The officials relegate Hill. I get the win.
We line up for the third ride. The winner makes the medal round. Hill leads off the line. Coming into the last lap we wind up our sprints. I fake as if I’m going to sprint over the top of Hill. He throws me a hook coming into the first turn, trying to beat me back, but I’m not there. I’ve dropped underneath him. When he realizes I’m coming below him, Hill tries to chop down on me. But he’s too late.
I’m already in front of Hill, and retaliating with my own hook, whipping my rear wheel up the banking as we exit the second turn. He tries to dodge me, but he’s late again. Zzzzing! I shave off a piece of his shoe with the bladed spokes on my wheel and slice one of his leather toe straps in half.
I win uncontested. Hill runs his mouth after we cross the line.
“You nearly took my fucking toes off!” Hill shouts in his thick Aussie accent.
Back in the cabins, the giant German sprinter Michael Hübner takes up Hill’s argument. He’s shouting at the officials to disqualify me. Never mind that he’s got no affiliation with Australia, and isn’t even racing. He obviously doesn’t realize how much I love to scrap. I dismount my bike and head for our team’s cabin. “Fuck off,” I yell over at Hübner from the US team’s cabin.
Hübner refocuses his rage on me. He moves toward me, I move toward him—two 200-plus-pound men preparing to collide. The laws of physics attest this will not end well. I charge right through the waist-high metal barricades trying to reach Hübner. But before we can meet, Gil jumps in front of me. The German contingent grabs Hübner. We’re steered in opposite directions.
The next day I lose to Florian Rousseau in the semifinal of the match sprints.
After the race, I’m called in for the compulsory drug testing. I’m seething. I expected to win, and I didn’t. In the testing room, I can’t pee. A half hour passes, then 90 minutes, as I wait to go. A frustrated French drug-testing official sighs and looks at his watch. “Oh geez,” he says. I snap. I throw the piss cup across the room. A stack of documents sitting on a desk goes flying. I can’t believe I didn’t win. I’m the world record holder.
In the keirin, the last event at worlds, I place fourth in my semifinal heat. Only the top three advance to the finals. I don’t have any power left in my legs. Three weeks ago, in Blaine, I was the best in the world, ever. I guaranteed a win in Bordeaux, and I arrived prepared to do just that. But I didn’t. My streak of 5 consecutive years with at least one world championship medal ends in Bordeaux.
That evening, Erv and I decide to go over to the race hotel and hang out. As soon as we get there, I run into Hill. He stares me down. I stare back. Moments later we’re face to face, nose to nose, daring each other to toss a jab. I can smell the cheap French beer on his breath.
“You messed up,” Hill says, claiming I fouled him in the last ride.
“No, you messed up,” I counter. It was he who tried to chop me first.
“Let’s go outside and settle this,” Hill says.
“Let’s go,” I say.
Hill stands at least 4 inches shorter than me, but he’s nearly as wide as he is tall—built like a concrete pillar. He’s also a thug who’s been convicted for assault in the past. But I won’t back down from anyone, especially another sprinter, especially right now.
Erv and a semicircle of spectators stare at us in disbelief. If these two guys fight, someone will surely die, they think. Just before Hill and I turn to walk outside, Erv and few other racers finally jump in between us. “Whoa, c’mon guys,” Erv says. He knows I’ll regret the altercation. No one wins in a fight like this. Hill and I move in separate directions.
But the fight continues inside me.
I’m an Olympian, a hero to thousands, a father to two adorable children, and a husband to a beautiful wife. My closest friends—my team—are the ones who make my success possible. But it’s letting down this very team that makes me madder than ever after Bordeaux. They sacrificed for me, and I didn’t come through.
Just like in Atlanta.
12
DO THE RIGHT THING
IN THE WINTER of 1999, I attend a training camp in Dallas with the EDS team. Despite the unseasonably warm weather and our daily sessions on the beautiful new Superdrome track, an air of ambiguity hangs over the group. EDS recently replaced its bike racing-friendly CEO with a new executive, a known cost-cutter. Rumors swirl among the riders that EDS will pull the sponsorship plug. I try to brush them off and focus on business as usual—training.
