Wheelmen: Lance Armstrong, the Tour De France, and the Greatest Sports Conspiracy Ever

by Reed Albergotti

  The truth was that Borysewicz thought these Americans were clueless about bike racing. These macho guys could beat a crowd of New Yorkers, but none of them would be able to keep up in a top-level European race. The problem was, there was nobody in the United States to teach them. He figured it was up to him.

  By late 1977, he was schooling the best cyclists in the tri-state area. Before Borysewicz, most of the cyclists in the area rode hard all summer and then got completely out of shape as the weather got cold. Borysewicz explained to them that winter was the best time to lift weights and build up the muscles needed for bike racing. Weight training was anathema. They thought if their muscles got too big, it would weigh them down and make their bodies inflexible. Cycling was about endurance, not strength.

  To prove his point, Borysewicz showed Fraysse and some of the other riders the training diaries of some of the top cyclists in Poland, including Ryszard Szurkowski, who had just won the world championship in the road race and the time trial. This would have been the equivalent of opening Lance Armstrong’s training diary and showing his secret workout plans—had there been a cyclist of that caliber in the States at the time, which of course there was not. Szurkowski’s winter training plan included dozens of weight-lifting sessions and running. The Americans thought it looked more like the training plan for a decathlete than a cyclist. But, convinced by then that Borysewicz knew what he was talking about, they began meeting up with him at a new, state-of-the art gym in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Borysewicz developed individual training plans for the riders, demonstrated weight-training techniques to them, and told them to keep diaries. The regimen worked. Many members of the North Jersey Bicycle Club who trained with Borysewicz had better results in 1977 than they had ever before achieved.

  Fraysse thought that if Borysewicz could have such great results with the North Jersey Bicycle Club in such a short period of time, he might be able to boost the performance of the country’s Olympic cyclists, too. Fraysse and Borysewicz came up with an idea: They’d put together a junior training camp for Olympic hopefuls in Squaw Valley, California, which had hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics and whose Olympic training facilities were free for use in the summer months. The camp was advertised largely through word of mouth, at bike shops and cycling clubs.

  When Borysewicz showed up in Squaw Valley, he saw very few riders he thought were special. But there was one fourteen-year-old who had been driven up to the camp by his father from his hometown of Reno, about an hour away. The kid was much younger than the others, many of whom had been training for years. His face was plump with extra teenage fat, and his blond hair flowed in the wind. But when he rode, he flew. His bike-handling skills were superb for a novice. His name was Greg LeMond.

  LeMond’s engine was powerful, but what impressed Borysewicz most was LeMond’s face. While he climbed the hills around Lake Tahoe, he grimaced in so much pain that the corners of his mouth nearly reached his ears. Borysewicz knew that a willingness to suffer like that couldn’t be taught. It was almost a sickness. A form of masochism. The best bike racers, he knew, usually had deep inner demons that they were running away from. Bike racing was like chemotherapy of the soul, burning and cauterizing the bad thoughts.

  LeMond had demons powerful enough for ten cyclists. Since he was eleven or so, he had been molested by a family friend—a pal of his father’s, who was seventeen years older than Greg. The abuse had gone on for years. But Greg was so ashamed that he hadn’t told anyone. His way of dealing with it was to ride the winding roads that lead to the ski resorts in Lake Tahoe. He would go all out on these rides, rocking back and forth on the bike, pushing against gravity. He’d hit 5,000 feet and the air would get thin. He’d feel light-headed. He’d breathe hard. So hard he couldn’t think anymore—couldn’t feel anything. And LeMond liked it that way. He was happiest when he was suffering, when he was in total pain. On the way down, he never hit the brakes. He tasted death at every turn. He was drugging himself with endorphins and adrenaline.

  Borysewicz took on LeMond as a special project, keeping in contact after the summer, sending him training plans and updating them as he learned more about LeMond’s unique physiology. He acted as another father for LeMond, who desperately needed male role models in his life.

