still there,” Gould said.
Around this time, Cathy Batten said her daughter voiced a desire for a coach and more of a structured plan. Haley also began looking for sponsorships, even heading to Interbike in Las Vegas to hand out her resume, which resulted in a grassroots sponsorship from Santa Cruz Bicycles.
The Sea Otter Classic in 2013 was a breakout moment in her junior career. Batten lined up on the Laguna Seca race track alongside future pros like Kate Courtney and Hannah Finchamp (now Otto) in the junior 15-18 category. The Battens weren’t familiar with names outside of the Utah scene, and didn’t know that Courtney, in particular, was one of the fastest juniors in the country.
Courtney and Batten were the strongest in the field, gapping their competitors while they weaved through the coastal hills, fire roads, and singletrack of Fort Ord National Monument. When they made it back to the finish at Laguna Seca after nearly two hours of racing, Courtney crossed the line the winner, and Batten was 31 seconds behind on her tail.
A short time later, Dario Fredrick got in touch. He was the director of the Specialized-backed Whole Athlete squad, one of the top development teams in the country at the time. It was at this point that Cathy Batten realized that mountain bike racing could turn into something more, but Haley was more oblivious. “I didn’t even know what Whole Athlete was,” she said, too busy living in the moment of racing bikes as a teenager to realize the career path that lay ahead.
“I do think that race at Sea Otter was a huge jump for me in that maybe other people were aware of what I was doing,” Batten reflected. “I started to realize that other people believed in me and I could get support for this crazy basic thing.”
For 2016, Batten signed with the all-female Luna Pro Team (later called the Clif Pro Team) on Gould’s recommendation. She continued to impress as she moved into the U23 ranks, earning World Cup podiums along the way. The rise of the best athlete in a generation is punctuated with the highs of success, but Batten still had plenty of lows to overcome as she moved through the ranks competing as a junior and U23 in Europe. She would land top-10s and some podiums, but other times she would be at the back of the pack, doubting herself.
“I always believed that if I had a capable body and a capable mind, I could figure it out with the right tools and the right resources,” she said. “I still have that belief to this day, but I think there were lots of times of doubt throughout my development. I think those challenges have made me the athlete I am today but it definitely wasn’t easy”
Batten really caught the world’s attention in 2021, her first year in the elite World Cup field (now called the World Series). The series opened in Albstadt, Germany, and the early season race was a key moment for Olympic qualification for the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Games. Then riding for Trinity Racing, Batten rode to a third-place finish in her first elite XCO start, behind none other than Lecomte and Ferrand-Prevot.
If that turned heads, the following week in Nove Mesto, Czechia really got people talking. The short track race was a muddy affair, with slippery conditions and aggressive racing leading to a split field. Ferrand-Prevot hit the deck hard, and shortly after Lecomte and Batten found themselves in a two-woman break with one lap to go. Batten hit the front on the finish straight, putting pressure on the 21-year-old French racer. The course took a 180-degree turn, and Lecomte slid out, handing the lead to Batten who rode the final lap solo to take the win.
Lecomte took victory in the XCO, but Batten rode in for silver, making her a clear pick for Team USA’s three-rider women’s Olympic team (Courtney and Erin Huck got the other two spots).
Batten was just 22 years old, and in her first elite season. As USA Cycling’s performance director, Jim Miller, has said, it’s common for athletes to be a bit wide-eyed at their first Games, overcome by the scale and importance of the event. But not Batten; she finished ninth in Tokyo, the top American in both the women’s and men’s fields.
It was a great result, but she wanted more. The medal positions are all that anybody really remembers at the Olympics, and Batten was on a hunt for the podium. “I had big goals at that Olympics. I’d been on a couple podiums that year in the World Cup already, and I was definitely hoping for a medal,” she told me.
While Batten was dreaming big in Tokyo, she knew she was still young and medals at Paris and Los Angeles, in 2028, were long-range goals. In the three years between the rescheduled 2021 Games and Paris, she set out to become an even better athlete. Through her career, Batten has learned to revel in preparing for and competing in the sport’s top events, the A-level races where everybody is at their peak and the pressure is the highest.
When she was younger, Batten was motivated by the shiny things – winning, standing on top of the podium, or being an Olympian. The big moments still motivate her, but she’s learned to love the process that is necessary to perform at the Olympics or World Championships. Digging into the details of nutrition, training, riding skills, and mindset feed her.
