UNSTOPPABLE: VICKI GOLDEN
Words by Kirsten Midura | Photography by MacKenzie Hennessey
Below, the bleachers sit silent, vacant, yet cheers arise from a group of onlookers nearby. The public is not permitted at the practice day for the Red Bull Imagination event, but no matter. Vicki Golden’s biggest fans are her peers who ride alongside her this weekend – the top motocross freeriders in the world.
Disguised as a competition, Imagination is, at its core, a family-reunion-cum-field-day for elite athletes in the sport: Those who, having come mostly from racing, have elevated their riding beyond any conventional metric for comparison.
“Freeriding is more art than sport,” explains Jeremy “Twitch” Stenberg, a founding member of Vicki’s first freestyle motocross (FMX) team, the preeminent Metal Mulisha. A world-class rider in his own right, Twitch knows how different this sport is from other competitions. “It’s all up to interpretation,” he says. “Even the competitive element doesn’t quite make sense.”
Indeed, in two short days, the ten riders who have been invited to compete will take on a sea of intersecting motocross jumps, each crest towering above the next. But today is practice day; spirits are high, smiles are ubiquitous, and the athletes are here to help each other and hone their craft.
As usual, the artistry is undeniable in Vicki’s performance. All agree that she is riding as well as she ever has. She makes it look effortless, yet Vicki’s mastery has come from a lifetime of hard work and incalculable physical and emotional sacrifices. Admittedly, Vicki thrives on pushing herself to the limit. “I absolutely love putting in work,” she says. “The more work you put in, the more it pays off.”
Throughout her life, Vicki’s work ethic has been centered undauntingly on dirt bikes, which she gravitated to in her early childhood. “It was mainly because of my dad,” she says. “He was just your average guy going to the track, but I saw him doing it, and it sparked my passion for anything on two wheels.”
Growing up in the outskirts of San Diego, Vicki, her dad, and her friends would bypass the local facilities and carve their own motocross tracks out of the surrounding hillsides. “It was the cheapest way to stay on two wheels,” Vicki explains. “We had more access, but it made it a lot tougher to go up and down big, rocky, rutty hills and just survive on a 50cc.” Those early challenges paid off, and by the ripe age of 8 – only a year after she first swung a leg over a bike – Vicki found herself racing.
At the time, there was no women’s class, despite the presence of multiple female racers. Nevertheless, Vicki flourished when competing against the boys. “It’s just what I got used to at the very beginning,” she explains, “I was always riding with guys on the practice days. It’s my origins; it’s just how it was.” As Vicki describes it, motocross is one of the few sports where you can hit a girl on the track and get away with it. “If they want to take your front wheel and get around you,” she says, “they’re going to. You have to figure out how to stand up to them to get their respect.”
And stand up to them she did. As she won race after race, Vicki established herself among the top in her class, to the dismay of many a competitor. “There was always a joke my dad had with me,” Vicki remembers, “that at every race there would be a kid crying because he got beat by a girl.”
When she was 12, both Vicki and her dad qualified for Loretta Lynn’s annual AMA Amateur Nationals Motocross Championship in Tennessee, the premier amateur MX competition. But months before they were set to compete, Vicki’s life took a dramatic turn.
On an otherwise typical day of riding at the local track, Vicki’s father was hit by an ATV that was also on the course. He was immediately paralyzed from the chest down. In an instant, Vicki’s mentor and go-to riding partner would never again ride alongside his daughter. “When the accident happened,” Vicki recalls, “I was too young to really understand what dangers the sport can bring. But my dad was so stoked to have me riding that from then on, I really rode for the both of us.”
Still determined to compete at Loretta Lynn’s that year, Vicki now had to become a one-woman show, preparing her “bone-stock, clapped out” bike for the event. “When I went there, the bike wasn’t even running properly,” she says, remembering the tears she had shed at the track. With only her owner’s manual and an occasional family friend for technical support, Vicki did all she could do to stay in the race. “I didn’t really know how it was going to go,” she says, “but it was either ride that bike or don’t race at all.” With the never-say-die attitude that has defined her career, Vicki collected herself. She not only competed that day, but won her race.
Over the next four years, Vicki continued to push herself outside her comfort zone. In 2008, she became the Loretta Lynn’s AMA Women’s Amateur Champion. The following year, she turned pro at age 17 and won the TransWorld Motocross Magazine’s Women’s MX Rookie of the Year. However, she also suffered a crash that brought her inaugural season to a staggering halt. With a collapsed lung, a lacerated liver, and an assortment of other injuries, this was the beginning of yet another theme in the Vicki Golden story – the pendulum swing between breaking records and breaking bones.