  Having seen what Borysewicz could do, Fraysse also wanted to make him the head coach of the US national team. After a few rounds of interviews and approval from cycling’s leadership, Eddie got the job in 1978 and was back to doing the work that he loved, full-time. No more painting bridges and water towers to pay the bills. His salary, and the budget of the entire US Olympic Committee, came mostly from corporate sponsorships. Unlike other countries, there was no government funding. The Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, passed the same year Borysewicz got the job, gave the US Olympic Committee and its member organizations, like the US Cycling Federation, a monopoly on Olympic sports, allowing them to more effectively raise money for the games. The act also specified that only amateur athletes could compete.

  As head coach, he spent much of his time in Colorado Springs, headquarters of the US Cycling Federation, where he conducted training camps. He would invite hundreds of young riders to each training camp and put them through the paces to screen them, asking only the top ten or so riders to return for further training. Over time, as he kept refining his choices, narrowing them down to an ever more accomplished group, he assembled a good pool of solid, talented riders.

  At each training camp, Borysewicz explained to the young cyclists the core principles of training: The body’s fitness level, he said, is constantly peaking and recovering. With periods of intense exercise, the body responds to the stress by increasing its blood volume, lowering its resting heart rate, and priming its cells for a more intense workload. But a body can remain at this peak level only for roughly two or three weeks before it begins to slow down so that it can rebuild itself and recover. The key to training for races, he explained, is to schedule the training so that the rider is peaking at race time.

  Borysewicz taught the cyclists about good technique, too, telling them they needed to learn how to ride with smooth, evenly powered pedal strokes. Too often, he said, American riders tended to put all their energy into pressing down on the pedals while neglecting the upstroke. That was what the straps were there for, he explained, so that riders could pull up on the pedals as powerfully as they mashed down on them. Borysewicz adjusted the riders’ bikes, taught them proper positioning, and described how to use their abdominal muscles to keep themselves steady on the bike and their hands light on the handlebars. He also taught them about diet. Americans were fat, he said.

  It wasn’t long before the young American riders learned to trust Borysewicz, despite his broken English and unusual behavior, such as his habit of analyzing every measurable angle of a rider’s body, and each component on the bicycle. Unable to properly pronounce Eddie’s last name—Bor-eeee-saaay-vitz—riders began calling him Eddie B. The nickname stuck so well that new riders had no idea what Eddie B’s last name actually was.

  Much of what Borysewicz taught the riders was common knowledge in Europe, but in the United States it was revolutionary—and the effects started to be seen. In 1979, when LeMond was eighteen, Borysewicz took him to Argentina for the junior world championships, a race held to determine the best rider in the world under the age of nineteen. Competitors for the title ride on national teams, just as they do in the Olympics. LeMond won the race convincingly, beating the best riders from Russia and from the cycling meccas of Belgium and France. This was arguably the best international racing result any modern American cyclist had ever achieved. LeMond’s victory meant he was going to be one of the favorites to win a gold medal in the Moscow Summer Olympics the following year.

  But LeMond’s gold medal chances were extinguished before he ever got a chance to try. In January 1980, President Jimmy Carter decided to boycott the Moscow games because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Borysewicz was heartbroken. Everythin
g he had been doing for two years had been aimed at competing in the 1980 Summer Olympics, and with Greg LeMond on the team, he felt he had had a real shot at the gold. Borysewicz tried to convince LeMond to remain an amateur and to train for the 1984 Olympics, but LeMond didn’t even consider that as an option. He knew he was good enough to ride professionally in Europe, and immediately turned pro. LeMond’s goal in life was not to win a gold medal. It was to win the Tour de France. At the age of twenty, LeMond left the United States to begin his professional racing career in Europe—riding in the European peloton for a French team sponsored by Renault, the French auto company, and Gitane, a French maker of racing bikes.

