By the team’s second year, Schwinn dropped out, but it didn’t matter. 7-Eleven lavished such huge sums of money on the team that Ochowicz was able to hire some of the best riders in the country, luring them away from rival teams, and, in the case of a number of riders, encroaching on Eddie Borysewicz’s turf.
While Ochowicz worked on building his commercial enterprise, Eddie B and the US national team knew they would be judged solely on their performance over the course of a week or so the following summer. As the date of the Olympics drew closer, there was an ever greater sense of urgency about winning. On September 30, 1983, US Cycling Federation staff member Ed Burke, PhD, circulated a memo to the rest of the staff saying he wanted to try a method of performance enhancement called blood boosting on the cycling team. The method wasn’t technically banned by the International Olympic Committee. It wasn’t expressly allowed, either. In essence, blood boosting was a way of increasing the body’s supply of red blood cells by way of transfusion.
The staff met in Colorado Springs to discuss the matter. When it came to using drugs, Borysewicz was always concerned about safety. But he made a distinction between doping and blood boosting. Simply adding blood to the body, he thought, wasn’t the same as doing something that was both illegal and could cause long-term damage. Borysewicz told Burke that if it was safe, not against the rules, and well supervised, he was fine with it. But he didn’t want to be directly involved.
One of the riders on Eddie B’s team, twenty-six-year-old Brent Emery of Milwaukee, recalled that one day, just a few months before the 1984 Olympics, an East German coach or support person had come to visit the US national team at its training center in Colorado Springs. The American team was riding at near world-record times in its training. “Why are you guys beating your brains out training at altitudes like this? We’re going to get the same boost in fifteen minutes,” the East German visitor told Borysewicz—a reference, Emery said, to blood boosting. In other words, why bother training so hard when you could just get an instant hit of energy by injecting fresh blood cells? The remark by the East German triggered a wave of anxiety among some American riders, who felt they were entitled to compete on a level playing field with the Russians.
But the Russian-American rivalry was again thwarted by politics. In early May, less than three months before the start of the Olympics, the Soviets announced they would boycott the games because they feared for their athletes’ safety. It was a disappointment for Borysewicz, who believed the real reason for the boycott was retaliation for the United States’ 1980 boycott.
The US team, however, went ahead with the blood-boosting effort. Participation in the program was voluntary. If they were interested, they were to arrange for family members with compatible blood types to provide the blood donations. A few days before the Olympic track cycling events, the cyclists and their blood donors lined up in a room at the Ramada hotel in Carson City, and a doctor connected tubes between them, allowing the blood to flow directly from one to the other. There was no screening of the blood for hepatitis or other diseases.
About a third of the team took part in the transfusions. Emery opted to participate, and his mother showed up at the hotel to provide the transfusion. Having her blood flow into his body through a plastic tube was a weird experience, Emery thought, but he felt it was necessary to go into the Olympics as well prepared as he could be. According to him, when the day of the Olympics arrived and he got on his bike and began riding around the track for a warm-up for the 4-kilometer team pursuit, he didn’t feel any better or stronger than usual, and his “split times” were in the range of what he would have expected, based on past experience. He wasn’t sure the transfusion even helped. He won a silver medal in the event.
Leonard Harvey Nitz, then a twenty-eight-year-old rider from Sacramento, California, also received a transfusion, but he noticed a small difference. Usually, during multiday competitions, Nitz’s fitness level would begin to drop off after about three days of riding. But during the 1984 games, he noticed that after five days, he was still just as strong as he was on the first day. He helped win the United States a silver medal in the team pursuit and a bronze in the individual pursuit.
In all, Borysewicz’s US team won nine medals, including five golds, out of a possible fifteen in the 1984 Olympics, including the men’s road race. In the six events for which the US riders won medals, 7-Eleven riders had figured in five of them. The United States won more medals in cycling during the 1984 Olympics than the American cycling team has won in all other Olympics combined, before or since those games. Of course, the magnitude of the triumph was somewhat diminished by the fact that the Russians hadn’t participated.
