UMass Magazine Online

Fall 2002

Departments

Great Sport

Features

Great Sport

Queen of the road...
Soigneur Stephanie Roussos '87 is nurse, sister, mom

Ben Barnhart




	Soigneur Stephanie Roussos '87 (photo by Ben Barnhart)

Stephanie Roussos ’87 and a half-dozen of her friends, all "soigneurs" for professional bicycling teams competing in the Housatonic Valley Road Race in Danbury, are gathered at roadside trading stories, laughing and gossiping when her two-way radio crackles to life. The riders are just 30 minutes from the feed zone comes the message, and the party quickly breaks up and everyone gets to work.

In a flurry of motion fueled by nervous energy, Roussos fills small sacks, called musette bags, with water bottles, snack bars and gel packs, and takes her place in the line of soigneurs waiting to feed the racers who are 50 miles into the 120-mile race. Roussos holds out each bag, which is adeptly snagged by its rider as the peloton whizzes past–like a pit-stop without stopping.

Within minutes Roussos has dispensed food and drink to the six members of her 7-Up/Nutra Fig team and the silent wave of bicycles has vanished down the road. Roussos climbs into the team car, a giant Ford van laden with bike racks, food and clothing and plastered with team and sponsor logos, and speeds off to the next feed zone.

Translated literally, soigneur means "nurse," but "mom" may be a more accurate definition of the bicycling term. The soigneur is responsible for the general health and well-being of the team and does everything from making travel arrangements – sometimes even carrying luggage to hotel rooms – to buying food and supplies and, most importantly, giving post-race rubdowns to those overworked legs.

Roussos began racing bikes herself while still in high school in New Bedford and she joined the UMass Bicycle Racing Club while studying exercise science here. Eager to avoid "real life" after graduation, she convinced her parents and herself that she would enroll in graduate school so she could stay in Amherst and continue racing. She twice won the district road championship and placed ninth in nationals in 1990 before a pair of crashes left her with a broken sternum, mangled finger and shattered confidence.

"That put a damper on my cycling career," she says with a dollop of understated sarcasm. Graduate school never materialized, either, mostly because she realized she loved bicycling much more than her planned field of study: entomology. Under some pressure from her parents to make something of herself, she fled to Cambridge and enrolled in the Massage Institute of New England.

"It was close and easy," she says of the decision to study massage therapy. "Sometimes you just take the path of least resistance. When you look at my life, it looks like I had this grand plan but I think it was mostly all just a delaying tactic."

That strategy has worked quite well for Roussos, who is now one of the most experienced and most sought-after soigneurs in the country. Often called "Queen" by her colleagues, Roussos has worked for most of the top U.S. teams and has traveled the world over in their support.

"I’ve been to China, Mexico, France and all over the U.S. twelve thousand million times," she says with a laugh. "But the downside is that you don’t have your own life, really. You belong to a bunch of bike racers."

But while her job is purely support and assistance, Roussos also wields a great deal of power since she often works with bike racers when they’re most vulnerable, as tension mounts before a big race or during rubdowns after a hard ride.

"I’ll never criticize them," she says. "Anything they say negative I’ll try to make it positive somehow. I’ll say, ‘wow, you look really fit, like you’ve lost a lot of weight,’ when really they’ve gained 10 pounds. Or during a massage I’ll say, ‘your legs feel great,’ when really they feel terrible. I have to put a positive spin on everything." Roussos says this psychological manipulation works even though everyone, racers included, knows what’s going on.

"I think they have enough doubts," Roussos says of bike racers, who are renowned for their fragile egos. "Sometimes they just want to hear that things aren’t so bad, even if they know it’s bull."

When Roussos works with men’s teams like 7-Up/Nutra Fig, she’s as much sister as soigneur since she’s the only woman in the team’s entourage. That means being just one of the guys and sharing hotel rooms, meals and long van rides with a half-dozen high-strung bicycle racers, but Roussos prefers it that way.

"Men are not competitive with me so they’ll tell me stuff they won’t tell anyone else," Roussos explains. "I’d much rather be with a bunch of guys – they’re more simple," she adds with a laugh.

Starting pay for a soigneur is about $2,000 per month during the racing season which begins in California in February and stretches into September. There are no health benefits, vacations or holidays, and almost every weekend means working a race somewhere. The hours are brutal, especially during multi-day stage races when Roussos might begin her workday at 5 a.m. and finally get to bed at midnight after three hours of massage. The logical question is: Why do you do it?

"It’s like a suspension of reality," Roussos explains. "When I’m on the road I have no bills and my problems are simple: Do I have enough water bottles? Do I know how to get to the feed zone?"

Roussos says burnout is a huge factor in the business. "Soigneurs will always tell you that this year is their last," she says. "But it never is the last year because there’s nothing that can replace the excitement. Especially for me, since I was a bike racer, to be at the biggest races like the USPro championships in Philly or in San Francisco with eight thousand trillion people watching is so incredibly exciting."

Back in Danbury, a long snarl of traffic waits impatiently for a police officer to wave cars through an intersection blocked with sawhorses to keep drivers off the race course’s finishing loop. But with the leading bicycles speeding toward the last feed zone, Roussos has no time to wait, and she takes matters into her own hands. Swiftly, she veers the huge Ford van to the right, bouncing over the curb and into an adjacent parking lot as the vehicle’s contents – water bottles, snack bars, clothing and bicycle gear – swish about the interior like flotsam. A handful of other team cars, driven by other soigneurs, follow Roussos’ lead.

That kind of maneuver is not something Roussos would attempt in real life but in the guise of soigneur, she swoops to the aid of her team like Wonder Woman.

"I’m not very aggressive in my life," Roussos says, "but with the team I just do what I have to do, and that’s kind of empowering."

[top of page]

Queen of the road...

Sports: More Images