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MB Grand Prix champ killed in Sunday race
by John Tawa
Nicole
Reinhart, the winner of the Women's Pro cycling race at the Manhattan Beach
Grand Prix one month ago, was killed Sunday after hitting a tree during the
BMC Software Grand Prix Tour of Arlington in Massachusetts.
Reinhart, 24, was in the lead pack with less than one mile remaining in the race when she apparently hit a pothole during a descent and struck a tree head on before her head on the curb.
Despite wearing a helmet, she suffered massive head injuries. Paramedics at the scene could not revive her. She was transported to Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, where she was pronounced dead.
Reinhart was trying to complete a sweep of the four-race BMC series. Had she won the Arlington race, she would have pocketed a $250,000 bonus for herself and her Team Saturn teammates. The two-time U.S. national track cycling champion, originally from Mertztown, Pennsylvania, but living in Oakland, had been having a stellar 2000 campaign, winning at least 14 races.
At Manhattan Beach in August, Easy Reader asked Reinhart whether she still felt fear racing around oval road courses at speeds greater than 35 miles an hour.
"It's not really afraid, it's more aware," she explained. "I'm really aware of whom I'm around in the field. I ride really defensively. Sometimes I'll ride in the wind so I can stay toward the front and stay out of danger.
"But I've been doing it since I was a kid. When you do it as a kid, you crash a couple of times, brush yourself off and get back up." ER