Year: Senior

Major: Spanish
Hometown: Seattle, Wash.

David Hancock, the current president of Whitman Cycling Club, is also a standout performer. Hancock recently earned second place in the road race stage of the 2012 Whitman Omnium among Category C men, and fourth place in the criterium. Last year at the Northwest Collegiate Cycling Championships, Hancock placed ninth in Men’s Category B the road race and sixth in the criterium.

Pio: How did you get started with cycling?
David: I didn’t bike here my freshman year and then I bought a road bike the summer after that, and I just kind of went on casual rides in the fall with some people on the team and then some people on the club. I really enjoyed it so I signed up for the listserve and went to the team meeting in January and decided to give racing a try. It was kind of a slow start.

Pio: Had you done much biking before?
David: A fair amount, I grew doing a lot of fun weekend rides with my step-mom but I had never done any racing.

Pio: What are you doing after Whitman?

David: I’m doing the culinary arts program [at Walla Walla Community College].

Pio: What prompted culinary school?

David: I studied abroad fall of our junior year and I got back here and was living off campus and had to kind of fend for myself. I was never too attracted to microwave dinners or anything like that. So really each week and month after that my interest in [cooking] really increased until I got to the point where I was like yeah I could see myself doing this for a job, or at the very least I want to get really good at it.

Pio: Do you want to enter the restaurant business?

David: I don’t know, I think I’d like to give it a try but I certainly don’t have my heart set on it, we’ll see.

Pio: Did you play any sports here before cycling or in high school?

David: Yes, I actually did men’s volleyball my freshman year-and intramurals. In high school I played tennis all four years and actually did swimming my junior year, which was interesting because I had never done competitive swimming before that and just kind of jumped in…I did cross-country my freshman and senior year. But mostly tennis-I kind of lived and breathed and ate tennis for most of high school.

Pio: So I hear you have special biking cream?

David: Yeah it goes by several names, chammy cream and chammy butter are the two most common ones. If you ride your bike enough you can develop these things called saddle sores…so basically what the chammy butter does is keep everything lubricated. It is quite a valuable thing to have. You always hear about Tour de France riders back in the dark ages-they would actually put steaks like meat cuts to pad things and then over the day they would warm up and defrost and sort of just become gooey and it just sounds awful. It goes to say that saddle sores have been around for a long time.

Pio: Are you going to continue to bike race after graduation?

David: I could actually, since I’m going to the [Walla Walla] Community College next year. I could race for them and start up a team and do that, but for now I’m going to give it a break.