  Looking forward to the 1984 games, which would be held in Los Angeles, Borysewicz worked hard to convince other top American riders not to follow LeMond to Europe. He told them the professional racing scene was a hard slog, filled with grueling travel and low salaries, and that they’d have to leave their families behind and learn other languages. It worked. Borysewicz was able to hold on to a nucleus of good riders. The reality was, for many of Borysewicz’s riders, cycling was a hobby, not a profession. For them, winning a medal—in an Olympic Games held on American soil—would be huge. Getting paid to race bicycles in Europe wasn’t the goal.

  Although he’d been bitterly upset by the 1980 boycott, Borysewicz also knew that there was a silver lining: He would now have a full four years to prepare. Russians and athletes from other Iron Curtain countries won fourteen of the seventeen medals in cycling in the 1980 Olympics—most of them on the track. World records were broken twenty-one times. Borysewicz and the Americans believed the cyclists from the Iron Curtain countries were part of state-sponsored doping efforts, and that was the reason track cyclists were huge and chiseled—like something out of a superhero cartoon.

  After the 1980 Olympics, the Americans realized they were behind in the pharmacology department. The general feeling within the US Olympic Committee, which oversees all sports, was that if the Soviets were doping, the Americans needed to do it, too. It was practically a matter of national security. In 1982, the US Olympic Committee funded a laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, to develop new tests for detecting steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. Those tests would be used at the 1984 Olympics. Americans would have the advantage in 1984 because they would know exactly which tests were being used during the games and how they worked. The USOC used the UCLA lab to conduct “informal testing,” whereby athletes could voluntarily submit to testing and get the results without facing any consequences. That allowed athletes to see how long the particular drugs stayed in their systems, useful information as well. This was the American version of the state-sponsored doping programs in other countries—the difference being that the US Olympic Committee wasn’t part of the government, and no American athlete was forced to use drugs.

  Borysewicz trained his team hard during those four years. He brought his team to Europe for international competitions and, for the first time in history, the United States was consistently winning international cycling events. He also began working his connections in East Germany to get top-level cycling equipment smuggled into the United States. Among his scores: He was able to secure carbon fiber wheels and aerodynamic bikes that weren’t available in the United States or anywhere else in the West. He also obtained handmade Continental tires, which were made on the other side of the Iron Curtain and could be pumped to higher pressure.

  • • •

  As the coach of the US national team, Borysewicz had thus far been able to count on one thing: His team would be the top choice for America’s best cyclists. In fact, it was the only choice for all but the few who could compete in Europe. But that began to change in 1981, when Jim Ochowicz, a stocky twenty-eight-year-old construction worker from Milwaukee who had been an Olympic speed skater, began to put together America’s first professional cycling team. Ochowicz had arrived at his interest in professional cycling in a somewhat circuitous fashion—by way of his interest in skating.

  Because most ice rinks were outdoors in the 1960s and 1970s, the years when Och—rhymes with coach—was building his skating career, he, like many of his fellow skaters, rode bikes in the warmer months to build leg strength. The two sports rely on many of the same leg muscles and are so complementary that competitors like Ochowicz were known colloquially as blades-and-bikes athletes. While riding in a local club called the Milwaukee Wheelmen, Ochowicz was befriended by an older rider who gave him French and British books and magazines about European cyclists, and he became enthralled with the photos of European cycling stars. Och started training as a cyclist and became good enough to make the US Olympic team in 1972 and again in 1976, competing in the 4-kilometer team pursuit, a track cycling event in which two teams, each with up to four riders, start on opposite sides of a velodrome and race for sixteen laps. The United States did not win a medal in cycling in either of those years.

  By 1977, Ochowicz was a married man and the father of a child. His wife was Sheila Young, who was also an Olympic speed skater—she’d won a gold medal in the 1976 Winter Olympics—and also someone who had crossed over from speed skating to cycling. Trying to support his family while still competing in cycling events, Ochowicz had been working construction. But he was coming to the realization that his racing days were probably over. Young was offered a job doing promotional work for the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, so the couple and their young daughter pulled up stakes and moved there. Once in Lake Placid, Och got work building the Olympic ski jump.

