The Price of Gold

by Marty Nothstein

  Mike must give Heinz updates on my progress, because before the 1987 racing season, Heinz puts in a good word with USA Cycling, the sport’s national federation, the Feds. I’m invited to the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, a development camp for future Olympians.

  It’s my first trip west and the first time I board an airplane. As we descend into the Denver airport, the snow-capped Rocky Mountains seem monstrous compared to the Appalachian hills. This sport can take me places, I realize.

  In Colorado, I’m thrown in with the best kids from across the country. The national team coach, Jiri Mainus, a champion bike racer from the Czech Republic wakes us up at 6 a.m. each day, lines us up and marches us to the cafeteria, making us perform calisthenics along the way. We swing our gangly limbs in unison, performing lunges along a snowy walkway en route to our breakfast.

  After we eat, we lift weights and then spend the afternoons riding outside in subfreezing, mid-December temperatures. In the evenings, we stuff our exhausted bodies with food from the training center’s corporate sponsors—including an unending supply of Mars bars. Occasionally, actual Olympians come and chat with us, handing down training and racing advice from the very top of the sport.

  Train. Eat. Dream about the Olympics. Repeat.

  I can live this life, I think.

  In the summer of 1987 the junior national championships come to Trexlertown, and Gil gets me ready. Ever since our showdown Gil lets me tag along with him. I go where he goes. We lift weights together and log miles on the narrow country roads winding through the Valley. On our rides, Gil talks to me about track racing, nonstop.

  Gil comes from one of the sport’s storied bloodlines, and the knowledge he passes down to me dates back to the origins of bike racing. He started racing at just 10 years old at the Encino velodrome. He tutored under Jack Disney, a three-time Olympian who dominated track cycling in the United States throughout the 1950s and ’60s.

  Gil tells me all about the history of the sport, about track cycling’s golden era. From the turn of the 20th century through the start of World War I, track cycling was one of America’s most popular sports, he says. Dozens of velodromes dotted the East Coast.

  Tracks like the one at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden drew tens of thousands of spectators and offered huge sums in prize money. America’s best bike racers earned double the salary of the nation’s top baseball players.

  Eventually though, mismanagement, the World Wars, the Great Depression, and rise of automotive racing combined to nearly wipe out track racing in the United States as a popular spectator sport. By the middle of the 20th century, track racing was all but forgotten. Just a handful of velodromes remain around the country today.

  Now, most kids opt to race road bikes. They idolize Greg LeMond, who recently won his second consecutive Tour de France. But Gil teaches me to revere riders like Marshall “Major” Taylor, an African American racer from Indianapolis who broke through the color barrier en route to winning the world championship in 1899, and Frank Kramer, the last American to win a match-sprint world championship in 1912.

  Over the 20th century, road racing changed dramatically. Derailleur and gear shifting advancements allowed racers to take on the high mountains, and completely changed the sport’s tactics and training methods.

  In contrast, track racing remained almost entirely unchanged. A track bike lacks brakes, gears, and a freewheel. The velodromes from a hundred years ago had the same banked ovals as the one here in Trexlertown. The training techniques and tactics Gil shows me were passed to him from the champion before Disney, and the champion before that, dating all the way back to the deities that ruled track racing’s golden era.

  Under Disney, a stoic professor of the sport, Gil mastered the fundamentals of track racing. He shows me everything: how the wind breaks over an opponent’s body like a V, how the closer you get to the tip of the V, the harder it becomes to get around. He tells me to pounce when I pass. Three pedal strokes and you’re beside your opponent. Bam. Bam. Bam. Three more pedal strokes and you’re around him.

  Gil talks to me as his own boisterous Pop Warner football coach talked to him, growling and spitting and waving his arms to get me psyched up. “It’s time for payback,” he booms. “Not just payback against your opponent, it’s time to pay yourself back for the hard work you put in!” He calls it his Lombardi.

  I’ve always responded to this kind of motivation. Before my own ball games my older brother, Tim, would blare AC/DC. He’d get in my ear, talking to me the whole car ride to the field. “Get in there and kick some ass,” Tim would tell me. “Play as hard as you can the entire game.”

