Competing in the Olympics began to seem like a real possibility for Dr. Thorburn. She began training with the Webcor Builders women’s cycling team in Palo Alto and won the 24 km national women’s cycling elite time trial championship in Redlands, Calif., which earned her the opportunity to compete in the 2004 Olympic Games held in Athens, Greece, with teammates Kristin Armstrong and Dede Berry.
On the Webcor team, Dr. Thorburn worked with Karen Brems, world champion in the inaugural women’s time trial event held in Italy in 1994 who also raced in the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Through biking, Dr. Thorburn also met her husband, Ted Huang, a former Olympic windsurfer who competed in the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta and the 2000 Olympics in Australia, finishing ninth and 13th, respectively.
“In preparation for the Olympics, I trained four days a week, doing a combination of cycling and exercises to build my core strength, such as Pilates,” Dr. Thorburn says. “I was completing my fellowship in rheumatology at the time and was almost done with my clinical requirements. Everyone at Stanford was very supportive.”
At the Olympic Games in Athens, Dr. Thorburn competed in both the road race and time trial events, finishing fourth in the time trial, a bittersweet end to her first Olympics.
“It’s ingrained in Olympic athletes to go for that medal, so to finish fourth, it’s easy to feel as though your ride wasn’t worthwhile,” Dr. Thorburn says.
The following year she began her postdoctoral research at the University of California, San Francisco, and continued to race in her free time. She went on to win a bronze medal in the 2006 Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) World Race Championships, one of the selection criteria needed to compete in the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.
“I decided to continue racing and training for the Beijing games, although looking back, I’m not sure how I balanced it all,” says Dr. Thorburn, who was a rheumatology fellow during her first Olympic games and a practicing physician for the second games in 2008. “I was granted a four-month leave of absence to go to Europe to compete and prepare for the Summer Olympics.”
In Beijing, Dr. Thorburn found that although the race course was harder, with a longer climb than in Athens, the Chinese were very prepared and had even managed to take care of the worrisome pollution problem. Although she narrowly missed a spot on the podium, finishing in fifth place just three seconds off the bronze medal, she savors her Olympic experiences.
