Alise Willoughby is at the top of her game. This past weekend, the BMX veteran, Olympic silver medalist, and Minnesota native took home her third world championship and qualified for her fourth Olympics in front of a packed U.S. crowd in South Carolina. It was a dream result for the 33-year-old, but the road hasn’t been easy.
“I’ve had a roller coaster of a career, as far as home life and sport, with tragedy,” Willoughby told SheKnows before the competition. She’s gotten familiar with a pattern over the past 10 years: success paired with pain.
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“Gut-Sinking Feeling”
In 2014, Willoughby won her third USA BMX Women’s Pro Series; later that year, she lost her mother to late-stage melanoma cancer. Willoughby went on to claim 13 total national BMX titles, more than any BMX racer of any gender, in addition to nabbing a silver medal at the 2016 Olympics — still the best-ever finish for an American woman. Then, weeks after the historic finish, her future husband and fellow BMX racer Sam Willoughby suffered an accident at practice that left him paralyzed as a tetraplegiac.
Alise, who was traveling at time, remembered getting repeat phone calls from the track operator and a “gut-sinking feeling” of foreboding. “This isn’t good,” Willoughby recalls thinking. “It was almost like that same feeling I had when I got the call about my mom, that [her health] had really taken a turn. You just have this feeling with phone calls sometimes.”
Alise flew back to Southern California and “kicked into overdrive,” she says. “It was obviously gut-wrenching and hard and scary, but at the same time, it was like my sanity lied in [focusing on] the process. ‘OK, what do we do now? How do we do this?'”
As Sam began his recovery, Alise struggled to get back into racing. “It was not fun at the track,” she remembers. “It didn’t feel right. I just was like, ‘why am I here? I don’t want be here.” Preoccupied by everything going on at home, Willoughby couldn’t keep her mind on her sport and kept crashing. “It was dangerous,” she says.
It wasn’t until Sam “kind of shook me” that Alise was able to get back into racing mode. “Hey, you’re really good at this,” Alise remembers him saying. “I’ll coach you. I’ll be on your team… let’s chase down this world championship.” That summer of 2017, following months of training that “didn’t look like any other prep that I’d ever done,” Alise won her first world championship at the same Rock Hill, South Carolina track where she took victory this past weekend.
“To date,” she says of the 2017 win, “that’s still my favorite moment in my whole career.”
Coached By Her Husband
Alise and Sam got married in 2019. Five years later, Alise says having her husband as her coach is a huge advantage. “There is no on and off switch with sport,” she says, describing being an athlete as a “lifestyle” more than just a job. “You don’t just clock off at five, and then live life and then expect your body to show up the next day like nothing happened… And he lived that, he did that, he gets it, you know? So I’m very fortunate to have someone that encourages me in the right directions and understands.”
Alise and Sam, who is from Australia, met when they were 16 and 17. “We were like high school sweethearts, but across the world,” Alise explains. “We grew up together.” And while, yes, BMX takes up a lot of their time, they’re determined to keep things balanced. They hunt down local coffeeshops whenever they travel, dedicate time to family and friends, and dote on their dog-slash-“fur baby,” as Alise describes her.
“We’re not going to live and breathe BMX every waking moment,” she explains, “because we both know that there’s more to life.” It was a hard but valuable lesson to learn. “Because outside life has happened to both of us, I think we get it. We prioritize and have perspective,” Alise says.
Next Up: Paris
As Alise turns her attention towards the 2024 Olympics, keeping that sense of perspective is key. She’s over a decade older than some of her competitors, but the Olympian doesn’t let that — or the ever-intensifying level of competition — dissuade her. “I look at it and say, ‘OK, how long can I keep beating you?'” she says. “I embrace that challenge of, can I be better? I want to see my full potential. And I don’t think I’ve seen that yet.”
That ability to challenge as opportunity — a trait Alise says she inherited from her mom — has Alise feeling “as weightless as I’ve ever felt” going into Paris. Supported emotionally by her husband, financially by major sponsors like Toyota, Willoughby’s goal is to win a gold medal in Paris. It would be a long-awaited victory for both herself and Sam, who took home silver at the 2012 Olympics, but she sees even that as “icing on the cake.” Willoughby explains, “No result is gonna define me as a person… I’ve learned that in the past 20-plus years of my career.”
At the same time, no one’s writing off the newly-crowned world champion, least of all herself. “I’m not limiting myself in any way,” Alise says, “but I just want to focus on the process. I didn’t know that I would ever, in a million years, be sitting here contemplating… my fourth Olympic Games. Here we are, living out something we never dreamed possible. And I just need to enjoy that.”
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