  Gil talks just like Tim, only louder. His speeches make the peach fuzz on my arms prick up. When I hit the track, I’m ready to kick some ass.

  Nationals arrive in T-Town. I face off against a couple of young guns from the East Coast with years of experience on me, Jonas Carney and George Hincapie. Jonas is from New Jersey, and his older brother, Jamie, is already a national junior champion on the track. George hails from Long Island and regularly schools senior riders at the Kissena velodrome in Queens. I’m fit and tenacious, but I’m still learning. Gil stands at the edge of the track. When he yells, I jump out of the saddle and give it hell.

  Nationals for the 15 to 16 age group is an omnium format. We do a bunch of different races, and the best overall finisher wins the national title. I’m doing well, really well, never placing outside of the top three in any event. But in one of the races, I get too close to another rider and rip a bunch of spokes out of my front wheel. I don’t get any points in the race, and it costs me the overall title. Jonas wins. I’m second. George is third. A local rival of mine, J. D. Moffitt, is also in the top five.

  We stand on the podium and an official puts a Stars-and-Stripes jersey over Jonas’s shoulders. They drape a silver medal over my neck. I look to my left, at Jonas and his new Stars-and-Stripes jersey. He’s beaming. I look at my own medal. I’m 16, and I already hate silver.

  I should have won. I’m good at football and I’m good at baseball, but I’m not the top player in the country.

  Fall comes. Football practice starts, and I don’t go.

  “Mom,” I say. “I’m not going to play other sports. I’m just going to race bikes.”

  My mom looks me up and down. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she says. She works at the Trexler Mall, a shopping center just a few blocks from our house. She’s the store manager at Fashion Bug. She wants the best for Jay and me, but she knows college tuition will strain our finances.

  The high school football coach even calls my mom. Where’s Marty? He asks her. Why isn’t he at practice? He’s throwing away a chance at a college scholarship, a shot at the big leagues, he tells her. “What is bike racing going to do for him,” my coach asks. My mom agrees. Her son is shaving his legs, participating in an unfamiliar sport. She’s concerned. My dad is, too. Neither of them knows a thing about cycling.

  But I remain determined. I’m 16, and I could go to the Olympics one day.

  What can my parents do?

  From now on, I’m nothing but a bike racer.

  3

  BORDERLINE OUTLAW

  ONE DAY in high school, I’m washing cars at my dad’s dealership, earning money for bicycle equipment, when a blue Ford Torino blows into the parking lot and launches off a grassy 3-foot slope separating the dealership from the house next door. The Torino slides to a stop in the neighbor’s gravel driveway.

  From the plume of white dust the car kicks up, out steps a bike racer with a scraggly handlebar mustache and a shaggy head of red hair. I look at him in awe. That’s Whitehead. The Outlaw. Whitehead’s antics at the Friday night races inspire even reserved fans to hiss and boo. And he loves every minute of it. He flips the bird to the crowd after crossing the finish line. He’s been ejected for hocking loogies at hecklers. And the louder the boos, the more Whitehead seems to win.

  “What the…!” My dad sho
uts. He charges over to Whitehead. “Pull a stunt like that again, I’ll tear you to pieces,” my dad yells, waving his giant hands menacingly. I’ve never met Whitehead before, but I know that when he’s in town, stunts like this tend to occur regularly.

  Whitehead lives in California and is in T-Town temporarily to race and hang out with his best friend, Gil Hatton. Together they’re Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid of cycling. They’re crazy as hell, but calculated too. They don’t win bike races by accident.

  Like Gil, Whitehead grew up in SoCal and learned impeccable track technique from the masters of the sport, including his dad, Pete, who hails from Scotland. Whitehead knows the track-racing rulebook better than most of the officials. (Gil jokes that most of the rules are in there because of Whitehead.) Whitehead and Gil are also emotional switchblades. You never know when they might pop open.

  On the track, they compete by one ethos: win, crash, or DQ. Mess with them in a race and they’ll deal with you in the parking lot afterward. “Never wear sandals to a bike race,” Whitehead chastises Gil one time. “You always bring sneakers. You never know when we’ll need to fight our way out of here.” These are the bike racers I aim to emulate.

