Olympic Anteater: Bryan Larsen

UC Irvine’s all-time Olympic medal count grew by two in Paris thanks to Kevin Tillie and David Smith, and there’s still a chance for one more with the Paralympics getting underway and Anteater Bryan Larsen representing.

Larsen is part of the seven-athlete United States Paralympic cycling team competing in Paris which begins August 27. His event, Track Individual Pursuit, will race on August 31 early in the morning UCI time in Larsen’s first Paralympic Games. The 2012 UC Irvine grad has had a passion for cycling from a young age and it continued at UCI.

“I studied biomedical engineering and UC Irvine being a great school from that aspect, that’s kind of what drew me to it. I had a few friends who attended UC Irvine and they kind of helped introduce me to the idea of coming to Irvine. And naturally, they kind of paved the way from a community perspective because they themselves were cyclists.”

Larsen got the scoop on what to be involved in, what classes were best, what teachers to take, and got in on the ground floor of the cycling club. A friend of his laid the foundation for driving attendance to cycling around 2006, and even helped get the rare approval to use the varsity logo as a club sport. Larsen came to school in 2008 and was the club’s President throughout his time.

“We attended a lot of collegiate races across California, and we started going to Nationals. I went a few times, but beyond the collegiate scene, just being in Southern California, there’s a pretty strong and very competitive contingent of bike races. It was a good place to be, in general - good roads, great weather, a lot of opportunity.”

UC Irvine cycling has a bit of a pipeline with Larsen following in footsteps like Amber Neben who was a three-time Olympian in Road Race Cycling. Neben and Larsen trained together in the Winter doing a lot of weekend rides through club sports that she would join for on Saturday mornings taking 100-mile rides together with other legacy bike racers that were in the area. He was able to follow her journey, learned a lot from her, and is very excited now for his opportunity.

Larsen’s Paralympic journey only really started five years ago. He had been racing able-bodied his whole life before his accident in 2019 left his right arm paralyzed. Larsen also had been born with a clubfoot which would have made him eligible for Paralympics on its own, but he didn’t know it. Not until the accident did he learn when he went in to submit documentation and request to be viewed by a panel of doctors to evaluate his eligibility.

“I’m looking around at other athletes and trying to figure out what their impairments are. I noticed a lot of people who had maybe skinnier ankles but no other obvious traumatic injuries. It came up from talking to people that some competitors have a clubfoot.”

He mentioned to those while registering that he also has one of those, and they were shocked to see that he had been going through this the whole time. Larsen said he played soccer and taped his ankle extra because it was so weak when he was younger. In March, his classification changed based on degree of his impairment. Paralympics was never his anticipation; he didn’t know much of it at all until his injury.

“I can make lemonade out of this really sour situation, and it gave me a light at the end of the tunnel; it was a distraction to get through the really hard and difficult and tough times right after my accident.”

It was an opportunity to do some of the things he’d always wanted to do like race in world championships and wear a team USA jersey. Larsen still had no expectations that he would qualify this year. “I told everyone I know that I wouldn’t be busy in August”.

After a really good showing at world championships this year, it started to sink in that this childhood dream could be real.

Larsen said he was lucky when he came down to UC Irvine because of the nice indoor velodrome nearby in Carson. He was exposed to the track side of things in college, but it never really was his whole focus.

“I don’t think I had the maturity to recognize how unique of a discipline it is, and so I just kind of stuck to road. For road, you train hard, you train a lot, but you don’t really have to be super specific, as long as you’re going to get stronger.”

Larsen recognized that the risk/reward of these road races with his ability at the time wasn’t worth it.

“I started to recognize that with my limited time, I could be really, really focused and fired up by track. I started to love it because it didn’t require as much time to train. The training is still very hard. It’s like the difference between being a sprinter or marathon runner in track & field.”

Leading into the injury, Larsen was kind of already in love with track again. When the accident happened, he recognized that he didn’t want to race with a lot of people, it didn’t fulfill him anymore.

“I became more focused on how I measure myself, how I improve myself and less around what the competitors around me were doing. It because a different transition into a battle with myself rather than other people. I want to beat me from yesterday. Whereas in road, you could have the best day ever and if someone beats you, you think ‘well, I got beat’.”

In 2022, he set a national record at the world championships, and he was ecstatic because he had just done something he didn’t think was possible and set him on a path to the Paralympic team. He’ll compete in Individual Pursuit on August 31; a four-component race equivalent to a mile that lasts typically around 4 ½ minutes.

In both his cycling life and career, he attributes problem solving to what has gotten him to this point. Larsen works for Medtronic in patient monitoring as a product service marketing specialist where a lot of problem solving comes into play stemming from his Biomedical Engineering degree from UC Irvine.

“It’s kind of like product marketing for devices. Some of the things I’m working on are very new, a lot of sharing skills of being a biomedical engineer or how do I socialize a new idea to a market or medical landscape.”

Larsen may not be engineering or designing components like a true engineer, but the troubleshooting and socializing of a new aspect or technology is very much something that he learned while at UC Irvine and it definitely comes in handy.

“I’ve worked in a few different sides of the same industries, and when I introduce myself, I do as an engineer. I’m also in this marketing life and appreciate the need to have to socialize something to be able to communicate something is important.”

He has an appreciation that he can turn and speak with engineers about what’s being done and then translate that to something so a sales individual who is thinking about it differently could understand it as well.

“My story was really just about being a problem solver. I needed to find some type of light at the end of the tunnel with those bad situations is really what kind of defined my path to Paris. I think a big part of that overcoming is at the core of what I try to share with people. As cliché as it is, don’t ever quit, and I’m kind of living it.”