A Very Challenging Champion
Award-Winning **VIDEO**
Skippy Massey
Humboldt Sentinel
Don’t tell her she can’t do something. She won’t take no
for an answer. And she believes nothing is impossible.
Women’s motocross is a fast emerging sport. Motocross has been a predominantly male pastime, particularly in the pro and international arenas. However, things are changing as the popular sport keeps on evolving.
Leading the charge is a young pioneering woman in the field: Ashley Fiolek, an AMA Motocross Champion and consistent top three finisher hailing from the sunshine state of Florida.
Ashley’s route into the sport wasn’t an orthodox one in the least. Ashley herself has been profoundly deaf since birth.
Her family moved to Augustine, Florida, because it was home to the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, the largest specialized school of its kind. She studied ballet, ran track, and played baseball, which was about as wild and reckless as it got. When she finished eighth grade, her parents decided to begin homeschooling her.
Some years before, as a child, Ashley’s parents noticed her passion for riding bikes. She used to ride on the front of her mother’s 4-wheeler or her father’s bike, and they often went to her grandfather’s house in Northern Michigan where she rode through the woods for hours. Around the age of three, her parents gave her a Yamaha PW50. Despite not liking the training wheels, the youngster’s career path was irreversibly set from this point and no amount of ballet and athletics was going to change that.
She was originally misdiagnosed as “mildly retarded” by doctors and was shy and introverted as a young child, until her family encouraged her to join the amateur motocross circuit.
Ashley started racing in 1990 at the tender age of seven. She soon shone as an emerging talent.
In 2008, Ashley won her first WMX Pro National Championship title, the youngest female ever to do so. In 2009, she won her first X-Games gold medal, cementing her position as a top rider and taking herself and the sport to a bright new future at the same time. In 2010, she won her second consecutive gold medal.
It didn’t come easy, though. In 2009, she finished Pennsylvania’s Steel City Railway race in great pain due to a collarbone fracture due to a spill. In 2011, at X-Games 17, Fiolek crashed during practice and knocked herself unconscious. In 2012 she again crashed again, this time suffering a concussion and a fractured tailbone during the WMX Moto 2 race in Lakewood, Colorado. Despite her injuries, however, Fiolek still continued to race; with determination, daring, an ongoing disability, and a whole lotta grit.
She became the first female rider featured in action on the cover of Transworld Motocross Magazine to advance women’s racing in the US. In 2009, she made headlines again when she became the first female to be signed to the American Honda Racing factory team.
In 2010, Ashley met Noora Moghaddas, a top motocross competitor in the Middle East, and the two women became friends while riding. They soon found out they shared similar goals for improving conditions for women and girls in their respective countries.
“Noora continues to help Iranian women learn how to ride, race and become stronger,” Fiolek said. “I hope to be a part of that important mission with her so we can share our love of motocross with people in other countries.”
“It is great to know our world is really not that big. Even with different languages and cultures, we can all come together and share something we feel passionate about,” she said.
Today, the 23-year-old has to her credit two X-Games gold medals, four AMA Women’s National Motocross Championship titles, garnered a shelf of racing trophies, has been featured in Vogue magazine, made a few appearances in film and on television, and published her first book, Kicking up Dirt.
We’re proud of Ashley and what she has accomplished, and we’re especially proud of her parents.
Despite her obstacles and challenges, Ashley Fiolek just won’t say no. She is determined to succeed, hitting life at full throttle and riding to the top of her game.
~Via Red Bull, AshleyFiolek.com, Vimeo,
Dirt Rider, Honda, and Chris Bloxom
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