On Tuesday, June 25, 1996, an international women's bicycle race came to Arbon Valley. The eighth stage of the PowerBar International Women's Challenge was a 60-mile road race from Pocatello to the valley, and national Olympic teams were in the field.
The story comes from Utah papers that followed the race, and in them Arbon Valley appears only in schedules, previews and a line of results. Nothing in these papers describes the riders' route, where the finish line was, or who in the valley came out to watch. What they do tell is when the race came, who was riding, and who won.
The race
The Women's Challenge began in 1984 as the Ore-Ida Challenge, named for its sponsor, the Ore-Ida frozen-potato brand. In a preview of the 1996 race the Salt Lake Tribune recalled that Rebecca Twigg had won the first one, beating 52 other women over five stages and 161 miles, and said the race "has been a showcase for women's cycling." By 1995 it had grown to twelve stages over 533 miles, and that year the field sometimes rode in a snowstorm. That preview, printed on November 1, 1995, already listed the 1996 stage that would come to the valley: the Pocatello/Arbon Valley Road Race, Stage 8.
The 1996 race ran from June 18 to 30 over 650 miles of Idaho and Utah roads. The Park Record of Park City, Utah, wrote on June 1 that it was considered by some "the toughest race in the world for women cyclists," and that PowerBar had announced 24 teams, with Olympic riders from ten nations among them. It was the last major women's race before the Olympic Games in Atlanta. A PowerBar advertisement in the Wasatch Mountain Times printed the full schedule. The riders opened near Boise, raced from Stanley to Ketchum and from Pocatello to Malad City, then crossed into Utah for a circuit race at Orem and a stage from Midway to Park City, before a stage from Logan back into Idaho at Montpelier. It set the Pocatello/Arbon Valley Road Race for 4:30 p.m. on June 25, with a rest day at Burley on June 26.
The day before
On Sunday, June 23, Anna Wilson of the Australian Olympic team won the stage from Midway to Park City and took the overall lead. On Monday the race went 68 miles from Logan to Montpelier, Idaho. The Park Record reported that 95 riders were left in the race and that a third of the field fell during the day. Anne Samplonius of the Canadian Olympic team won, and Wilson kept the lead.
On that stage Laura Charameda, whom the Park Record called a U.S. Olympic alternate and the race's sprint leader, carried a bottle of ketchup in her back pocket for luck. "It's my secret weapon," she joked: after she was dropped on the hills, it would help her "catch up." She finished 61st that day.
Pocatello to Arbon Valley
On the day of the Arbon Valley stage the Ogden Standard-Examiner told its readers: "Today's race is a 60-mile trip from Pocatello to Arbon Valley in Idaho." The valley lies southwest of Pocatello.
The result was printed the next day in a short Associated Press list datelined Pocatello. Laura Charameda, riding for the U.S. Olympic team, won the stage. Much of the list is garbled in the scanned text: Charameda's own time and the names of the riders in second and third place are lost. The riders in second through fifth place were all given the same time, 2 hours, 35 minutes and 49 seconds, so they evidently crossed the line together. Fourth was Heather Hall of Ogden, Utah. The Salt Lake Tribune had named a Heather Hall Albert among four Utah women with Challenge experience who planned to ride the 1996 race as a team, probably the same rider.
The riders rested at Burley the next day and went on west across southern Idaho. Anna Wilson won the 1996 Challenge, ahead of Clara Hughes of Canada and Dede Demet of the United States. The race was held for the last time in 2002.
What is not known
The papers read for this post do not say where in the valley the stage finished, at Arbon, at Pauline or elsewhere, or which road the riders took from Pocatello. The stage numbers also differ: an Associated Press report called the Logan–Montpelier stage the sixth, where the race's schedule and the other papers made it the seventh and the Arbon Valley race the eighth. Nor have they shown whether the Challenge came back to the valley in other years. Idaho papers closer to the valley have not yet been searched for it.
On this site: the histories of Arbon and Pauline and West Fork. If you saw the riders come through in 1996, the archive would welcome your memory.