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turned serious. He congratulated me for the llth-place finish, and said he liked what he saw.
"You weren't afraid to fail," he said. "You weren't out there thinking, 'What if I get caught?' " I
absorbed the praise happily.
But then he added, "Of course, if you had known what you were doing and conserved your
energy, you'd have been in the medals."
Here I had done better than any American ever before, and Chris was suggesting it wasn't good
enough. In fact, in his subtle way, he was telling me that I had blown it. He kept talking. "I'm
serious. You can do a lot better," he said. "I'm convinced you're going to be a world champion.
But there's a lot of work to do."
Chris pointed out that the top riders, the Marco Pantanis, the Miguel Indurains, were all as
strong as or stronger than I was. "So is everybody you're racing at this level," he said. What
would separate me would be my tactics.
I had to learn how to race, and the only place to do it was on the bike. That first year, I must
have spent 200 days overseas, riding around Europe, because the true test was on the road,
where there was no hiding in a 160-mile race. In the last part, you either had it or you didn't.
At home, I settled in Austin, in the Texas hill country where stony, dark-green banks surround
the town lake that's fed by the wide, uneasy waters of the Colorado River. In Austin, nobody
seemed to care what I wore, or whether I "belonged" or not. In fact, I couldn't find two people
dressed alike, and some of the wealthiest people in town looked like vagrants. It was a town
that seemed to be made for the young, with an ever-evolving selection of bars and music clubs
on 6th Street, and hole-in-the-wall Tex-Mex joints where I could eat chili peppers for sport.
It was also a great town for training, with endless bike trails and back roads to explore for miles
around. I rented a small bungalow near the University of Texas campus, which was fitting since
I was a student, not in the classroom, of course, but on the bike.
Cycling is an intricate, highly politicized sport, and it's far more of a team sport than the
spectator realizes, as I was discovering. It has a language all its own, pieced together from a
sampling of European words and phrases, and a peculiar ethic as well. On any team, each rider
has a job, and is responsible for a specific part of the race. The slower riders are called
domestiques servants because they do the less glamorous work of "pulling" up hills ("pulling" is
cycling lingo for blocking the wind for the other riders) and protecting their team leader through
the various perils of a stage race. The team leader is the principal cyclist, the rider most capable
of sprinting to a finish with 150 miles in his legs. I was starting as a domestique, but I would
gradually be groomed for the role of team leader.
I learned about the peloton the massive pack of riders that makes up the main body of the race.
To the spectator it seems like a radiant blur, humming as it goes by, but that colorful blur is rife
with contact, the clashing of handlebars, elbows, and knees, and it's full of international
intrigues and deals. The speed of the peloton varies. Sometimes it moves at 20 miles an hour,
the riders pedaling slow and chatting. Other times, the group is spanned out across the road and
we're going 40 miles an hour. Within the peloton, there are constant negotiations between
competing riders: pull me today, and I'll pull you tomorrow. Give an inch, make a friend. You
don't make deals that compromise yourself or your team, of course, but you help other riders if
you can, so they might return the favor.
The politics could be ambiguous and confusing to a young rider, even upsetting, and I got a
harsh lesson in them in early 1991. My plan was to race as an amateur through the 1992
Olympics in Barcelona, and to turn pro right afterward. In the meantime, I continued to race in
the U.S. for Subaru-Montgomery. Technically, I was a member of two different teams:
internationally, I raced for the U.S. national team under Chris Carmichael, but domestically I
competed for Subaru-Montgomery.
While I was overseas with the national team in '91, we entered a prestigious race in Italy called
the Settimana Bergamasca. It was a pro-am stage race, a ten-day ride through northern Italy, and
some of the best cyclists in the world would be there. No American had ever won it but our
U.S. team under Chris had great morale and teamwork, and we felt we might just pull it off.
There was an awkwardness, however. The Subaru-Montgomery team was also entered, and I
would be racing against them, riding in my stars and stripes, while they would wear their
Subaru-Montgomery jerseys. Nine days out often, they were my teammates, but for this race, we
would be competitors.
Early in the race, a Subaru Montgomery rider and friend of mine, Nate Reese, took the overall
lead. But I was riding well, too. I moved into second. I was exultant; it seemed like the best of
both worlds to have the two of us riding at the front. But the Subaru-Montgomery team director
didn't feel the same way. He was not happy to see me in contention, and he let me know it.
Between two stages, he called me over. "You work for Nate," he said to me. I stared at him,
uncomprehending. Surely he didn't mean I was supposed to hang back and play the role of
domestique to Nate? But that's exactly what he did mean. "You're not to attack," he ordered. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]