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Looking at Ashley Fiolek, you wouldn't know she was a speed demon. You wouldn't know that this teenager with the girl-next-door face loves to tear up the dirt. But she is and she does.

From an early age, motor oil seemed to course through her veins. She's been riding motorcycles most of her life and racing them since she was 7 years old. Since winning her first race, the 2004 AMA Amateur National Championships, she's won more than 100 races and racked up 12 more national first-place trophies.

Fiolek is not the type to sit on her laurels. She has goals to attain. She wants to be the fastest woman motocross racer in history, and she's well on her way to doing that.

Making History
Fiolek went professional in 2006 at the Women's Motocross Association (WMA) in Steel City, PA. She came in fifth place, not a small feat for a relative new-comer to professional racing. In 2008, she won the Women’s Motocross Association championship.

And, as if that weren't enough to excite any athlete, she's just been nominated for the Sportswoman of the Year award. That puts her in line to join such legends as Mary Lou Retton and Martina Navratilova. This year (2008) there are nine other contenders for the coveted award, including Olympic Gold Medalist Veronica Campbell-Brown. Not a bad crowd to be hanging around with, is it?

Living Without Hearing
All of this would seem a reasonable course of events for anyone who wants to race motorcycles professionally. But Fiolek is different from most. She was born deaf. That puts her at a disadvantage she's had to learn to compensate for in many aspects of her life. And she has.

One example is interviews. All athletes have to conduct them. It's one of the ways they get the public interested in them. But what makes Fiolek's interviews stand out is how they are conducted—through sign language, with her father acting as interpreter.

Racing Techniques
In a sense you might call Fiolek a dirt whisperer, but her language is comprised of hand signs and feelings in place of words and sounds. Rather than listening to the sounds on the track—a good way to know when competitors are breathing down your tailpipe—she watches the track and constantly checks the position of other racers, and she waits to feel her bike. Sometimes that causes her to lag behind longer than other racers would, but she always makes up for it in the end. She shifts gears when her bike tells her to, using the feel of the engine as a guide rather than its sound.

Benefits of a Racing Career
Athletes with disabilities sometimes have difficulty attracting sponsorship from mainstream companies. If you doubt that, an examination of the history of sponsors of the Paralympics would be an eye-opener. Fiolek, in comparison, has had little trouble attracting money from the “Big Boys.“ She's backed by companies like Red Bull, Honda, and Pirelli.

Racing, says Fiolek, has allowed her to expand her exposure to the world. She's travelled all across the United States, developing many close relationships along the way. She's even travelled to Japan to race twice. Most of us have never envisioned being able to visit the "Land of the Rising Sun" even once, never mind going there twice.