SPORTS FLASHBACK 2000: Steinbach racer is Manitoba’s best

With aircraft taxiing in the background, Manitoba’s top ranked mountain bike racer, Greg Penner of Steinbach, describes his passion for racing bicycles.

An interview with The Carillon was conducted at Harv’s Air Service, the family business where Penner works as a part-time dispatcher, when he isn’t training.

“My parents are my flexible employers,” chuckles the 22-year-old mountain bike expert.

Penner, who has set lofty goals for himself as an international competitor, has been working at his chosen sport, since he first caught the bug in 1993 as a Grade 10 student at the Steinbach Regional Secondary School. That was when he started riding recreationally in Sandilands Provincial Forest.

Two years later, he was part of the SRSS team that won a seven-race provincial high school mountain bike series. After graduation, Penner moved to Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada’s mountain biking mecca. He worked in a retail paint store in Abbotsford to pay the bills, while spending most of his spare time on a bicycle.

During his time in British Columbia, Penner’s training intensified, and race results kept on improving. In that first year in BC, he moved up to the senior ranks, winning a couple of Vedder Mountain pre-season races.

“The turning point for me was 1997 when I got destroyed in a couple of races and became demoralized.”

It was at that time, Penner decided to dedicate himself even more to training and to compete in as many events as possible, racing in two dozen events that year. The strategy worked, with Penner moving up through the classes, placing first and third in a couple of races that had 50 to 100 riders competing.

Competing on a higher-level BC team in 1998, he moved through the expert class, moving into Pro-Elite in 1999, where he garnered a second-place finish.

He returned to Manitoba last fall and lives in Steinbach with his parents and 17-year-old brother Luke, who has shown some interest in cycling as well.

Flying is the family business and both mom and dad and Greg’s older brother, Adam, are all pilots. Penner says maybe one day he’ll take up flying, but for now the only training that interests him is on land with his bicycles.

Now a member of the Manitoba cycling team, which includes Gilles Corbeil of Oakbank and Murray Carter of Ste Anne, Penner won the first Manitoba Pro-Elite race of the year in mid-April at Grand Beach, completing the 38 km race in 1 hour, 40 minutes.

Needless to say, the mountain bike terrain is different when comparing Manitoba to BC. In Manitoba, a typical course would include numerous, smaller but steeper hills. In BC there may be only one hill on a particular circuit, but that “hill” may require bikers to go up the side of a mountain.

Penner also competes in road racing, but his primary focus remains on mountain biking. He trains every morning on his road bike, riding 400-600 kilometers a week. The morning he spoke to The Carillon he had just completed a little three-hour jaunt to Roseau River and back, a 110 km round trip.

The summer racing season has already begun, and Penner will be racing across Canada in either road racing events or mountain bike every weekend until September. He will travel to many of the events with the Manitoba team in a 15-passenger van. He is particularly keen on doing well at the two national championship events in July, the road racing championships in Ontario and the mountain biking championships in Quebec.

The top cyclists in the world peak between the ages of 25 to 30. Four years from now, when the 2004 Summer Olympics roll around again, Penner will be 26. Although it is any elite athlete’s dream to compete in the Olympics, Penner’s immediate goal is to become one of the top 15 riders on the Canada Cup circuit this year.