As Cathy Batten describes, “Haley had the ability to be truly exhilarated by adversity. Getting caught in a blizzard, or up on the mountain after dark, doing intervals in five inches of slush up Royal Street [a road in Park City which averages nearly 16% over its 500-meter length], and epic rides in the rain and cold in Squamish [British Columbia], it was always game on. It fueled her and made her feel the thrill of life.”
A week before the Paris Olympics, Batten was in Annecy, France with Specialized trade teammates and fellow Olympians Christopher Blevins and Martin Vidaure for a training camp. Reality began to sink in that she was just a few days away from the most important race of her life, one for which she had been preparing for the past three three years and, honestly, ever since that day in Sun Valley more than a decade ago.
The nerves began racing through her head as fast as an XCO racer speeding around a track.
You’re an elite rider.
You want a medal.
You’ve worked so hard . You don’t understand how hard it is when you’re young.
And then you’re there.
You want it so bad, but you know that everything has to go right for it to come together.
She reached out to her former teammate Gould for advice. The two didn’t keep in close contact, but the bronze medalist, now a mother of two living in Vermont, was happy to help. She’d had similar experiences back when they first met when Batten was a junior.
“It was really cool to have her support and kind of learn from her a little bit,” said Batten of Gould’s help. Encouraged, she reached out to others as well. “Just having that support from a lot of people I called – like, a lot of people – just helped me work through those nerves.”
Sometime after the text message pep talk, Batten sent Gould a picture of her number plate – No. 11. It was the same one that Gould had in London. The parallels didn’t stop there. Gould also had a poor start in London and had to fight back. The parallels with Batten’s experience, Gould said, were uncanny.
It’s a cliché of sorts to say that you should enjoy once-in-a-lifetime experiences in the moment, but after talking with Gould and others in her orbit, Batten felt that she really could do just that. She could soak in the Olympic village and all the hype, soak in the “special energy” of representing her country, of having her family on hand to watch in person, of an atmosphere that no other race offers. “I was so free. I was so happy to be there. All week I was just in my happy place,” she said.
On race day, she was dialed in. “My mind was just so clear. On the start line I could feel the energy, but I knew that’s what I wanted. I was able to soak it in a really positive way,” she said.
Perhaps it’s that mental clarity that allowed her to stay calm during the unexpected moments in the race, or the setbacks throughout her career.
Batten had identified the three-year period between Tokyo and Paris as her opportunity to refine her physical, technical, and mental skills to get that all-important medal. But the path was anything but straight and smooth, interrupted by several serious health issues, including two concussions and their aftereffects. The first was in 2022, one week before she raced the Cape Epic. It wasn’t bad, she said, but it was a wakeup call to the impacts of a head hit. In the aftermath, she couldn’t train, so she meditated every day and worked on her mental game.
“I knew that if I couldn’t train physically, I just needed to focus on my mind,” she said. “That was the only thing that I could train in a way, or get stronger at. And it wasn’t just for performance, it was for life, like how can I be and apply myself as best as possible every day?”
It’s taken years for Batten to cultivate this mindset, that “champion’s mind,” as she called it. Yes, you can feel calm and prepared on a start line, but what do you do when you have a bad start or get a flat tire? Those in-the-moment decisions are what can turn a good racer into a great racer, or an average rage into a career-defining one.
It wasn’t just hitting the deck that caused setbacks. In 2020, Batten was diagnosed with Inducible Laryngeal Obstruction, a condition often confused with asthma where the vocal cords constrict, making it hard to breathe. It’s the same thing Jolanda Neff struggled with this year, causing her to sit out the race in Paris.
Batten has had to train her upper body and neck muscles with breathing exercises and speech therapy to make sure the muscles don’t constrict. In races, she has to work on her breathing from the start to make sure she is ready when it gets really hard and the muscles might start to tighten.
Batten is steadfast that all the challenges along her career path have helped her learn and develop into the athlete she is today. The wins boost confidence, but losing – and learning how to salvage a bad day – help too.
“When you want to win races so bad and set really high goals, you have to train your mind,” Batten said. “You have to figure out how to listen to your body and all the small elements of your mentality that affect race day.”
As Cathy Batten observed, Haley is extremely positive and has an innate ability to process information and move forward. Combine a strong mind with a strong work ethic, fitness, skills, race craft, and an entourage of support staff, and you get a world-class performance like the one in Paris.
How has Batten found the mental strength to persevere through setbacks and find peak performance? She said she doesn’t work with a mental coach or sports psychologist, but rather gains insights from her team around her. She is coached by three-time Olympic gold medalist Kristin Armstrong and has coaches for skills and strength work, who all give her “little gems” of wisdom. Outside of cycling, she decompresses by reading books, listening to podcasts, cooking and baking, and skiing and surfing during the offseason. She wants to pick up her old ukulele habit again.