After the Olympics, Borysewicz’s stature was greater than ever. But he had enemies within the US Olympic Committee. Sheila Young, Ochowicz’s wife, who sat on the board of the US Cycling Federation, had repeatedly asked Borysewicz to make her brother a coach on the men’s team. Borysewicz stubbornly refused. Sheila wanted Borysewicz out, and less than six months after the Olympics, it looked as though she might get her wish. In February 1985, Rolling Stone magazine wrote an exposé on the blood boosting that had taken place on the US cycling team. Borysewicz, who was implicated in the article, suspected that Sheila was behind the leak, and he was furious, but he couldn’t prove it.
After the scandal broke, some in cycling’s governing body, the very organization that started the program, stepped forth to say publicly that they felt the transfusions were unethical. But Borysewicz, who had had very little to do with them, declined to express contrition. He said the line of morality in sports was a blurry one. “If we pump tires with helium, wear our new [aerodynamic] helmets, use new [disk] wheels, are we immoral because everybody does not have them?” he asked.
He was suspended for thirty days. Although he was able to stay on as an Olympics cycling coach, he was demoted. In the future he would have to operate without the autonomy he had grown accustomed to.
Ochowicz’s team sustained little damage from the scandal, despite the fact that some of the riders had participated in the blood transfusions. The team had become iconic by then, so that its “kit”—or uniform—was featured in the movie American Flyers, a 1985 Warner Bros. film starring Kevin Costner. In the film, Costner and David Marshall Grant play estranged brothers who become reacquainted in the course of a cross-country, three-day bicycle race modeled after the Coors Classic. Cycling was becoming cool in the eyes of the American public.
Later in 1985, Borysewicz was on his ranch in Ramona, California, just northeast of San Diego, when he got a phone call. It was Mike Fraysse, who wanted to know if Borysewicz would train a masters athlete, a fortysomething banker named Thom Weisel. Borysewicz was livid. “You want me to do what?” he asked. Masters was the word used to describe athletes, usually over the age of thirty-five, who competed against athletes in their age bracket. In many sports, it was a polite term for “weekend warrior” or over the hill.
“Listen, Eddie, the thing is, this guy is a big backer of the US Olympic Committee,” Fraysse said. “If you help him, it’ll help the movement.” The argument resonated with Eddie B, who knew funding was always the major issue. He agreed to do it.
Within minutes of Eddie’s conversation with Fraysse, Weisel was on the line. “When can I start?” he barked into the phone in his deep, commanding voice.
Weisel was a wealthy Silicon Valley investment banker who, in a power struggle, took control of Montgomery Securities, a firm that had pioneered tech industry investment banking. He’d been an A-student and a speed skater as a boy growing up in Milwaukee but had clashed with his strict father, a prominent surgeon and a disciplinarian who had kept a stick for the purposes of beating Thom and his younger brother. A jock, and the quarterback of his high school football team, young Weisel craved the outdoors and disliked what he viewed to be the parochialism of the Midwest, so he enrolled in Stanford University, with its 8,180-acre campus near Palo Alto, California. He began dreaming
of competing in the 1960 Winter Olympics, and shortly after enrolling in Stanford, he took the winter quarter off to prepare. But he didn’t spend enough time on the ice and performed dismally in the skate-offs for the US Olympic skating team. He blew it, and he took it hard.
After graduation, Weisel attended Harvard Business School, where he befriended classmate Michael Bloomberg, before returning to the West Coast to become a research analyst working for a firm there. In 1971, he joined the investment bank Robertson, Colman & Siebel, in San Francisco. By the mid-1970s, the firm took several venture-backed tech companies—including Applied Materials—public. With guidance from his friend Bloomberg, then running the Salomon Brothers equity trading desk in New York, Weisel added a profitable trading desk. But when investment banking hit a slump, the firm’s trading operation grew bigger, and Weisel, who was the junior partner and the most aggressive, began to battle with his partners over profits. In 1978, Weisel became CEO of the firm, and the partners split up. Weisel changed the name of the firm to Montgomery Securities—after Montgomery Street in downtown San Francisco. Because Montgomery was a relatively young firm, competing with giant New York investment banks, Weisel tried to build a culture that rewarded entrepreneurial drive. He believed in “equity upside” and “huge profit participation.” He viewed himself to be a “frustrated athlete,” and liked to hire and fraternize with those who were also competitive in sports. After he took up running, for instance, he brought in his running coach as Montgomery’s personnel director—and formed a corporate running team that won a series of national championships over the course of a decade. Montgomery placed ads in running magazines, seeking women runners interested in working in financial services—a way to fill out the corporate women’s running team for corporate challenge cup races. One of the women who answered the ad wound up as Weisel’s second wife. He firmly believed that success in sports would bring success in business and life, too.
