Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - The Pro Athlete Turned Drug Smuggler - The Missy Giove Story

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

Missy Giove rocketed to fame in the 1990s as one of the most aggressive and charismatic downhill mountain bikers in the world, blasting through the NORBA circuit and winning the 1994 UCI Downhill World Championship while turning herself into an extreme-sports icon with her punk-charged energy. After retiring from competition, her life swerved into scandal in 2009, when she was arrested in a federal operation for transporting hundreds of pounds of illegal drugs.

So what do professional mountain bike riders do after they get seriously injured? Well, this one became a drug trafficker. Now the woman's name is Missy, and Missy is 29 when this story starts, and she's living in Colorado, and Missy is really, really good at professional mountain bike racing. Like she won 14 titles and 11 World Cups and the 1994 World Championship. She's actually a playable character in a PlayStation 2 bike racing game. And here you can see she's being interviewed on Conan O'Brien's old show. I mean, you get it.

She's good at what she does and she's very famous in that world. But one day, in 2001, all that starts to change. Because Missy is doing a practice run and suddenly, boom, she goes flying over the handlebars, knocks herself unconscious, and dislocates her shoulder. But a little injury is not going to stop her. Against medical advice, she decides to go right back. to racing. And midway through a run, she loses control again, she goes flying over the handlebars again, and pow, she slams her head into the ground. However, this time the damage is serious. Her brain

starts bleeding. And she goes and she gets medical attention and she finds out that she now has a brain hemorrhage. And because of this, she's in excruciating pain. She can barely open her eyes because it hurts so much and if she moves around too much she'll throw up. And this goes on for like three months. Now, you would think that after these injuries, this would be the end of her career. But you'd be wrong. She still isn't ready to give up biking. I mean, she loves it. It's how she makes her living. She's not about to quit. So she continues racing. But then, in 2002, it gets really bad because she's over in Slovenia racing and doing her thing

and kaboom she crashes again. The next year in 2003 she crashes again and she ends up dislocating her shoulder again and she also breaks her wrist. And by this point Missy has been doing this extreme sport for a really long time.

She's broken over 40 bones and suffered at least 10 concussions. So she finally decides that it's time to retire from this thing that she loves doing so much. But here's where things get really bad for her. Because it seems like Missy doesn't really have a post-race career plan mapped out. She doesn't really have a job anymore, so no steady income, no sponsorship deals. She doesn't even have health insurance. And to make it worse,

she now has permanent damage from some of her injuries. She suffers from chronic headaches and seizures and pain that just never goes away. And you know, she smokes a little zaza every now and then to help with that pain, but that's just not a permanent solution. So Missy ends up needing to make some money. And then one day in 2006, she finally gets an opportunity to make some. Because that's when she meets this guy, Eric. And Eric, he actually runs a successful business. And it's not a legal business. It consists of transporting and smuggling thousands of pounds of marriage of Juana from growers in British Columbia all the way over to the East Coast. And his business does this on a regular basis. And Eric is thriving at this.

At his peak, he's doing around $50 to $60 million a year in sales. Now, Eric, he doesn't drive all these shipments of drugs himself. He likes to hire drivers to do the transporting. So when he meets Missy, he thinks that she would be the perfect driver for him. Because she's got a great cover of being a former professional athlete. No one would ever suspect her of transporting large quantities of illegal drugs. So he offers her a job as a driver, where she would be driving a truck full of high-grade California Zaza across the country to the east coast.

And Missy thinks about it and, you know, she's broke and she's in pain. and honestly, the job sounds kind of thrilling. So she's like, all right. So she gets to work. She starts making trips across the country, hauling hundreds of pounds of weed in a trailer attached to her truck. And on top of all that weed, she's got her racing gear, her mountain bike,

and her dirt bike in there too. So that she just looks like a former pro athlete just traveling around with her racing stuff. And this actually works. She starts making money. She's making around $30,000 a run, which is not bad for a few days of driving. So she does it again and again and again for years. And the operation keeps getting bigger and bigger.

And now she's getting paid $60,000 a run. And a few more years go by. And it's now 2009. And by this point, Missy's logged thousands of miles driving around the country. And I don't know if she's tired of driving or if she just realizes that she could. make more money doing it this way, but eventually she brings in another person to make the drive for her. This other person is her friend, who will just call friend. So friend steps in and hauls the payload from California all the way over to New York. And there in New York,

she meets up with Missy and Missy handles the rest of the deal. And this works fine, so she asks friend to drive a few more times. And having Friend drive the truck is actually a great deal for Missy, because Missy is getting paid $60,000 a trip, still. But she's only paying Friend $3,000 of that. So all this is going well for her. She's making a lot of money, doing very little work, and it seems like she could just keep doing this forever. Until...

Until something terrible happens. While driving through Illinois, Friend gets pulled over for speeding. And I don't know exactly how it goes down, but... pretty quickly, Friend starts telling the police everything. All about the 410 pounds of Zaza on the back of the truck, and that normally Missy is the driver, and that she's driven for Missy before, and I don't know if she knows who Eric is or not, but I'm sure she would tell the police about him too.

So the police contact the DEA, and now the DEA is involved. And they end up coming up with a plan to put a GPS tracker in the wall of the trailer and let Friend drive the rest of the way to New York. That way, when she meets up with Missy, they can swoop in and make an arrest. And of course, to avoid serious prison time, Friend agrees to set up Missy. So Friend continues on the route, and a few days later, she makes it to New York. And she meets up with Missy, just like normal. Then Missy takes the truck and trailer, and she goes and meets up with Eric at his house,

and they start unloading that trailer. And as they're unloading the trailer, Boom, Eric notices the GPS tracker. The trailer's been bugged. And pretty quickly, they realize they're fucked. I mean, Missy knows she has to run for her life. I imagine Eric does too. So Missy panics, and she hops into the truck and scur-she speeds away,

still dragging the trailer behind her with most of the weeds still in the back. But along the way, she finally realizes that the DEA, they can easily track her because the tracking device is still in the trailer. So she knows she's busted, and instead of continuing to run, she just says, fuck it. And she pulls over, and she smokes a bit of Zaza, and then she just takes out a lounge chair and sits in it as she waits for the DEA agents to show up. And a bit later, they do. And so, bam, she's arrested. Here's her mugshot.

And later, bam, they arrest Eric too. Here's his mugshot. And so ultimately, Missy takes a plea deal, and she quaffir. and she's only sentenced to six months of time served. While Eric also takes a plea deal and he's sentenced to 30 months in prison.