Gaggioli looks like a Romanian gymnast who just finished a floor routine. The svelte 28-year old made her mark in June of 2003 on live television while riding for a small composite team she nearly stole the show with a gutsy solo move in the final miles of the Liberty Classic in Philadelphia, ultimately finishing second.

Lynn has a spritel aura about her    like a nocturnal feline waiting to pounce. As a sprinter, that jump usually occurs in the last 500 meters of a race. Able to get over most climbs that leave rival fast twitch competitors behind, Gaggioli is a formidable threat in any race.

Growing up in California, Gaggioli (formerly Brotzman) took a circuitous route to cycling. When she was eight, her family moved to West Hollywood.

"My dad was city manager and Hugh Hefner invited the family for a private tour of the Playboy mansion," recounts Gaggioli. "Our first residence was the Ian Schrager hotel, the Mondrian, on Sunset Strip."

In junior high she studied acting at the renown Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. "I had headshots and people said I looked good," says Gaggioli matter-of-factly. In the entertainment industry, the line between acting and modeling is blurred. Struggling wannabees will take whatever offer they can get in the hopes it will launch their career. Gaggioli soon found herself auditioning in the seedy underworld of teen modeling.

She was eyecandy in a sea of predators    where every waiter and valet on the boulevard claimed to be a producer or actor or some other industry power-broker in their own right    each with pre-cooked lines designed to prey upon the naiveté and desperations of dreamers. The proverbial casting couch was a frequent offer for Gaggioli as she innocently strolled the strip during an era when the then clandestine porn industry was just beginning to evolve into the multi-billion dollar empire it is today.

"All the club managers would let me hang out in their establishments, provided I didn't drink," recalls Gaggioli. It was not the place to be for an impressionable teenager, and for Gaggioli, her career was gravitating towards that of an aspiring Lolita.

Her high school years were difficult.

Gaggioli attended the prestigious Vivian Webb boarding school in Claremont where she became an accomplished three-meter springboard diver and swimmer.

Describing maternal pressures Gaggioli reflects, "I have a very demanding mother, so I was just focused on studies. It was more difficult and more expensive than any university or college I ever went to," she says of her experience at Webb.

The tranquility of the pool gave her an escape from the pressures of academic studies. "I could do the 10-meter just for fun, but I didn't do it competitively," she clarifies. "I had this fear of hitting my head on the board. So I had a fear of doing some of the jumps where you would stand on the edge of the board with your back to the pool and do flips. I mean I could do them, but I could never hold them right. I'm really good where you do the walk and jump, that kind of thing," she declares in the utmost confidence, as if beckoning a dare to drive to the nearest YMCA to prove it.

"My best one is the breaststroke though," she tosses in with a puerile giggle. "The name of that one just cracks me up."

"On our campus we had a special honor code that everyone respected with pride," she adds as if hitting a toggle button on the stick of a fighter jet that switches her into serious mode. "You could leave your money, calculator whatever, wherever on campus anywhere and no one would take it. You could leave money sitting there and no one would take it."

In a moment of philosophical insight, Gaggioli concedes it was a sheltered life. "It sounds like Utopia, and it really was in many ways." But she reverts, "There's too many alternative realities    you just find the best one."

For someone use to the rigors of training 350-mile weeks, one is left with the impression that Gaggioli allows herself to occasionally drift into a bygone world of suspended disbelief that sieves the past for reassurances to an uncertain future.

"I don't live in reality    I try not to at least," the percolating giggles signal the switch back to carefree mode.

After graduating high school, Gaggioli enrolled at the University of California in Santa Barbara where she majored in literature.

By then, her interest in modeling was waning. Maintaining an ultra-thin Barbie look through diet alone was taking its toll. Although denying she was clinically anorexic, Gaggioli uses euphemisms to ameliorate the pain of those memories. "I suffered from not eating enough. I began to think about food from the moment I woke up," confesses Gaggioli. "I was absolutely miserable."

"I got out of modeling once I realized all the men around me just wanted to sleep with me," she reveals in a self-acknowledgement to her own allure.

Gaggioli is a belle époque who emanates come-hither seductiveness that invites others into the sanctity of her personal thoughts. And once there, what she says is oftentimes a concise assimilation of astute observations beguiled by a natural pulchritude.

"But I could remember one thing    only one thing that made me happy. I loved to ride a board," she says in a reference to her favorite avocation of snow boarding. "So I dropped out of college, got my board, packed my bags. My dad said if I could find a place where I could go to school full-time, 'I'll pay your way.' So I said, 'okay, I found it.'"

After only two years at UCSB, Gaggioli traded Tinseltown for the ski slopes of Colorado Mountain College in Steamboat Springs. Her exodus from a world of the superficial left her feeling somewhat jaded, yet more aware of her surroundings. The much needed change allowed Gaggioli to take up snowboarding with a passion.

