Christopher Blevins plastered a sticky note on his bedroom wall in Durango five years ago. It read “Tokyo 2020.”
The same sticky note stayed up on his wall the next four years at California Polytechnic State University until his lifelong dream of becoming an Olympian came true. The 23-year-old was named by USA Cycling for the team’s one spot in the men’s cross-country mountain bike race July 26 at the Summer Olympic Games in Tokyo.
“It’s momentous,” his mother, Priscilla, said. “It’s the pinnacle of anybody’s athletic career and it’s been a dream of his since forever. He’s worked really hard personally, physically, and he just completed college, so it’s nice when all the ducks fall in line. Things like this don’t happen often.”
Christopher’s father, Field, placed him on a BMX bike at five years old. At that age Christopher couldn’t clip in or out of the bike himself. Throughout elementary and middle school, Blevins raced in BMX national races. He won seven national titles in his age group before age 12, when he also started racing mountain and road bikes.
With Durango being a mecca of mountain biking, Blevins saw a path higher than casually riding trails with friends as he got older.
“I went over to Europe as a 15-year-old, on my road bike, and seeing the cycling culture in Belgium I started to realize the places that biking can take me — both literally on the map and as a career,” he said.
He saw the Olympians, world champions, national champions — top riders who rode through his youth team, Durango DEVO, to get to the next level. Blevins knew that was his pathway to success.
“My job as his younger coach was to show him that it’s fun to ride bikes and all the fun ways to train,” said Chad Cheeney, DEVO co-founder. “I look back at my influence on him as not so much teaching him how to ride, or this trick or that trick, I kept it fun.”
Even though DEVO’s focus was on fun, Blevins was advanced beyond his years. The way he maneuvered his turns and made seemingly effortless jumps and hops all put his racing IQ on a different level.
Taking the cycling scene by storm at a young age, Blevins became a poster athlete for American bike racing. Pairing his national accolades with his interest in 90s rap and songwriting, the cycling community had an emerging star.
Blevins traveled the globe, made his mark on the world stage and appeared headed toward the Olympics. Then the pandemic hit, and he was forced to put off his dreams for one more year.
“I was really lucky and the privilege I had as a cyclist during COVID because it was one of the best socially distanced sports out there,” Blevins said. “… It came to a point where the process of training was the goal itself. It was nice to have that throughout 2020 and then this year now that racing is back.”
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“For Tokyo specifically, there’s going to be a lot of emphasis on dealing with the heat and humidity during training,” he said. “There’s some strategies such as sitting in a sauna after a ride, how to cool yourself and what hydration to have on the bike.”
Blevins will be in France for some fine-tuning in a World Cup race before leaving for the Olympics in two weeks.
When he left his college house back in June, Blevins tore down the sticky note he had on his wall for all those years. For him it was a proud moment. He had done it.
“With the Olympics, it’s the honor of representing Team USA, the magnitude of the event and how much work went into that and just really embracing that and feeling that completely,” he said. “That’s enough motivation as it is.”
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