  Through his connections in speed skating, Och befriended the family of a promising young American speed skater, Eric Heiden, and later, while coaching the US speed skating team during the lead-up to the Olympics, became a sort of manager for Heiden. When the speed skating team went to competitions in Europe, Ochowicz’s basic role was to look after Heiden, then twenty years old, and to make sure he didn’t get into much trouble. It was Och’s first foray into sports management.

  Heiden performed brilliantly at the Lake Placid Olympics, winning five gold medals in February 1980—a record for a single athlete in the winter games. Heiden was suddenly the most celebrated sports figure in the United States, an instant celebrity who was besieged by agents and corporations chasing him for endorsement deals. A low-key Midwesterner with a humble demeanor, Heiden wasn’t interested in most of the endorsement offers, however. He was reluctant to cash in on his Olympic fame, as he believed swimmer Mark Spitz and track star Bruce Jenner had done. And he had other priorities. He planned to return to college, which he had left two years earlier, with the hope of eventually going to medical school to become a doctor like his father, an orthopedic surgeon in Madison, Wisconsin.

  Ochowicz, however, had other plans for Heiden. After his Olympic success, Heiden had begun dabbling in bicycle racing as a way of staying fit. That fall, Och traveled to see Heiden at a track cycling event and thought he was good enough to be able to have a second career as a professional cyclist. By this time, Och had begun to dream about building a US team that could eventually compete on the European pro circuit. Heiden, Ochowicz realized, could be his biggest asset. He pitched Heiden on the idea, and Heiden agreed to join the as yet unnamed pro team, with Och as manager. Och then began traveling the racing circuit, attempting to line up other riders, with Heiden’s participation as his lure.

  If he were really to make a go of it, however, Ochowicz needed a sponsor that could provide funding for equipment, transportation, and riders’ salaries. He lined up sponsorships with Schwinn, which had been backing Heiden, and Descente clothing. But he needed a bigger sponsor. With the help of Heiden’s agent, the Dutchman George Taylor, he got one. Taylor pitched the Southland Corporation, owner of the 7-Eleven chain of convenience stores, on the idea of a Heiden-led cycling team. Finally, at the end of 1980, the brothers John and Jere Thompson, who owned the company, signed on to a multiyear deal worth millions. The 7-Eleven team was born of Och’s desire to develop a pr
ofessional-level cycling team. But it was also geared toward helping to groom American athletes for the 1984 Olympics. If Och could help some of the 7-Eleven team’s riders become good enough to race on the Olympic team, and if some of them were actually able to win medals—which would be the first time the United States had won an Olympics medal in cycling since 1912—it would be both a tremendous personal accomplishment and a marketing coup for 7-Eleven, as well as a great way of helping 7-Eleven reach its marketing and branding objectives. The convenience-store chain had already agreed to shell out $3.5 million to build a new velodrome to help Los Angeles defray the costs of hosting the 1984 Summer Games.

  Ochowicz and Borysewicz were now overlapping with each other in their Olympic aspirations, with a number of their riders going back and forth between the two teams. There were bound to be conflicts, especially because Borysewicz and Ochowicz did not see eye to eye on how to get to the goal they both shared. Borysewicz was a cycling coach at heart. Ochowicz was an operations guy who specialized in selecting athletes and raising funds; he saw himself playing a role similar to that of a baseball manager. And the two men had different ideas about how to get their riders ready for the Olympics, which sometimes resulted in scheduling conflicts. Borysewicz wanted his best riders to get ready for the big national and international competitions by working with him at the Olympic training center in Colorado Springs, while Ochowicz felt the good riders didn’t need to train as much as they needed to be out there racing, particularly in the big sponsored meets.

  The $250,000 7-Eleven spent on its team during the 1981 season was a significant sum, allowing Ochowicz to offer his riders a contract, with expenses, instead of just the promise of prize money. In its first year the team signed up seven riders, including some of the best amateur riders in North America. By the time the 7-Eleven team began racing in the spring of 1981, it was already the highest-caliber cycling team on the domestic circuit.