"I boarded every single day," recalls Gaggioli of her Gen-X hippie lifestyle at the time. She once spent 115 days straight carving up the powder on her snowboard. "The college was so easy," she says with aplomb. "I was in the honor society without much work."

Talking about her skills on a board, she doesn't embellish. "I don't do tricks. I can catch air and that basic stuff," she says, harkening back to her days in Steamboat. "My best trick would be when I spend all day on the board from opening to close of the mountain and hike back country. I love finding a good place with a view to sit down and have lunch," says Gaggioli in the present tense as if reliving the moment in her mind.

It was 1996, and when there was no snow on the ground Gaggioli would ride a mountain bike to get her daily fix of exercise. It was at Mountain College where she would fall in love with the sport that would become her vocation.

"The people who had the bike shop were my best friends," recounts Gaggioli of her genesis in cycling. "First I rented the bike multiple times. Then I bought the bike for a birthday present for myself," she says with a devilish chuckle of self-indulgence, but quickly adds, "The people who own that shop are still my closest friends."

Gaggioli eventually moved back to UCSB to finish her degree in literature. Looking back on her growing pains, she makes it a point to asseverate she solved all her problems herself.

"I took care of myself," she says in a precise inflection of defiance. "I am my own psychologist." After a pause she concedes, "I did struggle    it was hard."

More the rule than the exception, Gaggioli reflects upon her memories with the punctuated giggles of a flirtatious teenager. An inquiry about tattoos reveals a conservative undercoat.

"I don't have one yet, but I was thinking about getting one," she threatens. "On my ear," she adds in all seriousness. But at 28 it seems more like an idle threat to assure herself she can still retreat back into the sanctity of her carefree days swooshing through the Snowwhite powder of the Rocky Mountains.

Back in 2001, Gaggioli loaded up her '87 Volkswagen Westfalia camper van and went off on a nomadic three-month odyssey around the country to race her bike. "The van was wonderful. It had a stove, a sink, a fridge, an upstairs and downstairs bed...I looked at every single one made that year and it was the nicest one. It was a great adventure," she says of her inaugural plunge into the bike racing circuit. "But I wasn't being successful on the bike," she notes.

It was at Superweek that same year in Wisconsin where she would meet future husband Roberto Gaggioli.

"At first, I wasn't romantically interested," says Lynn. "Though I was interested in picking his brain about everything I could about racing."

The consultation turned into a friendship, and then a romance. "When she got back from Superweek I found her address and sent her a big bouquet of flowers," says Roberto, who has a 17-year old son from a previous marriage.

Lynn moved in with Roberto in his Santa Rosa home and two became inseparable. "It was just supposed to be for a couple of weeks, but she never left." And in January of 2002, Roberto proposed on bended knee in his home town on a balcony under a wooden statue of Leonardo da Vinci's Study of Man. The two married soon after.

Their new house in Redlands is without cable television, and she and Roberto spend most of their time training in the year-round warm desert sunshine of southern California. During rides Lynn listens to an iPod uploaded with Bob Marley and a blend of South American music she gets from her father's music business. The Gaggioli's occasionally travel back to Roberto's roots in Vinci, Italy, where he grew up.

Roberto dotes over Lynn at times more like a protective big brother than a husband, a small digital camera always in hand. He's her only mentor, her coach, her strategist, and her manager. And the secrets of racing he instills in her are highly guarded. "Some I can tell you, and some I won't tell you," she states with the un-apologetic authority of someone with C3 clearance who had just been asked to divulge state secrets.

Within a week after meeting Roberto, she won her first race. Prior to meeting him, Gaggioli had never won a race in her life.

Lynn soon discovered her forte: sprinting. Like Roberto, who won the 1988 Corestates USPRO championships in a memorable two-up sprint along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway against 7-Eleven's Dag-Otto Lauritzen, Lynn was coming into her own. It would be in the same race in 2003 that she would almost win with similar panache. But another Lyne    Lyne Bessette of the powerhouse Saturn team    would spoil what would have been a fairy-tale beginning for the Gaggioli's.

The insecure fiscal realities of women's pro cycling attracts those willing to take a calculated risk to stave off a nine-to-five career    and even motherhood    for the freedom to race a bike. Few make a livable wage, and even fewer are willing to sustain the hardships longer than a few years. To make it work, the Gaggioli's spend months at a time on the road like a traveling circus sideshow, training out of motel parking lots as they hopscotch their way to races across the country. The seemingly carefree lifestyle oftentimes masks the sport's hidden dangers.

In August of 2003, Gaggioli crashed and sustained a severe head injury while on a training ride the day before the Chris Thater Memorial criterium in Binghamton, New York. She was rushed to a hospital and spent the next several days in intensive care. At the time she wasn't wearing a helmet, and the incident almost left her with a permanent disability. She would end up missing the remainder of the season. "I couldn't think straight for two months," she says.