  I tag along with Gil, and now I tag along with Whitehead, too. One day, Whitehead and I are out riding in the hills rimming the Lehigh Valley. We’re flying down a long, steep descent, when an old Buick pulls out of a trailer park. It cuts us off, nearly hitting Whitehead.

  As he frequently does, Whitehead implodes. He knows what an irresponsible driver can do to a cyclist. He used to ride for Heinz on the Panasonic team. He’s pushed Mike Walter’s wheelchair.

  Whitehead rides up alongside the driver’s window and starts screaming at him. The smell of cheap whiskey smacks Whitehead in the face. The driver’s drunk and belligerent. He tries to shake Whitehead by slamming on the Buick’s breaks. The car screeches to a stop, and I clip the rear end flipping over the trunk and skidding across the pavement at nearly 40 miles per hour. Seeing he’s really in trouble now, the driver peels out.

  Whitehead’s infuriated. He wants to strangle the guy. He takes off in pursuit and sees the car pull into a bar just up the road. Inside the bar, Whitehead notices he’s outnumbered. Normally, he wouldn’t care. But he knows the driver is in the wrong so he picks up the pay phone and calls the cops. When the cop pulls up, he immediately goes over to talk with the driver. The cop ignores Whitehead. Whitehead can tell, the cop is a buddy of the driver.

  “This is fucking bullshit,” he yells at the cop. “This kid almost got killed, and you’re over there talking to the driver like you’re best friends.”

  “Fuck you,” Whitehead tells the cop. He doesn’t even file a police report.

  Back at my house, Whitehead tosses me in the shower. I’ve suffered road rash before, but nothing like this. The bloody mess stretches from my cheekbone down to my ankle. Chunks of black asphalt sit deep in the wounds.

  Whitehead doesn’t know what he’s going to do about the driver yet, but he knows how to deal with road rash. “You’ve got to scrub the shit out of it,” he tells me. “Here, bite this,” he says, sticking a rolled-up hand towel in my mouth. Then he bears into me with a bar of soap, scouring the blacktop out of my skin.

  Later, when my dad sees me looking like a bandaged mummy, he flips out. “Who the hell’s responsible?” he says. He wants justice. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of this,” Whitehead tells my dad. He rides by the bar every day for a week. One day he sees the Buick. He goes back to his house and grabs two bottles of Fast Tack, the toxic glue we use to mount our tubular tires to the rims of our bike wheels.

  At 10 o’clock in the evening, Whitehead emerges from the bushes beside the bar. He covers the car in glue from the hood to the dent in the trunk where I hit it. He rings the gas tank with the flammable gel. Then he opens a pack of matches, lights a single stick, and flips it onto the car. The vehicle erupts into flames. A few days later we ride by the bar. The car’s still there, melted to the ground. Whitehead never gets caught.

  Whitehead’s the Outlaw. I become a borderline outlaw. He terrorizes T-Town, but he’ll whip my ass if I ever get in trouble. He won’t let me make the mistakes he made. Whitehead made the ’84 Olympic team, but he never won a medal. I’m 16 and I dream of gold.

  If I want to succeed, I’ll need to learn how to walk the line that Whitehead steps over.

  I can’t wait for the 1988 season to start. If I race well enough, I can go to the junior world championships in Denmark that summer. I lift weights religiously, up to five times a week. I’m 17, a junior at Emmaus High and starting to build adult muscle on my lanky arms and legs. I can barely walk following the workouts.

  I start my season in the early spring at a series of road races in New York City’s Central Park. One of my best friends from the T-Town development programs, Tim Quigley, lives in New Jersey, not too far from the city. Tim’s an endurance rider not a sprinter, so there’s no competitive animosity. Tim’s parents, Eileen and Ed, adopt me into their nuclear family. They fill in when my parents can’t get me to an out-of-town race, which occurs regularly. They make sure my tires are pumped and my bottles are full before the races.