The peaks and valleys of Vicki’s career continued. In 2011 she took gold in the Summer X Games’ Women’s MX Racing, was the first woman to break the top 10 in AMA Arenacross Lites Main, and became the first woman to qualify for an AMA Arenacross Premier Class night show. She also tore her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) and medial collateral ligament (MCL), resulting in the loss of both ligaments in her left leg. In 2012 and 2013, she won her second and third consecutive gold medals in the Summer X Games’ Women’s MX Racing. However, she suffered additional injuries to her head, leg, ankle, and shoulder while leading up to her 2014 season.
Still, Vicki pushed on indomitably, setting aside fear and placing full trust in building her muscle memory. “Fear is a mental barrier that has to be broken,” Vicki says. “I know I can do it, so why would I let my brain convince me otherwise?”
Rather than let her injuries faze her, Vicki threw herself head-first into training. “On Monday I would ride, and Tuesday I would train,” Vicki says. “Then on Tuesday or Wednesday I would fly to the East Coast. From there I would have a couple of press days starting at 3 or 4 in the morning, all the way to noon or the end of the day. Friday would be more press and bike prep, Saturday was the actual race, and Sunday was spent flying back to California. Every weekend that I didn’t qualify, I went home and worked harder, which was the opposite of what I should have been doing.”
In the midst of the 2014 season, Vicki’s daunting schedule began to take its toll. A slew of mysterious ailments emerged. Cold symptoms one week would be followed by nausea the next, then by problems with her memory, her focus, and her mood. This was more than mere exhaustion, yet nearly a full year would pass before Vicki could find a medical explanation. Still, she did not stop. “I was digging myself a bigger and bigger hole,” she admits, although she did not know it at the time.
At the penultimate round of the season, Vicki received bloodwork results that were nothing short of life-altering. She had developed Epstein-Barr, a virus that plagues extreme athletes, including Olympians, who overtrain. “My body was so shut down that I slept 20 to 24 hours a day,” Vicki says. “It was a slow process to get blood work, see how numbers look, to sit and do nothing for months on end with lots of IV treatments to speed things along.”
A period of self-reflection passed over Vicki’s life as she was forced to let go of the pressures and pace to which she had become accustomed. “It was extremely frustrating,” Vicki says. “If you break your arm, it’s pretty obvious, and the doctor will give you a fix and a timeline of what it will take to get back on the bike. With Epstein-Barr, it’s completely silent. You don’t know what’s going on, and when you find out, you don’t know what you can do about it.”
Vicki tiptoed through recovery, terrified of overexerting herself and triggering the “couch potato hole” that she had found herself in. She used the 2015 Costa Rica nationals as a testing ground for her rehabilitation, and after dealing with a second bout of severe Epstein-Barr, she eventually found herself back in the Monster Energy AMA Supercross stadium. But Vicki had come face to face with the limit that she had pushed for so many years, and she knew something had to change.
“It was a learning curve switching from racing to freestyling,” Vicki admits. “I knew I couldn’t race and put in the effort that I wanted to, so it was time to move on.” No longer measured by lap times, freestyle motocross brought a new slate of challenges for Vicki. “I had that racer style that doesn’t quite work for tricks,” she explains. “You’re trying to stay low and suck into the bike for racer style, but when you’re a freestyle rider, you want to get away from the bike as much as possible.”
Vicki knew that her secret weapon would be the diligence with which she had always approached her preparation, albeit with a newfound recognition of her limitations. “It’s tough in our sport because I think you need to have ‘it,’ but there are also athletes who have ‘it’ and still need that work and repetition,” explains Vicki. “I think that’s me. I need repetition to really grasp something, but once I have the start, I know where to go. Once I develop that skill and ability, I just have to learn how to use it.”
Vicki still worked out regularly, but her training now incorporated a stricter diet, and more attention to rest periods. Freestyle MX and, eventually, freeriding also introduced Vicki to a community that prioritized camaraderie over competition, which helped to elevate her riding even further. “On the racing side,” she explains, “everything’s kept secret. You don’t really talk to or help people outside of your own team. But the freeriding community is more of a family thing. If you called another athlete and were struggling with a trick, they would give the shirt off their back to help you out.”
Just as Vicki was finding her rhythm in the freestyling world, she was confronted once again with debilitating obstacles. In 2017, her father passed away, and in 2018, she suffered an accident that nearly ended her career. During a freestyle trick on a concrete floor, Vicki’s wheel spun from beneath her, causing her to fall and shatter her right heel in multiple places. “It was a pivotal moment for me,” Vicki says. “I was mentally tapped out on surgery, since your pain receptors heighten as you get more surgeries. Even getting the IV put in before a surgery was kind of grueling.”
This crash meant yet another year on the couch for Vicki, who developed compartment syndrome and an infection in her heel, and came dangerously close to having her leg amputated. “That one left me at a point where I was reconsidering riding,” says Vicki, “but when I thought about it, I knew it wouldn’t make a difference if I quit or not. I’d still have to do all the therapy to get back to walking. Once you start walking, then you have hope.”