But I’m not immune to the speculation. I’m in the midst of contract negotiations with the team manager, Nick Chenowth. He’s certain I’ll win gold in Sydney, only about 18 months away now. He wants to sign me through 2004, before my price skyrockets. I’m eager to ink a new deal, too.
Nick’s extravagance—some would say arrogance—rubs a lot of people the wrong way, including my teammate, Chris Carlson, a member of the employee team and a lawyer at EDS. Nick personifies a stereotype common to Dallas. He wears designer suits and drives ridiculous cars. He recently traded his Lamborghini in for a Ferrari. His über-modern home is decked out with expensive Cantoni furniture.
But my own experiences with Nick (excepting our tandem crashes) remain positive. He’s a consummate salesman, which is something I can relate to, having grown up around the auto retail industry. Watching him pitch his sports-marketing projects to a room full of EDS executives wearing intimidating dark suits is awe-inspiring.
Nick’s enthusiasm for the EDS cycling team is infectious, even among the riders. The team is a mix of full-time athletes like Erv and me, plus company employees like Carlson. Despite our seemingly different agendas, members of the team rally around one another at events. When Carlson sets the national pursuit record at a big track race, I slap him on the back. “Bad ass, Chris,” I say. “Way to ride your bike!”
More than anything, though, Nick believes in me. He insists he wants to wrap me up before the Sydney Games, but he hesitates on drawing up a new contract. For the first time in our relationship, he lacks confidence at the negotiating table.
During the camp, I also have a strange conversation with Steve Walsh, who works with Nick in the Global Sports division at EDS. I consider Steve a friend and our conversation is jovial.
“Hey, did you get a check for $10,000 from Nick?” he asks. “He said he needed the money for a business deal you two were working on together.”
“No,” I say, befuddled. Maybe I didn’t account for a bonus? I think. I’ll keep a close eye on the mail from now on, I jokingly tell Steve.
Something’s up, but I don’t know exactly what.
Later, I go on a road ride with Gil, whom Nick hired as an EDS coach this year. Gil’s excited about his new position. He’s always measured the rewards of coaching through the success of his athletes. But finally, Gil is receiving compensation proportionate to his talent as a trainer and motivator.
Me, I’m not so chipper. I turn and look over at Gil while we ride. He sees the pessimism on my face. “This could all be gone in the blink of an eye,” I say.
In March, just before the racing season starts, the ax falls. The new CEO cuts EDS’s Global Sports division, meaning the company will no longer sponsor the cycling team that pays my salary. Suddenly, I’m unemployed. But I’m not the only one affected.
EDS sponsors every facet of track cycling in the United States. Gil loses his job, and so does Erv. The sport’s governing body, USA Cycling, relied on EDS for nearly $1 million worth of sponsorship every year. That’s gone. The EDS Cup, a nationwide series of track races, comes to an abrupt end. Without a title sponsor, even the recently constructed Superdrome near Dallas, which EDS invested in heavily, faces an uncertain future.
I can’t say I’m surprised. Maybe I somehow jinxed the team with my comments to Gil a few weeks earlier. I don’t know what will happen to my current contract, which pays me through 2000, and if I’ll be able afford the mortgage on my new home. But I’m determined not to l
et the EDS fall-out distract me from my goal: winning the Olympics.
I call Gil moments after we get the disheartening news.
“I’m going to the gym,” I say. “You coming?”
“Not today,” he says. He’s just not in the mood.
I take out my frustration on the weights. I thrash my body with set after vicious set of Olympic-style lifts. I throw up more weight, and with greater intensity, than I have all year.
In some ways I feel liberated. I’m free of the financial motivation to compete. As I toss the immense weight around the gym, the pressure builds inside my head. I remember my childhood and brashly proclaiming, “I’m going to win the Olympics someday!” Sweat pours down my shoulders and cakes on the chalk in my palms. I think back to the day Jay and I tossed those rocks—Thwack! Thwack! Thwack!—the day I first discovered bike racing in the basement of Heinz’s house.
I’m destined to race track bikes in the Olympic Games. It doesn’t matter if I earn millions of dollars or a single cent. My silver medal still haunts me. I still dream of winning gold. As I finish the last rep in a set of power cleans, I let out a scream—a war cry—that echoes off of the thick concrete walls. I release the weights, flicking them away from my body and letting them fall to the rubber mats where they bounce a few times.
