I don’t want any loose clothing snagging on the weight bar during the lifts, so I only wear a jock strap and a pair of spandex shorts, no shirt. Sweat pours off my chest and drips down on the bar as I prepare for a series of power cleans. I look down at the bar. On either end sits a stack of plates with a combined weight of 325 pounds. As I prepare for the vicious round of reps, I recall my childhood, and my mom’s words: “No matter how hard you think you’re working, someone is always working harder than you.” I approach every lift like I sprint, like my life depends on it.
But the mind-set applies to more than just getting the weight off the ground. My livelihood as the world’s best sprinter depends on each and every lift. With each rep, I’m building toward Sydney, gaining the power and quickness I will need to beat the best sprinters in the world. If I lose my focus, if I use poor technique or don’t control the weight, I can seriously injure myself. Olympic lifters have dislocated their elbows in competition, crumpling to the ground with the bar falling on top of them. Gil doesn’t spot me. If the weight slips, there’s nothing he could do anyway. It’s best he just stays out of the way. If I don’t control the weight, I’m on my own.
I rub chalk between my hands, reach down, and grip the bar at a width slightly wider than my shoulders. My knees bend, my back rests at a 50-degree angle to my thighs, my abs contract, my glutes tighten. I look straight ahead.
Boom. I blast into the floor, extending my legs and back. The weight flies off the ground and moves directly upward. I catch the bar on my chest in a deep squat. One breath in, one breath out. Boom. Every muscle in my legs, butt, and back fires to move the bar upward again, pushing the massive weight against the force of gravity. I finish the lift standing, with my feet shoulder-width apart.
One rep down. I drop the bar to the floor. The rubber weights bounce three times, each one less high than the last. I reach down, move the bar back into position, and prepare for the second of a half dozen more reps.
With each completed power clean, pressure builds inside my head. It feels as if I’m descending from 30,000 feet on an airplane. I can only vaguely hear Gil shouting, “C’mon Blade, dig in! Let’s go! C’mon, push…get it! Don’t quit, Blade! Go! Go! Go!” I finish my final rep and drop the bar. It rolls toward the wall. Gil hands me a bottle of water. I breathe deeply. My ears pop.
After a short break, I move on to the next set. At the end of the lifting session, after all the reps and sets of squats, deadlifts, and overhead presses after pools of sweat accumulate on the floor, and my hands are caked with the chalk, and Gil’s hoarse from yelling, I’ve put up more than 50,000 pounds of weight.
By the time I get home from the gym, I’m catatonic. I need rest. I need to sit nearly motionless and let my body recuperate as much as possible before that afternoon’s sprint workout at the velodrome.
I’m home, but I’m not here. My physical presence is in the room, but I’m mentally detached. I seal myself off. Emotional connection requires too much effort.
Tyler is 3, and a bundle of energy. I look at him and smile. He’s constantly up to something and into something—probably a lot like me at the same age. I love him, but I don’t have the energy to give him the attention I should. I just lifted 25 tons. Now I can barely swing a 45-pound 3-year-old over my head. It pains me not to play with him. I want to chase him around the house for hours on end, listening to him giggle and scream. I want to feel that pure, parental joy. But I don’t.
When athletes mention sacrifice, they don’t talk about putting winning in front of their own family. But that’s what I’ve done. I’ve missed most of Tyler’s growing up because I was off racing or at some training camp. Now Christi is pregnant with our second child. She’s due any day now, and she’ll bear the early years of raising this child alone, as well. I tell myself in the end I’m doing this for my family. I promise myself I’ll make it up to them when this is over—after I win gold. I use the long absences from my family as motivation.
I look into the foyer, where my silver medal from Atlanta sits. Christi proudly set it there right after we got home from the Olympics. Then we got in a fight.
“Put it away,” I told her.
“No, it’s something to be proud of,” she said. “You worked hard for this.”
“Not hard enough,” I told her. But Christi didn’t budge. It stayed in the foyer.
She leaves the case open, with the medal on display. I walk over to the medal and close the case. She’ll open it back up tomorrow. She always does.
