Sometimes athletes find their sport early on. For others it’s the opposite; their sport finds them, sometimes much later. That’s what happened with Cindy Devine, who only discovered mountain biking in her late twenties at first strictly as a social activity. Remarkably, within just a couple years Cindy was the first Canadian ever to win a mountain biking world championship.
Born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where her father Raymond worked on telecommunications towers for Gulf Oil, Cindy’s family moved to North Vancouver when she was four. There Cindy zoomed her first bike, a beautiful gold-flecked Mustang, down woodlots and trails, essentially mountain biking before the term existed. Cindy also lived in the Faroe Islands, where her mother Malvina was born, and in Ruskin, BC for periods.
She played basketball and volleyball at Garibaldi Secondary, but other than occasionally cycling 70km from Ruskin to English Bay to hang out at the beach Cindy didn’t become serious about biking until university. She and friends organized multi-day cycling trips around BC, across Canada, Europe, and even through many South Pacific islands including New Zealand. Back home in BC, after a winter skiing in Whistler her boyfriend Greg introduced her to the mountain bike trails. That led to local races and Cindy just kept winning, first at home and then, after earning her first sponsorship, traveling to NORBA races abroad.
Over a six-year period from 1989-94, Cindy was one of Canada’s great early mountain bikers and among the best in the world. In 1989, she burst onto the world scene winning downhill gold and slalom bronze at the unofficial NORBA world mountain bike championships at California’s Mammoth Mountain.
One year later in 1990 at Durango, Colorado’s Purgatory Ski Resort, Cindy won the first-ever official UCI world downhill mountain bike championship, overcoming a slipped pedal clip to finish less than a second ahead of Whistler teammate Elladee Brown. Today Cindy remains one of only two Canadian women ever to win the downhill world title. In ensuing years at the world championships, Cindy won downhill bronze medals in 1991 (Ciocco, Italy) and 1992 (Bromont, Quebec), as well as top-five finishes in 1993 and 1994.
Cindy was also a five-time undefeated Canadian downhill champion from 1990-94 and a three-time US National downhill champion. She also found success in longer endurance races winning the 1989 Dodge ‘Desert to Sea’ 150-mile mountain bike race from Palm Springs to San Diego.
Cindy was inducted into the World Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 2003.
Written and researched by Jason Beck, Curator of the BC Sports Hall of Fame.