I stand stoically for a moment, alone in the brick room. The sweat rolls off the tips of my fingers and into small pools on the black floor. My legs and ass, my lower back and abs, my chest and shoulders, even my neck, throb with fatigue. My body aches that good ache of a job well done—a workout that will reap dividends.
I can’t wait to get to Sydney.
A few days later Gil shows up at the gym.
“I’m with you,” he says. “Let’s get after it.”
Since Atlanta, I often struggle getting to sleep. I lie in bed, thinking about what I can do to get quicker. Sometimes, visions wake me in the middle of the night. I see Fiedler in front of me. I charge at his rear wheel. He holds me off. I can’t get around him. I am one of the quickest sprinters in the world. I need to be the quickest. I stare into the darkness of the night, trying to figure out how.
Then one day, I’m flipping though my local newspaper, the Morning Call, when I spot an ad for athletic speed camps. I pick up the phone and call the number. A man named Ed Ruisz answers. He tells me he is a native Pennsylvanian and ran track in college during the ’80s. In school, his graduate work in human performance took him to the Soviet Union, where he studied at the Soviet Sports Institute in Moscow. Upon returning to the Lehigh Valley, Ruisz brought back the Eastern Bloc training techniques the Soviets and East Germans used to dominate track cycling, before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. He tells me he can make me quicker.
Though his methods seem unorthodox, Ruisz’s athletes get results. As the track coach at a local high school, Ruisz’s women’s team set a national record for consecutive victories. His team won 134 track meets in a row. In his spare time Ruisz works with NFL players and other professional athletes.
Now, he’ll train me.
Ruisz says to get quicker, I must train my mind as well as my body. We start with plyometric exercises. Basically, jumping. But Ruisz doesn’t just tell me to start a round of plyometrics. Every movement I perform is keyed by a visual stimulus. Ruisz signals me to begin the exercise by flashing a light, teaching my body to react without waiting for a conscious order from my brain.
Ruisz attaches surgical tubing to a belt on my waist. He makes me perform vertical leaps and standing long jumps against the stretchy resistance, slowing my reaction time to the start signal. Then, Ruisz takes away the resistance, letting me respond instantaneously. Next, he straps me into ankle shackles and instructs me to do a series of split-jump squats. I start in a forward lunge position, then leap into the air and alternate legs. During the jump squats, the shear force expended by my powerful legs frequently causes the elastic bands to snap in half. We remedy this problem by using two sets of elastic bands for many of the exercises I perform.
To recruit more of the fast-twitch muscle fibers required of my explosive sprint efforts, Ruisz uses the elastic bands to tow me as I run. The short bursts of running, performed with the aid of the elastic instead of against it, force me to turn my legs over faster. Where I would normally run 20 meters in just under 3 seconds without the elastic towing me, it takes me just 2.5 seconds with the elastic.
Ruisz’s training flies in the face of traditional practices for cycling, namely the notion that bike racers don’t run. But I’m confident that Ruisz knows how to make athletes quicker. I work out beside football stars, whose sport requires lightning-fast reactions, and I regularly outperform them.
As the season progresses, Gil and I adapt Ruisz’s quickness techniques to the bike. Gil flashes a light to signal the start of a sprint interval, or he simply waves his hand in my peripheral vision. The drills mimic the type of quickness I need to keep a competitor from jumping over the top of me in a race, or beating me off the line.
The lapse between the message from my brain and response from my body nearly disappears. Everything seems to slow down. I can grab fish from flowing streams and snatch flies out of the air.
After EDS pulls out, my friend Jim Kennedy, of Cox Enterprises, steps in to help. He pays me to race for a team sponsored by one of his subsidiary businesses, AutoTrader.com, which is managed by another friend of mine, Macon Cherp. I earn enough to focus on the Olympics, without worrying about refinancing my house.
But the drama with EDS isn’t over. I get another phone call from Steve asking about unaccounted-for money, involving Nick. I conclude EDS is looking into the cycling team’s finances. And the bizarre nature of Steve’s questions leads me to think they won’t like what they find.