By the mid-1980s, Weisel had injured his knee and could no longer run long distances. Inspired by Eric Heiden’s success on the 7-Eleven team and his crossover from speed skating to cycling, Weisel wondered about his own potential on the bike. So he bought a bike and began cycling recreationally. But then his fierce competitive drive took over.
For his first meeting with Borysewicz, Weisel flew to San Diego on his twin-engine plane, and then the two drove a few miles to the velodrome at San Diego’s Balboa Park. It was a dilapidated wreck, with cracks the size of New York potholes. The view was beautiful, though, with the cycling track perched on a cliff overlooking a desert canyon full of eucalyptus.
By the time he met Eddie B, Weisel had gray hair and a slightly weathered face. His eyes were narrow and overpowered by his bushy gray eyebrows, giving him a blank poker-faced look. He looked fit, but his broad shoulders and pronounced chest kept him from looking like an emaciated cyclist. As Eddie asked Weisel about his athletic history, he learned about his passion for running, and his near miss in qualifying for the Olympic team more than two decades earlier. Weisel also told him about his investment banking success and his passion for skiing. He had bought a condo with Bloomberg near Snowbird, Utah, and later purchased a place near Sun Valley Resort in Idaho and gotten into masters ski racing, where he’d also gotten involved with the US Ski Team. He helped to revamp the organizational structure and bring in new sources of funding. But Weisel’s bad knees had forced him to stop racing.
Eddie watched Weisel spin around the track. Like every pupil Eddie had observed, Weisel’s form was terrible. He thought to himself that Weisel looked like a mule trying to ride a bicycle. But Eddie had worked with worse. At least he had determination. Eddie gave Weisel a training plan, and after that, the two men met monthly in San Diego.
Eddie also allowed Weisel to join him when he was training Olympic athletes. Weisel got to know Olympic medalists like Steve Hegg and Mark Gorski, who’d won a gold in 1984, and they showed Weisel some of their tricks in track cycling.
One night, Weisel took Eddie out to dinner. He had a proposition: “You make me a national champion and I’ll make you a millionaire,” he said, in his commanding way. It wasn’t a joke. Weisel was offering to invest money for Eddie in the stock market and tech IPOs. He wanted to incentivize Eddie to do everything in his power to turn the middle-aged investment banker into a champion in his age group.
By the end of the 1987 cycling season, Weisel had mastered the technique of track cycling and its strategy. That season, he signed up for the Masters National Championships in Houston, Texas, where he won in the match sprint. Eddie had honored his part of the agreement. Now Weisel had to honor his: make Eddie a millionaire.
Perhaps inspired by his win, Weisel came to Eddie with another proposition. He wanted to start a high-level cycling team with aspirations to race in the Tour de France. It would be an elite team composed of younger riders who hoped to become full-time professionals. But he was also starting a masters team to go alongside it, which would consist of older amateurs like Weisel.
The Montgomery Securities team was a new invention in cycling. Until that point, there were either cycling clubs, with scores of older riders, or professional teams, like 7-Eleven and the many superb European teams, where the average age was somewhere around twenty-five. Nobody had ever thought of combining the two enterprises. It would be like starting a Minor League Baseball team with the stipulation that the team owner and his older friends also got to play. It was fantasy camp.
Weisel also formed Montgomery Sports Inc., based at Montgomery Securities headquarters in San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid, and became its president. Eddie set up the team headquarters at his ranch in Ramona. The area was a perfect training ground for a cycling team. It was remote, temperate in climate, and the infrequently traveled roads were well maintained. The area also had huge mountains nearby, including Palomar Mountain, and a fourteen-mile winding road that led to the largest mirrored telescope in the world.