She’s also been working on completing an undergraduate degree in learning sciences since 2017 and is expected to earn it this spring. She started her studies at Quest University in Squamish, Canada, a private school with an unconventional approach to education, where degrees are built around a question. Quest closed in August 2023, but while she studied there, Batten’s question was: How can education be optimized to inspire? She’s always been curious about solving big problems, and in Batten’s mind, that always comes back to education. She’s not sure how that future career may look, exactly, but she wants to “design an education system that’s effective and helps make stand out humans.” (She has since continued her coursework at Prescott College.)
In September, Batten traveled to Snowshoe, West Virginia for the UCI Marathon Mountain Bike World Championships. It was a chance to race for the rainbow stripes at home and the scheduling worked well with the final two World Series rounds in North America, with Batten sitting in third place in the overall standings.
A slew of other XCO racers had the same idea, and the first hour of the race saw Batten riding well at the front with other World Series stars. She felt good, and enjoyed the slippery roots and technical terrain of the mythical Appalachians.
“You know when you can just feel that you’re in good form and you’re riding well, and you have an opportunity to really succeed at the race? I really felt that way that day,” she said.
But before the first feed zone, a slippery section took her out. Batten said it was a minor wash out, and she barely hit her head, helmet undamaged. Dispatched from the lead group of women, she jumped back on her bike and continued down the course. She made it back to the group, but as the pace rose on a climb, Batten could tell that something wasn’t right. With previous signs of concussion ringing through her head, she pulled out of the race at the third feed zone.
She was still hopeful that she could compete the next weekend in front of a home-country crowd in Lake Placid, New York to shore up her position in the World Series overall standings, but concussion symptoms still lingered. Light headaches set in after rides, and when she pre-rode the track, she could tell that her reaction time was slow. The same was true the following week as the season concluded in Mont-Sainte-Anne, Canada, and Batten didn’t feel like she could safely race the technical track with limited mid-week preparation time.
Maybe a younger Batten would have made a different choice, would have pushed through no matter what. But the setbacks that have shaped her as much as her success helped put the final piece in place of her foundation of resiliency: her support system.
“As an athlete, you’re so determined to race,” Batten said. “I mean, I probably cried a few times at both Lake Placid and Mont-Sainte-Anne just with the disappointment of not being able to do what I love. So that’s where when you want it so bad, I need the right people to help me make those decisions. I make sure to surround myself with those people, and I’m lucky that I’ve done that over the years.”
With an Olympic silver medal in hand, Batten states explicitly that her ultimate goal is gold. This year was a massive step toward that goal, but Batten admits that she still has a lot to work on. Beyond further dialing in her mental and physical fitness, she’s acutely aware that the sport of mountain biking is a precarious work environment for a professional racer.
The race calendar changes every year, plus Warner Bros. Discovery and the UCI have introduced structural changes to the mountain bike rulebook for next year, stratifying teams into two tiers for qualification. As a podium-capable rider on one of the sport’s top teams, Batten is relatively insulated from some of these changes, but XCO is already a different sport from when Batten was a junior, and the sport will continue to evolve.
As Batten intimately knows, one split second can alter the course of weeks, months, and years of preparation and planning. I asked her if she ever reckons with the fact that her body and mind are among her greatest assets as an athlete, and yet also so fragile. She’s well aware, she said, and hopes she can use that awareness to become a more sustainable athlete. She knows the impacts of concussion, for example, so perhaps strength and skills training can help her better prepare for the inevitable crashes and sketchy moments.
She also recognizes the value of her education and interests outside of sport. “If it all went away one day, I would want to make sure that I know that there’s another life outside of it and I can still pursue my life as fully as possible in a lot of different ways,” she said.
The sport is also constantly cycling in new talent. Racers like Ferrand-Prevot may no longer be a threat, but by the time LA 2028 rolls around, there will be a new generation of names to watch out for, in addition to current young guns like Puck Pieterse and Mona Mitterwallner.
Batten welcomes new riders and new challenges with open arms. A deeper women’s field is only a good thing. She wants the races to be faster and the battles harder. It’s another indication of a mind that’s always ready to keep climbing.
“If I can’t accept that the competition will get better, then I’m not strong enough to be better,” she said. “I think it’s important to always take on that challenge as a good thing, you know.
“And, yeah, I’m excited for that.”
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