Christi asks me if I’m ready to eat. When I’m home she cooks all of my meals. She doesn’t work. She treats taking care of Tyler and taking care of me as her job. My job is to train, eat, sleep—and then win. Her commitment to winning gold in Sydney matches my own. I never touch a spatula or turn on a stovetop. She sometimes even pours the milk over my cereal in the morning.
I can’t perform at the top level of the sport alone. Christi is part of my team, the people around me who help me succeed—my family and my training staff. Gil and Andrzej help me train and are my corner men during competitions. Eddie works the thick knots out of my muscles with those big hands. Christi makes our home a completely stress-free environment—a place where I’m allowed to be lazy. Tyler is one of the few people who can make me smile.
Christi finds fulfillment in working toward our mutual goal, but like me, she also experiences isolation. She’s lonely. People don’t understand her commitment to my success. Social interactions often end awkwardly. Friends say she’s spoiling me. They don’t see how taking care of my every need makes me perform better. They’ve never won an Olympic medal. They’ve never lost gold.
I’m not always there for her, either. When I’m home, I don’t talk to her about my training or my races. I live two lives, one with her and Tyler and another fighting my demons in the gym and on the track. I know it’s not fair to her, but I can’t bring my demons home with me. My home is my sanctuary. Even though I’m her husband, Christi finds out how my races went from people who read about me in the paper.
When I’m in the middle of a brutal stretch of training, our daily interactions sometimes devolve to just hello and goodbye. Or, when’s the next meal?
One day, overwhelmed with frustration, Christi says to me, “You know, it’s been months since we’ve had a real conversation.”
I don’t know what to say. I just say, “I don’t want to lose you over this.”
But Christi keeps things from me, too. Any issues that arise around the house she deals with alone. She doesn’t tell me if Tyler’s sick. If he kept her up all night, crying. She doesn’t want to distract me. Even joyful moments, like Tyler’s first words, she keeps from me until I return home.
I talk with her on the phone, and I hear the kids crying. I ask her what’s wrong, why are they crying? She doesn’t tell me they’re crying because I’m not home. She knows I feel bad about missing the seminal events in my kids’ lives, and that if I truly knew how much it meant to them, it might affect my focus and determination.
She understands that I have to put myself first. So she puts me before herself.
I don’t know if I could make the same sacrifice for someone else.
11
DISAPPOINTMENT IN BORDEAUX
DURING THE winter of ’98, I’m finishing off a training ride by riding up the gradual hill toward my house. The computer on my handlebars reads 49.73 miles. I’m not happy with this number. My goal is to win gold in Sydney. I am number one, I tell myself. I will not end a ride with any number other than the number one.
I turn into our long driveway, 50.28 miles. I reach the garage door, 50.43. I roll back down the driveway and turn around until I’m at 50.88. Christi comes out of the house and sees me doing circles in front of the garage door. “What are you doing?” she asks. My bike’s odometer ticks over to 51. I’m satisfied.
“Finishing my ride,” I say, as I roll my bike into the garage. I don’t tell Christi how obsessive I’ve become. Christi
does enough. She doesn’t need to bear this burden with me. I’m possessed by my drive to win in Sydney. I’m in a trance.
The compulsion overtakes my every action. I pump 11.11 gallons of gas. I take one drink from the water fountain. The mind-set becomes an obsession. I make sure my seats on airplanes and my hotel rooms contain the number one. I end every ride on the number one. I am number one.
Later in the winter I go to Dallas for a training camp with my trade team, EDS. In Dallas, Erv and I lift weights at the Tom Landry Fitness Center at Baylor Hospital. In addition to its immaculate weight facilities, the Fitness Center does performance testing, everything from maximum VO2 analysis to hydrostatic body fat testing, also known as the dip tank. I decide to measure my body fat in the dip tank.