Eddie hosted the masters men at his ranch for team rides with the young up-and-coming professional riders. On a hot summer day in 1987, Thom Weisel was driving with Eddie in his old Honda Civic, trailing the pack of riders as they climbed Palomar Mountain. He turned to Eddie and began to talk about his ambitions. “We can build this into something great. One day, this team is going to win the Tour de France,” he declared.
Eddie laughed. “That is like a French baseball team trying to win the World Series. You realize that, right?”
“You’re damn right I realize that,” Weisel said. “That’s why I want to do it.”
CHAPTER THREE
A RAGE TO WIN
Thirteen-year-old Lance Armstrong hadn’t come all the way down to this sprawling Houston theme park to try out the SkyScreamer, a ten-story free-fall ride, or the suspended-swinging coaster. He and his fiery stepfather, Terry, had come for Lance to compete in the IronKids Triathlon that was being conducted on the Six Flags AstroWorld course. The event included 200 yards of swimming, about 6 miles of cycling, and just over 1 mile of running. The top six finishers would get an all-expense-paid trip to Orlando for the IronKids Triathlon National Championships at Walt Disney World.
This was Lance’s second triathlon. At an IronKids event up in Dallas earlier that summer, Lance had blazed the course, torched his competition. But the organizers hadn’t mastered the timing system yet. Because the children were sent off in separate groups rather than competing simultaneously, the race officials couldn’t determine who won. Terry was furious. He had witnessed Lance’s dominance and was sure he was the winner. He demanded that they be flown to Houston for the next IronKids event so Lance could get another shot at winning—officially. And now, on a hot September day when the temperature was over 90 degrees, here they were.
The IronKids competition divided the field into two groups by age. Lance, who would turn fourteen the following month, was placed in the “senior division” and pitted against rivals age eleven to fourteen. As the race began, Lance splashed into the pool and
freestyled his way to a lead. When he popped out of the water, he put on his running shoes and quickly darted out in front of the pack. He hopped on his Mercier bike and sped away. The six miles on the bike vanished in a flash. He sprinted the final mile and crossed the finish line well ahead of all the other adolescents in the competition. He had earned his trip to the IronKids National Championship at Disney World. Terry was ecstatic.
In October, Terry and Lance flew to Orlando to compete for the national championship. Terry was so intensely competitive that he bet another father five hundred dollars that Lance would beat his son. Terry won the bet—Lance torched the other kid—and he was happy. But Lance didn’t win the race, coming in second, so Lance was not happy. He was furious with second place. That would never be good enough for him.
Lance wasn’t like other athletic kids in his hometown of Plano, Texas. They were into football and baseball. Though Lance played both, agility sports weren’t his strength—or his interest. Slender and not particularly tall, he lacked the build of a football player, and wasn’t a good ball thrower. Team sports bored him anyway. They forced him to endure something he had learned to hate at a very young age: the mistakes of others. But running and swimming and biking he enjoyed. He’d gotten his first bike when he was five, bought for him by his maternal grandfather. A year later his mother, Linda, spent three hundred dollars to purchase Lance a BMX bike—the small-wheel off-road bikes kids rode on dirt track obstacle courses—and Terry started taking him to youth races.
Lance’s mother, Linda Mooneyham, had been raised in the projects near Dallas and was the daughter of an alcoholic father. After she became pregnant at sixteen, she dropped out of high school. Her parents wanted nothing to do with her. At first, she attempted to raise Lance—named for Lance Rentzel, Dallas Cowboys star wide receiver—with his biological father, Eddie Charles Gunderson, a boy from her high school with an imposing physique. They married on her seventeenth birthday and lived in Oak Cliff, a rough Dallas neighborhood, scraping by. Linda worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken, while Eddie worked as a route manager for The Dallas Morning News. They soon split up. After Linda’s father sobered up, she moved with Lance into his place and drifted from job to job, including a gig at the dead-letter office. Gunderson fell behind on his $20-a-week child support. When Lance was three, Linda began a relationship with Terry Armstrong, who worked for a meat company that supplied corn dogs and barbecue beef to school cafeterias.
Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour De France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever Page 5