Ashton Lambie aims for the America’s Cup, while his wife Chris Birch aims for space
By BERNIE WILSON, AP Sports Writer
SAN DIEGO (AP) — Pushing boundaries and going fast has always been in the blood of cyclists Ashton Lambie and Chris Birch, whether they were racing around velodromes or the gravel roads of the Great Plains.
After all, they had hoped to take part in the Olympic Games in Tokyo three years ago.
When that path ended, the couple began to pursue boundaries that many dream of and few achieve.
Birch completed astronaut training with NASA in March and is now aiming for space. Her first mission will be either to the International Space Station or to the moon as part of the Artemis program.
Lambie is still pedalling, but this time he’s flying over the waves of the Mediterranean in a fantastic looking sloop called the Patriot, trying to win the America’s Cup.
Lambie is a “cyclor” on the New York Yacht Club’s American Magic, one of the crew who pedals recumbent bicycles to provide the power needed to trim the sails as the powerful 75-foot monohull zigzags up and down the course on hydrofoils, its hull completely out of the water.
The Louis Vuitton Cup for the five challengers, including American Magic, begins in Barcelona on Thursday. The winner will compete in the 37th America’s Cup in mid-October against two-time defending champions Emirates Team New Zealand.
Cyclors were introduced in 2017 aboard Team New Zealand’s 50-foot foiling catamaran, which dethroned tech billionaire Larry Ellison’s top team Oracle Team USA.
The idea behind it was that the power of the legs provided more juice for trimming the sails than the arm power previously provided by the powerful grinders that turned the winches of the coffee grinders.
Cyclors were banned in 2021 after competition switched to the AC75 foiling monohulls. But when crew sizes were reduced from 11 to 8 for this America’s Cup, leg power came back to the fore and Cyclors became part of each team’s arsenal. Of the eight-person crew, four are Cyclors. American Magic has 10 Cyclors on its roster, rotating from race to race to stay fresh.
Lambie’s cycling resume includes being the first person to complete an individual pursuit in under four minutes and winning several dozen gravel races, including the 1,060-mile, 72-hour Flint Hills Gravel Ultra in May 2023.
He learned about the opportunity at American Magic through Declan Doyle of SRAM Bike Components, one of his personal sponsors and suppliers to American Magic.
“They were looking for cyclists who were a little more powerful and capable,” Lambie said. “Not necessarily the Tour de France riders who go uphill very fast.”
Lambie had no experience with sailing.
“But I knew how to push the limits and just go fast,” he said. “I guess you can bend the rules a little bit to go as fast as you can, which seems to be a common thread between track racing and the America’s Cup.”
He gained some sailing experience after he and Chris moved to Houston for their astronaut training.
“I’ve done the Lakewood Yacht Club Winter Regatta, so that’s something,” he joked. “I think we would have been second or third. I was just a total hit. We were just hanging out. I lost a little weight. It was fun.”
Now he is competing for the oldest trophy in international sport for a yacht club that once held the “Auld Mug” for 132 years, the longest winning streak in sport.
“Have you seen this guy’s thighs?” Birch said in a video interview with her husband. “When Ashton was on the track, he didn’t necessarily look like a typical track cyclist. Some of your top competitors were these lean, tall Tour de France guys who just have incredible aerobic thresholds, and Ashton is actually a little shorter and very muscular, looks more like a sprinter. I mean, your legs are about as thick as my waist.”
“I have really big legs and I’ve always had big legs,” said Lambie, who also has a distinctive mustache.
Lambie had to learn the basics of sailing and how the cyclists must respond to the helmsman’s many commands as tactics and conditions change.
“Every time there’s a tack, a gybe or a bear away, we go full throttle and it’s pretty intense,” he said. “Our situational awareness has to be better than it was when I got here. You can’t just pedal for 20 minutes and expect to get around the course quickly.”
The sleek-looking Patriot, with a navy blue hull and white deck, was launched in early May. While the Cyclors on the other boats are forward-facing, the American Cyclors are rear-facing and have cockpits with mesh covers.
“I’m incredibly excited about the secret weapon we’ve developed,” said Lambie, who also helped install the fiber optic sensors on the boat. “We’ve never felt like we could win the Cup like we do now, when we realise we’re the only team taking advantage of the huge aerodynamic advantages of recumbent cyclists.”
The legality of the network covers has been questioned by other teams, but they remain in place for now.
Birch and Lambie met while competing for places on national cycling teams.
Birch’s resume is stunning. In cycling, she has won eleven national championships and multiple medals at Pan American and World Championships. She has degrees in mathematics, biochemistry and molecular biophysics, as well as a PhD in bioengineering from MIT.
While training for the Tokyo Olympics, she saw that NASA was accepting applications for the next class of astronauts. She filled out her applications between grueling workouts at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado.
That was in March 2020, just before the pandemic paralyzed the world and the Olympic Games were postponed for a year.
She made it into the Olympic long team and was thus qualified for the race, but was not selected for the short team in Tokyo.
The men’s team did not qualify for a place at the Games.
“It went quite well,” said Lambie.
As part of her astronaut training, Birch practiced spacewalks in a giant pool at the Johnson Space Center, learned to operate the robotic arm on the space station, and participated in splashdown and recovery exercises with the Orion capsule. She is authorized to fly in the rear cockpit of NASA’s modified T-38N Talon training jet and is currently learning to fly the UH-72 Lakota helicopter.
“While I would love to work as a scientist on the moon, doing research and collecting samples, just being part of our return to the moon would be incredible because we are asking such interesting scientific questions,” she said.
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Bernie Wilson has covered sailing for The Associated Press since 1991.