The dip tank uses a scale placed inside a tub of water to measure a person’s buoyancy. Because body fat floats, and muscle and bone sink, the difference between a person’s weight in the water and his or her weight on dry land provides the most accurate measurement of body fat percentage. I strip down to my shorts, get onto the scale in the tub, and submerge myself underwater, blowing out all the excess air in my lungs. The scale measures my weight under water. An algorithm that compares my water weight to my standard weight calculates my body fat.
Even though it’s early in the season and I’m not even close to my peak fitness, I don’t like the results. I’m 8 percent body fat, a number well within the range of most world-class sprinters. But I aim to win the Olympics, and 8 percent means I can improve. If I’m carrying less fat on my muscle-bound body, I can accelerate more quickly. I need to get quicker. Fiedler beat me not because he was faster or stronger, but because I couldn’t get past him in the final 100 meters. He beat me off the line and protected the front with his superior quickness. I’m one of the three quickest sprinters in the world. I need to be number one.
When I get back home to the Lehigh Valley, I tell Christi to clean out the kitchen. Get rid of the junk, I say. I grew up in a PA Dutch family, where baked treats and fatty meats were the norm. A traditional PA Dutch salad consists of iceberg lettuce drowned in hot bacon dressing. Growing up, my family considered all food healthy. Though we ate venison regularly, we never thought of it as a healthy, lean meat. We ate venison because we hunted deer. My parents never discussed empty calories, or good versus bad fat. If the food filled you up and kept you working hard, it was good food.
In college, Tim Quigley and I regularly got our dinner from the local convenience store. We considered a few packs of Twinkies and a giant soda a well-rounded meal. At the Alpine training camp, Erv and I drank super-caffeinated Jolt sodas and ate king-size candy bars during our rides. Many of those bad dietary habits stuck with me. I eat ice cream almost every night. I crave Wendy’s hamburgers when I’m traveling. I work hard enough to eat whatever I want, I think.
But not if I want to win the Olympics. We throw out the candy bars I sometimes eat and the potato chips and the soft drinks. Christi reads through an array of nutrition books. She cooks homemade meals with the right amounts of carbohydrates, protein, and fat. Food is fuel, she says. The quality of the fuel, and when you fill up, makes all the difference when it comes to performing better and getting leaner.
Christi prepares the right meals at exactly the right times. More carbs in advance of my workouts to provide quick-burning energy, and balanced dishes with lean protein to aid recovery afterward. She makes peanut butter, banana, and honey sandwiches on whole wheat bread as my favorite prerace snacks and cooks dinners with the lean meats I stockpile each hunting season. We never eat after 7 p.m. I don’t touch alcohol.
As the diet takes hold, fat fades away from parts of my body where I didn’t even know it existed. My muscly quads go from looking just big to freakishly defined. Veins pop out of my shoulders and make a web across my abs.
I was 225 pounds in Atlanta. I go down to 210, and I gain power in the gym and on the track. The next time I get in a dip tank, I’m just 4.5 percent body fat. I almost feel sorry for the racers who will face me in Sydney.
Almost.
In the summer I head back to Texas for the national championships in Frisco, a suburb north of Dallas. The sponsor of my team, EDS, recently spent $4 million to construct a state-of-the-art track in Frisco, dubbed the Superdrome.
The Superdrome is a modern marvel, designed and built by the same company that made the Atlanta velodrome. It’s 250 meters around with ridiculously steep 44-degree turns and composite boards that whoosh under my bike wheels. Personally, I don’t like the track. It’s too similar to the Olympic velodrome. When I ride the track, I’m reminded of losing gold.
Nick Chenowth, the director of the EDS cycling team, helped convince the company to build the Superdrome in partnership with local governments. The track represents the crown jewel of a cycling empire Nick built and now oversees. Since the ’96 Games, the EDS team has grown from a group of employees who liked to race bikes into perhaps the most talent-laden track cycling team in the world.
After the Atlanta Games, Erv decided to switch over to road cycling, but Nick convinced him to come back to the track and race for EDS. Nick gave Erv a contract so good, Erv even decided to buy a house in the Dallas area, near the track. Nick also signed former Olympic medalist and former world champion Rebecca Twigg.
