Deanna Mayles and Ivan Sippy Sweep GoPro Mountain Games Titles in Vail

The sun hits the pavement on Mill Creek Road at a specific angle in late June, baking the asphalt and thinning the air just enough to make your lungs burn in a way that feels like a warning. Ivan Sippy isn’t listening to the warning. He’s listening to the rhythm of his pedals, the 374 watts he’s pushing out over a seven-minute climb that averages a steep 6.2% gradient. He’s not looking back. He’s looking at the clock.

It’s 10:30 a.m. in Vail. The air is crisp, dry, and expensive.

This is the scene at the GoPro Mountain Games, where the local narrative isn’t just about who crosses the finish line first. It’s about who can survive the altitude, who can afford the training, and who actually lives here versus who just flies in for the weekend. And this year, the story was written by two people who decided that winning one event wasn’t enough.

Ivan Sippy and Deanna Mayles didn’t just show up. They dominated.

On Friday, they took home the short track titles. On Saturday, they added cross-country crowns to their resumes. It’s a "2-for-2" sweep that feels less like luck and more like a calculated strike.

Mayles, a 33-year-old from Colorado Springs, didn’t just win. She soloed much of the race. She started behind Erin Osborne’s wheel on the first fire road climb, matched Osborne’s hard early tempo, and then looked back to find everyone else gone. By the time she hit the first checkpoint at the base of Golden Peak, she was already four seconds ahead. Osborne, a former teacher with a math tutoring business called Tandem Tutoring, tried to keep pace. She sliced almost five minutes off her fourth-place effort from last year, but she was chasing a ghost.

“She’s like a mountain goat,” Mayles said of defending champion Erin Huck, who took bronze. Huck was 1:45 off the pace, a gap that feels insurmountable when you’re breathing thin air for two hours.

Mayles realized something crucial during the race. Her regular rides up Rampart Range and Old Stage roads hadn’t just prepared her for Vail’s thin air; they had overprepared her. She uncorked a 33:50 split on her second lap, opening up an almost two-minute advantage. She wasn’t nervous. She was bored, in the best possible way.

“I felt pretty good,” Mayles said. “I realized I’ve actually been training at altitude quite a lot.”

Sippy’s race was different. It was a war of attrition. Eight men came through the first lap within eight seconds of each other. It was chaos. It was noise. It was the kind of start that makes your heart rate spike before you’ve even left the chute. But then the course narrowed. The climbs got steeper. The pack thinned.

Sippy blasted up Mill Creek Road. He didn’t just climb; he attacked. His split time on that 1.56-mile segment was about 50 seconds quicker than the next guy. He finished the roughly 19-mile course in 1 hour, 25 minutes and 39 seconds.

Osborne, who runs Tandem Tutoring and wears math-related graphics on her kit, was pleased with her runner-up finish. She wanted to feel strong on the climbs. She wanted to ride smooth on the singletrack. She got it. But she couldn’t catch Mayles.

“It was good,” Osborne said. “I felt strong and on the climbs and that was my biggest goal.”

And that matters because this isn’t just about medals. This is about the people who live in the valley, who train on these roads every Tuesday and Thursday morning, who know that the difference between fourth place and first place is often just a matter of how many miles you’ve put in when the rest of the world is still sleeping.

The sun dips lower over the Gore Range. The finish line tape is cut. The crowd cheers. But the real story is in the silence that follows, in the quiet realization that these athletes didn’t just win a race. They won the altitude.