Catherine Marsal, Head Coach

Specialties: Road Racing, Elite Development, Track Racing, Time Trial

Home: Copenhagen, Denmark (Originally of France)

Client levels accepted: Individual, SemiCustom, Custom, Consultation.

Available to take on all levels of athletes both racing and non-racing

Available for seminars, camps, clinics, and team direction on a contractual basis.

It is the rare cyclist that is born with extraordinary talent who also has the passion and understanding of tactics, training and teaching. Head Coach Catherine Marsal is one of those cyclists. Not only has she been a four-time World Champion and a Tour de France winner, she has 15 French Championships under her belt as well as having participated in four Olympic Games. Just as importantly, Catherine is putting her knowledge and experience forward for other cyclists of all ages and abilities to improve their own performances.

French, and born into a family of eight kids as the first sister after five brothers, Catherine quickly learned that if she were going to find her place with her five older brothers that she’d have to fight! She began cycling at ate 11 in order to show her brothers what she could do. In little time, she was detected by the French federation and put onto the national arena. Her first national title came at age 13, and her first World Championship title came in Bergamo, Italy on the road at 16. By 1990 at age 19 she was Elite World Champion, and in that same year she won the Tour of Texas, Tour de l’Aude, Tour of Italy, the Giro d’Italia, Tour of Norway, Tour of the EEC, and her National Championship!

Catherine is awesome -- better than having a conscience! I feel that I am getting stronger already and have found that it is much less (physically) demanding to train correctly. ~Ben Skrainka

Being successful at such a young age was as much a curse as a blessing. Her strength at that time and now was her determination and capacity to be able to extract everything out of her mind while racing. But as a World Champion at age 19, the price to pay was sometimes painful. To elite athlete, only one thing was important: winning! She faced three long years where started from scratch and learned humility and modesty. She needed a challenge, and she finally found it in the Hour Record. The record had been held at that time by rival Frenchwoman Jeannie Longo for 6 years. Very very few people believed that she could do it, and it was as if her attempt was attacking a monument of women’s cycling. At times Catherine even doubted herself. “But inside of me was this light fighting,” Catherine says. She broke it handily with 47,112km/hour, gaining 800 meters over the record of Longo.

Challenging the record taught her to use pain as a source of energy and focus, living for one goal, day after day. Breaking the record gave her a breath of fresh air into her racing career, sparing her onto a second place at the Road Race World Championships that year and third place two years later. She signed her first Pro contract in Italy in 1998. She continued as a pro, riding with such teams as the superpower Saturn in 2002 with Petra Rossner. She finished out her career with the Rona team in 2003 and the Nobili team in 2004. A career total of near 150 wins, and 11 World Championship podium appearances on the road, the track and in the time trial summed up her well-rounded ability.

“Cycling has been my school of life, teaching me everything I know. I have learned what it takes really to be at the top and how ‘easy’ and quick it can be to fall back to a starting point,” says Catherine. In her coaching as in her riding, she has gone above and beyond the necessary means to be a coach, achieving her 1^st Sate Degrees in Coaching in France in 2004/2005. Since then she has worked as the Sport Director of Team SATS, where she learned the sport from the team car view. In 2006, in addition to her individual coaching, Catherine will be working as a Sport Director for the Italian Team Nobili Rubinetterie Menikini Cogeas ABD.

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