The EDS team rides the nicest equipment available. Inside the team’s sparkling trailer sits an array of carbon-fiber track bikes and wheels, top-of-the-line handmade gear. EDS also sponsors a national series of track races around the country and handles the computer systems at USA Cycling in a sponsorship deal worth more than half a million dollars.
Some people might contend that the amount of money EDS pumps into track cycling doesn’t necessarily make sense. Why would a technology company care so much about supporting track racing? But no one says anything. Nick, who’s also the head of the company’s international sports marketing division, convinces anyone who’ll listen that EDS is getting a deal. The company will easily earn back its investment when EDS racers make it to the Olympics. We all buy what Nick sells. Heck, we’re getting paid to.
I train straight through nationals, and still win three more US titles. Then I head to Blaine, Minnesota, for another training camp in advance of the ’98 world championships in Bordeaux, France. I’m ripping apart the track in Minnesota, riding unofficial world-record times, even during the last few intervals of my brutal workouts.
I want to make the times count. I convince Gil and Andrzej to give me a crack at a world record. We call in an official from the international governing body for sports cycling, the UCI (International Cycling Union), to clock me. We get US Olympic Committee drug testers at the track. I aim to break the world record for 500 meters.
But Andrzej won’t let me miss a second of training to set this record. We schedule the record attempt for Wednesday night, at the end of my evening training session, and after a morning workout that same day.
Wednesday evening comes. It’s August in Minnesota, but unseasonably cool as the sun dips below the track’s railing. A blustery wind blows across my bare shins as I circle the top of the boards, preparing to launch my record-setting ride. I’ll ride two laps as fast as I can around the track. I ignore the soreness in my quads from the day’s hard work and focus on the final, intense effort I will make for just under a half minute.
I approach the start line and drop from the top of the track all the way to the black line ringing the inside of the boards. I stand and pound on the pedals until I reach my max speed. The first lap flies past, effortlessly. I’m topping out at 45 miles per hour as I cross the start-finish line to start the second lap.
Some people might interpret the surge of lactic acid flowing through my body as pain. But I don’t hurt. I’m floating. I’m in complete control of my body and my bike.
I whip through the final turn as if I’m riding a set of rails, my bike pinned against the bottom edge of the track. My legs spin as fast as humanly possible. I cross the line. 26.4
82 seconds. A full 0.2 seconds faster than the previous mark, set by a Russian sprinter more than 10 years ago—but still not as fast as times I set during training.
I head to worlds brimming with confidence, but still not willing to back off my demanding training schedule. Worlds take place in Bordeaux, amid a strangely intense atmosphere. Everyone seems on edge, as if a full moon is lighting the velodrome.
My world record, and the publicity it spawned, caught the attention of the racing world. Record attempts are typically made in the thin air of high-altitude velodromes. Rarely does a record fall on an outdoor, sea level track like Blaine’s. The other racers know I’m hauling ass. I’m the favorite.
In the quarterfinals of the match sprint, I meet Darryn Hill. The Australian national team, including Hill, spent the summer in T-Town and we raced regularly on Friday nights. We waged some intense battles on the T-Town track. But those were friendly bouts compared to the intensity we bring to the world championships.
In Bordeaux, we revert to our most hardened demeanors. I want to kill him. He wants to kill me. I ready myself for a cage match. All eyes turn to the track when we line up. Racers stop warming up on their rollers. The officials become more vigilant. They know it won’t be a clean race.
Hill wins the first ride. I must win the next two rides to make it to the semifinal round. In the second ride, he moves high in the final turn and leaves the sprinter’s lane open. I drop underneath him. Hill retaliates by dropping down the banking, right into me. We’re shoulder to shoulder coming into the finishing straight.
Hill keeps moving to his left, forcing me onto the apron. As we approach the line, both of us are riding completely off the wooden boards, now waging our battle out-of-bounds. I lean to my right and headbutt Hill in the shoulder to push him back up onto the track as we cross the finish line.
The Price of Gold Page 14