Not too long after Steve’s call, I learn the company is investigating Nick for embezzlement. One of the lawyers working on the inquiry is my former teammate, Chris Carlson, who’s accustomed to rooting out malfeasance within the company.
I later find out that Carlson is tenacious in his pursuit of Nick. In an effort to compile evidence, Carlson pores over the team’s financial documents. He interviews, and in some cases deposes, nearly everyone involved with the EDS cycling team, from the prior CEO of the company to the manager of the local bike shop. Carlson even contacts the FBI, which considers pursuing criminal charges against Nick.
It doesn’t take Carlson long to discover how Nick lived so lavishly. He submitted falsified expense reports to EDS for various goods and services. Most of the invoices and receipts for the goods were handwritten by Nick himself. The company then wrote Nick checks that were deposited directly into his personal account. Between 1994 and 1998, he stole well over $1 million from EDS.
Some of the expenses EDS erroneously paid for on behalf of the cycling team were for items that don’t even exist, such as a set of 130-centimeter crankarms (most crankarms are measured in millimeters) and $12,000 for some mysterious bike containers. Nick supposedly purchased thousands of racing tires priced at more than $300 apiece, and bought bikes for the team that no one ever actually saw.
During the course of his investigation, Carlson alleges Nick used EDS money to buy those exotic sports cars and Italian furniture. He also alleges Nick stole $25,000 to pay for his girlfriend’s boob job. But Carlson admits much of the money Nick took simply disappeared.
Then, one day, the EDS legal department contacts me. They want to talk to me; can I please come to Dallas? I’ve got nothing to hide. My lawyer, Eric Hall, who also acts as my agent, tells me not to worry. “There’s not a scintilla of evidence you did anything wrong,” he says. “Just be truthful.” When I sit down with the EDS lawyers, I make sure Carlson’s there. He knows cycling, and he attests that I was in no way involved in Nick’s fraud.
Eventually, the case goes to civil court. Nick acknowledges his guilt to the judge and agrees to pay $1.3 million in restitution to EDS. Then, the FBI files its criminal case. The saga finally ends when Nick is sentenced to 2
7 months in a federal prison.
Though I absolutely don’t condone Nick’s actions, I’m less hard on him than many people. During its height, EDS was the best track-cycling team in the world, and the company’s support of USA Cycling gave opportunities to athletes they would’ve otherwise never imagined.
Nick also believed steadfastly in me. You are going to win the Olympics one day, he would tell me. Though many people consider Nick to be a scoundrel, he helped me to believe in myself. Unfortunately, it was that same talent to make people believe, as well as Nick’s own greed, that caused his downfall.
Publicly, Nick continues to dispute any wrongdoing.
In August of 1999, I put the EDS fiasco behind me and head to Winnipeg, Canada, for the Pan-Am Games. The competition will serve as the selection for the Sydney Olympics. Just before the Pan-Am Games, I set max lifts in the gym as I continue to get more lean. I put up 550 pounds on the squat rack and lift 315 pounds 10 times on the bench press.
I’m ready to kick some ass. This is the moment I’ve waited for since Atlanta. The run into Sydney has begun. For the first time in nearly 3 years, I rest. I back off of my training and let my body recover from the repeated beatings I’ve given it in the gym and on the track, year after year.
When cyclists taper for a big race, they talk about letting themselves breathe. As if the training prior to the event was suffocation, and taking a rest feels like breathing big gulps of air. For years, I drowned myself with training. Now, I’m rising to the surface. After the disappointment of worlds in Bordeaux and the EDS debacle, I’m angry. Really angry. I’m ready to annihilate my competitors.
Heading into the Pan-Am Games, I’m also excited. Win these races, and I’m guaranteed a trip to Sydney. In the match sprints I qualify first, and set a Pan-Am record for the flying 200 meters at 10.3 seconds. I dominate each of my opponents in the early rounds of the sprint tournament, and meet another American, Marcelo Arrue, in the final. Arrue is a good friend and teammate of mine. He even moved to T-Town and is a valued training partner. But he’s no match for me in competition. I beat Arrue in two straight rides.
The Price of Gold Page 15