Thankfully, Vicki’s doctors found a solution that avoided further surgeries. She was able to not only keep her leg, but to continue to compete. She resumed her record-breaking streak and, in New Zealand, performed a backflip off the 15-foot Next Level ramp, making her the only woman to flip one of the largest FMX ramps in the world. In 2019, she broke the firewall record on the History Channel show “Evil Live 2,” riding through 13 flaming boards – an accomplishment “where other people think it’s cooler than I did,” Vicki admits. And in 2020, to Vicki’s own surprise, she was invited to ride amongst the best-of-the-best in the first annual Red Bull Imagination freeriding event.
For the first time in her illustrious career, however, Vicki began hedging her bets. She now realized that longevity and legacy are as important as winning medals. “I don’t want to be in a spot where riding’s done and I’m like, ‘shoot, what do I do now?’” Vicki says.
In 2021, Vicki began allocating some of her energy toward business, becoming an owner of the MX goggle company Onium. While this shift brought promise for Vicki’s future, it also has brought a sense of uncertainty that is all but new to this champion rider. “It’s like being a kid with your first party, and you don’t know if people are gonna show up,” says Vicki. “But people are stoked on the product, and it’s cool when you see people want to be in the company just because you’re a part of it.”
Vicki also has begun putting herself out there in the women’s riding community, an area to which she’s had limited exposure except in competition. Last year, she taught the Over and Out (OAO) Moto Camp, experiencing for the first time an all-women’s moto campout. “I never really understood the whole women’s-only camp thing,” Vicki admits. “I was skeptical and thought it was a little corny. I grew up around males my whole life, and I never realized that if a girl asks a dumb question, the guy will laugh, and the girl will get embarrassed and not want to do it anymore.”
OAO opened Vicki’s eyes to what it’s like for women getting into the sport later in life. She witnessed firsthand a woman struggling to start her own bike, and then stalling it immediately after she got it running. Contrary to the judgment, gawking, and laughter to which Vicki had grown accustomed over the years, she watched as another woman helped and encouraged the rider. “It was something super special that I never thought about or understood,” says Vicki. “Guys and girls learn differently, and I was so desensitized to it that I realized, oh, this is what they need: someone to help them learn without the pressure.”
“Women want to be women,” Vicki continues, “and to do what they want in the way that they want. I immediately hopped into this idea of things and want to be a part of it.”
Vicki also discovered that she had something unique to bring to the women’s grassroots riding community: proper MX training. “I noticed that a lot of women were not getting taught all the right steps in the right order,” Vicki recalls. “Even after a group lesson of just 10 minutes, I had so many women come up to me and say, ‘I’ve been riding for 5 years, and no one’s told me that.’”
While Vicki continues to diversify her resume, she is not yet ready to leave the competitive arena. She still pushes herself to the limit, only now she knows where the limit is. She still feels frustrated when she does not perform to her own standards, but she brings with her a perspective that can only come from a career’s worth of trial and error. “I get defeated when I’m not doing well results-wise,” she says, “but I have to take a step back and realize there is no one else that I can beat higher. Beyond where I’m at, there really isn’t anyone else to compete with.”
On competition day at this year’s Imagination event, Vicki hits the lip of a jump, catches an extreme gust of wind, and goes sailing into the trees. “I didn’t mean to go into the woods,” she jokes, “but we ended up there anyway. You’ve always got to get creative, and I guess I just did a little extra.” Her injuries are not debilitating, but Vicki considers the accidents she’s had this year so far and the competitions that she has ahead of her. With the sagacity of a seasoned professional, Vicki makes the tough decision to withdraw from today’s event. “It’s a bummer,” Vicki admits, “but I hit my personal goals for this week, and that’s really what matters.”
Whether Vicki competes at this event, or the next, or any in her upcoming program, nothing can change the trail that she has blazed in this sport, for women and otherwise. This is something that even Vicki has come to accept of herself. “It’s really humbling to look back at where I started and to see where I am now,” Vicki says. “I kind of just embrace it more now because I’m in a really good spot in my career and my life.”
In stark contrast to her early career, Vicki is finally at peace with letting go of the need to prove herself. This shift has not only had an impact on her physical health, but also on her personal life. “I kind of started noticing enjoying things,” Vicki says, “like getting to enjoy time with my boyfriend, family, and friends. I’d neglected it for so long when it was all dirt bikes all the time.”
“Gnarly Vicki” has been pushing the limit and inspiring riders for years, but now she hopes her fans will take away another lesson from her story. “The biggest thing is that dirt bikes aren’t everything,” she advises. “They’re a huge part of somebody’s life – and of my life – but I see a lot of kids get heartbroken because they didn’t win. I see a lot of moto parents who put too much pressure on kids because of how much money they’ve spent. But it’s a family sport, so take it for what it is. It’s about having fun. Just enjoy it, because that’s the whole point.”
