Coming from a school where biking is the top form of transportation, it’s only appropriate that the Stanford cycling team is now the top in the country. Competing at the USA Cycling Collegiate Road National Championships, May 11-13, the Cardinal bikers took home the team title by an 89-point margin.

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Senior Rand Miller posted a pair of top-10 finishes to help boost the Cardinal to the national title. In both the road race and the criterium, Miller decided to make a push in the early going. The strategy paid off, as the senior took ninth in the road race and sixth in the criterium a day later. #gallery http://daily.stanford.edu/image/full/7580
Bernard Bluhm

Senior Rand Miller posted a pair of top-10 finishes to help boost the Cardinal to the national title. In both the road race and the criterium, Miller decided to make a push in the early going. The strategy paid off, as the senior took ninth in the road race and sixth in the criterium a day later.

Driving Stanford’s win in Lawrence, Kan., was the consistently high performance of its ten cyclists. With points awarded based on order of finish, the Cardinal was able to accumulate 519 points and beat its rival, the 2006 champion, UC-Davis (430). Fort Lewis College followed in third with 403 points, while Midwestern State (385) and Colorado State (347) rounded out the top five.

Despite the Cardinal’s depth, three cyclists in particular came out to lead the pack: senior Rand Miller garnered top-10 finishes in the men’s road and criterium races, placing ninth and sixth, respectively. And among the women, Caitlyn McCullough, a first-year bioengineering graduate student, took sixth in the criterium, while sophomore Arwen Bradley placed ninth in the road race.

The weekend proved the ultimate finish for Miller, especially after four years of chasing the national title with the Stanford squad.

“For me it’s been a lot of elation over the past week and half,” he said. “I really haven’t quite gotten over it yet. It’s been a dream of mine to win a national championship of some kind since I started bike racing back at the beginning of high school.”

With that long-standing goal, Miller entered the weekend hoping to grab at least one top-10 finish to aid the Stanford squad. Not only would a lower finish have proven disappointing individually, according to Miller, but it also wouldn’t have helped the rest of the squad.

“I wanted to pull my weight on the team because I knew I had a shot,” he said. “If not every single one of us pitched in, we wouldn’t have won the title. So, it felt good for me to lead the team in that way.”

The Cardinal men and women had gotten off to a good start in Friday’s team trials, with the women taking third and the men finishing sixth; going into Saturday’s 84-mile road race, Miller knew he would need to step things up to keep the Cardinal in the running for the championship.

All season long, Miller had seen groups of 10 or 15 riders break off from the pack near the start of races, so he decided to take the risk and do the same, only to have it pay off in spades.

“I went really early and no one went with me, so I was out there by myself and I got a huge gap without pushing too much,” he said. “I was really trying to conserve my energy, but I still ended up getting a two-minute gap over the entire field.”

That gap was closed by the end of the race as a set of riders broke off from the main pack to push Miller back into ninth.

But the breakaway strategy had worked, so Miller tried it again in Saturday’s criterium when a group of riders left the main pack halfway through the race. Noticing the cyclists pull away, Miller pushed forward as well in hopes of leaving the Cardinal’s top rivals — UC-Davis and Fort Lewis — behind in the main pack.

“I went to the front of the group and just drilled it as hard as I could because I knew that breakaway had the potential to win us the national championship,” Miller said.

The move again paid off as the high-powered cyclists gained a one-minute advantage and Miller eased into a sixth-place finish.

With that, and the contributions of McCullough, Bradley and others, Stanford scored enough high finishes to win the overall title despite not capturing any individual titles. Though every race came down to individual riders, coming together with similar tactics and goals proved crucial to the Cardinal.

“The best part of nationals — of the whole experience — was the camaraderie and excitement the team shared,” Miller said. “I think that’s really what won us nationals. We have 10 very strong riders, but we also have 10 riders who wanted to win the championship for themselves and wanted to win the championship for the team.”