But her results that year while riding for Velo Bella    a team of That Girl look-a-likes who wear gigantic foam wigs and party accoutrements to match    were good enough to get her recognized by the defacto women's national team: T-Mobile.

Gaggioli signed a one-year contract and set her goals on racing in the Athens Olympics and world championships in Italy. But the lack of team tactics and scheduling hampered her style, and led to a lackluster season. Gaggioli failed to qualify for either, and the experience left her with a bad taste in her mouth. Well before the season ended, Gaggioli made it clear to team management she was looking for a different ride for the following year.

Gaggioli wanted to go back to the well of Velo Bella to reanoint herself with the camaraderie she didn't find on T-Mobile. But the small non-profit team couldn't match an offer from Monex    a precious metal investment company which also sponsors the continental pro team her husband runs.

Leading into 2005, Gaggioli has her sights trained on a few coveted races. Her teammates for stage races will be a potpourri of castaways and hopefuls, good enough to gain entry as a composite team.

Unlike many elite athletes enamored with their own existence, Gaggioli is just as interested in what I got for Christmas as what she found under her tree.

After patiently listening to my wrappings, she eventually says, "I did get a new board this Christmas," her voice rising with the inflection of a child describing a new toy. Her home in Redlands is within a half hour's drive to the ski resort of Big Bear where she frequently goes on four-hour training rides. "We can climb to the summit in an hour and forty-five minutes from our house," she says.

"I also got...you know those comic books ElfQuest?" she inquires, as if I were suppose to know what that was.

She explains. "When I was a kid, I collected all the big ones, full color. I was always fascinated by just that comic    only that one. Because they had these really beautiful warrior elf-women who would ride wolves out in the forest and go hunting and like have battles and all this cool stuff," she says in a flashback to her first impressions as a little girl when she opened her first ElfQuest.

The sometimes youthful demeanor in Gaggioli is even more evident when asked her favorite movie.

"The title starts with an R and ends with an A, and Arnold Schwarzenegger co-stars to the leading lady..." she says as if playing a word tease (a lesser-known flick called Red Sonja).

"Well, the movie is not that good. It's really silly, but I love her character," she clarifies. "It's totally 1980's sci-fi style with electronic dragons and stuff like that. Anyway, I am more inspired by books and there too I have a bunch of favorites," says Gaggioli, beckoning me to ask.

Her favorite authors are surprisingly scholarly for a twenty-something nueva Italian who wears Armani jeans and designer boots made in Milan. "Walt Whitman and J.R.R. Tolkien," she states, showing an erudite side. Gaggioli goes on to describe in a roundabout way how Whitman, a 19th century transcendentalist poet, had a penchant for writing about Civil War soldiers. "No, I mean he really, really liked them," giggles Gaggioli, her mischievous snickering intimating a homosexual proclivity left out of the history books.

She even has a cat she named Pippin after the hobbit character in Lord of the Rings. "He likes to eat a lot and cause trouble. I think he was feral when I got him from the pound," says Gaggioli.

In terms of palmares Gaggioli is still a cyclist manqué. And despite her strong showing in one-day events, she claims to enjoy stage races more. "I feel there is so much more there," she says. "But of course I'll be looking at Philadelphia." Next to the world championships or Olympics, the Wachovia Liberty Classic    the richest one-day race in the world for women    is the coveted event Gaggioli aspires to win more than any other, more than even a national championship.

Talking about last year's season riding for T-Mobile, Gaggioli becomes reticent.

Not given much of an opportunity to race in Europe, she originally wasn't even slated to race Liberty Classic. It was only after event organizers demanded Gaggioli be put on the team's roster did she even get a plane ticket to Philadelphia. And in August, she was suspended from the team for using Cane Creek wheels instead of team sponsor Shimano's at the U.S. national criterium championships in Downer's Grove, Illinois. Coming off her suspension, she found herself off the start list for her sponsor's flagship event, the T-Mobile International Grand Prix. It was a painful exclusion, as the serpentine hills of San Francisco were perfectly suited for Gaggioli's explosive style; it would be the second straight year she would miss the event.

"The part I dislike the most are the politics," she says, being intentionally vague. "The part I like the most: being outdoors all day, inspiring my friends and family," she says, perking up a bit. "The life is good material for a book," hints Gaggioli at a furtive work-in-progress.

Disappointments aside, Gaggioli is confidant going into the new season. In a sport known for its what-did-you-do-for-me-lately attitude, she is supported by fewer, but loyal sponsors. "TIME has taken great care of me. So has USA Cycling," she says. Her all-carbon fiber bike is decked out with top-of-the-line Campagnolo Record, including cranks made out of a special aerospace carbon worth more than their weight in gold, and a new prototype pedal.

Indeed, only time will tell what lies in the future for this former snowboarder turned cyclist living in the desert. But for now, Gaggioli is just playing it by ear.

"Riding a bike, getting a tan," she says with a smile.