  The Central Park races have no official start time. The whistle blows when the sun rises. So Tim’s parents wake us up at 4 a.m. to get into the city on time. It’s March and still below freezing at daybreak when we line up. We rub sleep out of our half-open eyes on the start line. But we never complain—we’ll do anything to race our bikes. Tim frequently wins the competitions, while I mostly suffer.

  When summer rolls into T-Town, the track racing starts in earnest. I race on Tuesday nights in the Pro-Am competitions. Gil and Whitehead sit in the bleachers, drinking beer and cheering me on. “Yeah, get ‘em kid!” they shout when I dust the other juniors and lower-category adult racers. After I take a sprint, I meet them at the rail of the track and exchange high fives.

  Soon I’m dominating the Tuesday night races, and it’s obvious I’m fast enough for the Friday night pro event—but the track officials are hesitant to let me ride. On Friday nights, Gil and Whitehead will turn from fans of mine into vicious competitors. They just returned from the Japan keirin circuit, where they racked up more than 50 grand apiece in winnings during just a few months. They brought the former keirin world champ, Belgian Michel Vaarten, back with them. Nelson Vails, who won a silver medal in the sprint at the ’84 Olympics, is also a regular competitor on Friday nights. But Gil and Whitehead vouch for me. “Let him ride,” Gil says. “He’s ready.” At 17, I’m racing against some of the best sprinters in the world, every week.

  Well before I ever got to race on Friday nights, I fell in love with the atmosphere. I used to collect extra cash by doing odd jobs before the races. I hung the flags and helped park cars in the gravel lot. Now I’m part of the action. When the sun sets on Friday nights, the lights flicker on above the track. Thousands of fans, many of them toting six packs of beer, filter into the bleachers and line the wall at the top of the banking.

  The racers prepare for the evening’s action in an old red barn next to the velodrome. Some of the pro racers get ready by passing around a joint. I walk into the barn and notice a funny smell. Whitehead sees me and grabs me by the collar. “Don’t you ever fucking touch this stuff,” he says. “If I ever see you smoking this I’ll fucking kill you.” Walk the line. Do as they say, not as they do. I promise never to touch the stuff, and I never do.

  The racing starts, and I do as they say. Gil says go, and I go. In one of the keirin races, Gil yells at me to jump with a lap and a half left. I shoot a hole between a mass of racers with Gil and Whitehead tight on my wheel and hit my max speed on the backstretch. In the final turn Gil blows around my outside with Whitehead in tow. As he passes, Whitehead chops me. He cuts down the banking before clearing my front wheel, knocking me down onto the apron and out of contention for the finish.

  “Nice lead out, kid,” Gil says after the race. I just got used and abu
sed, but I’m pumped. I’m no longer peering in on the race from the back straight. I’m part of the action.

  As I get more comfortable racing on Friday nights, I see how the crowd appreciates showmanship, in addition to speed. I learn to ride with panache and to play to the people who buy tickets. From Heinz, the meticulous German and former pro team manager, and his son Mike, I learn to treat my bike racing professionally. I polish my chrome bike parts to a mirrorlike finish and shine my shoes glossy black. I call it the Heinz treatment. “Respect the sport by respecting your equipment,” Heinz tells me. “Don’t show up looking like a bum,” Mike says.

  All the top racers have nicknames. Gil’s the Bear. Whitehead’s the Outlaw. There’s the Animal, and Torch, and Art the Dart. The nicknames describe the riders’ racing styles. The fans cheer wildly for their favorite racers, and yell even louder for those they love to hate—like the Outlaw. I aim to earn a nickname too. The other racers sometimes refer to me as the Flying Dutchman and the Toast Master, because I so often burn my opponents, but no nickname really sticks.

  Then one Tuesday night I’m racing the keirin against a bunch of other juniors and local amateurs. I’m out of position coming into the last lap, so I open up my sprint early. I dodge and weave through racers coming out of the first turn and down the backstretch. Entering the home straight, I kick again and pass three more riders, winning by the width of a tire. “Wow, you sliced through those guys like a blade,” says David Mullica, an older racer who’s friends with Gil.