Versatile Brutsaert now a successful cyclist

People with a special interest in cycling in particular, as well as sports fans in general, might want to keep their eyes and ears open in the near future to see what happens with a very familiar name who has decided to see just how far this sport can take her.

Elke Brutsaert of Orono has just left for Colorado where she will be training for the summer, building up her stamina.

Brutsaert, of course, was a top field hockey and track and field star at Orono High School, and a former captain and one of the top track athletes at the University of Maine.

She’s won several championships in schoolgirl sports and on the college level. She won hurdle titles in the Penobscot Valley Conference and in state competition. In 1987 she was the New England heptathlon champion and also won the New England pentathlon.

In her new-found sport of cycling, Brutsaert had a second and third-place finish in the Collegiate National Biking Championship in Stamford, Calif., May 17-18. That race is sanctioned by the United States Cycling Federation.

Brutsaert was one of five women selected from the eastern region to participate in the nationals. Her eastern team finished second in the time trials and Brutsaert finished third in the criterium, a race consisting of short laps of one mile or less completed 25-30 times.

Dr. Willem Brutsaert said his daughter’s interest in cycling took hold when she spent the 1988-89 college year on an exchange program in Austria.

“She joined a bike club there and started participating in a couple of races and had some wins,” he said. The cyclist won a time trial in the German Citizen Race in Salzburg, and finished seventh in the Austrian Sectional Prestige Classic 54-kilometer race.

Dr. Brutsaert, a cyclist and former track racer himself, met up with his daughter last summer in Belgium and said he didn’t realize it was happening, but discovered “she was teaching me lessons rather than the other way around.”

It was when she returned to the states that Brutsaert started actively competing on the New England circuit where she took several firsts, seconds and thirds.

She was sixth overall in the Killington State Race in Vermont over Labor Day weekend in 1989 and, after wininng the Tour d’Acadia in 1987, came back to win it again last year. She was the first woman finisher and 10th overall of 60 participants in the Black Bear Triathlon. Brutsaert also won the University of Maine Recreational Sports Mountain Bike Race.

Brutsaert will be biking in the Aspen and Boulder area this summer “just to get the mountains under her belt,” according to her father.

Asked what his daughter’s goals were in this sport, Dr. Brutsaert said, “she’s excited about it. She’s still trying to see if she’s good enough, so I guess her goals are as high as one can go.”