The slender, handsome thirty-eight-year-old Polish man had an athlete’s chiseled face and a mustache. He spoke no English and had no clear idea what he was doing in America. He knew only one thing. He was as far away as he could get from his wife, who he believed had been cheating on him during her many business trips out of Poland. He had also left behind his career, and his teenage daughter, with no idea of when he would be able to see her again.
Eddie Borysewicz wasn’t so much heartbroken as he was angry that he had allowed his marriage to fall apart. It overshadowed everything he accomplished, and he now looked at his life through the grim tint of failure. He was ready to start his life over, but he did not know how he would reinvent himself. He had originally flown to New York in the summer of 1976 with the intention of attending the Olympics in Montreal, but he never made it to Canada. Now all he knew was that he needed to become someone else.
Borysewicz’s life in Poland had revolved around cycling. He joined the Polish national team as a teenager, won national championships, and traveled around Europe competing in bike races. As he moved up through the ranks of cycling in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he thought maybe the life of a professional athlete wasn’t so bad. Poland was then a hotbed of cycling, and the sport was fully supported by the Soviet-dominated Communist government. He hoped to make the Polish Olympic team.
His dreams of Olympic glory fell through when he was twenty-one. During a routine chest X-ray, a doctor found a small lesion, and diagnosed tuberculosis. Borysewicz was hospitalized for treatment. When follow-up X-rays showed no sign of improvement, they tripled the dose of his drugs. This went on for weeks before a doctor finally realized that the mark on his chest was simply old scar tissue, and not tuberculosis. When he returned to cycling, he felt weak and was never able to regain his full strength. He had hoped to one day be a world champion; he resigned himself to the fact that he would never achieve that goal.
Borysewicz had a sense of curiosity. He had always been a good student, though he had delayed university education to become a cyclist. Soon after his misdiagnosis, he enrolled in the Academy of Physical Education in Warsaw to study physiology and exercise science, an extremely prestigious field in Communist Poland. He continued to race on the Polish national cycling team, but focused more on his studies. Other riders called him professor. At the university, he took a position coaching the junior national team.
He came up with individual training plans for the cyclists and he kept detailed diaries of their performance and fitness levels and the progress they made in response to his training regimens. He was conducting what was essentially a scientific experiment on some of the finest athletes in Poland to learn the best methods of training. Some of the riders were conducting their own experiments—with drugs. They told him about the various types of amphetamines and hormones they took to be able to compete at a higher level, yet they would always downplay their importance. “Oh, it’s just a vitamin,” they would say, or “Oh, it’s something for my heartburn.” Eddie would take mental notes of the names of the drugs and then look them up in an old medical book. He discovered that many of them had dangerous side effects. Sometimes, if the rider was someone he particularly liked, he would show him the book and make him read about the terrible damage the drugs could do.
Soon Borysewicz was one of the top athletic coaches in Poland, in charge of developing young talent to feed the Olympic ranks. But as an employee of the state, he didn’t earn much. To bring in some spending money for his family, he also worked as a tour guide. Life was good enough, but after he learned about his wife’s affair, he decided he had to leave. The Polish government gave him permission to attend the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympics as a spectator. He flew into JFK and had planned to drive to Montreal. He never did.
As it happened, he arrived in the United States at a moment when recreational cycling clubs—organizations like the Wolverine Sports Club in Royal Oak, Michigan; the Lehigh Wheelmen Association in Trexlertown, Pennsylvania; the Quad Cities Bicycle Club in Davenport, Iowa—were proliferating. Amateur races were popping up everywhere, from the Midwest to California to the eastern seaboard. However, as popular as the sport had become at the amateur level—registrations with the Amateur Bicycle League of America reached 8,621 in 1973, for example, a 70 percent increase from the year before—there was no professional racing scene in the United States. There were no professional cycling teams, no pro races on the calendar, and fewer than a dozen pro cyclists.
While in New York, Borysewicz looked up a former Polish teammate of his who was living in New Jersey. He stayed at his home, earning money doing odd jobs with a Polish work crew, mostly painting bridges and water towers. After Borysewicz had been in the United States for about six months, he stopped by a bike shop in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey.
Unbeknownst to him, the shop was owned by Mike Fraysse, one of the top officials in the United States Cycling Federation. Fraysse had managed the 1976 Olympic cycling events in Montreal, and when he saw Borysewicz standing in his shop, he knew he recognized him from somewhere, though at first he could not place him. Then he remembered: When he had once traveled to Warsaw with a group of American riders to attend a bike race, he’d seen Borysewicz coaching athletes. Now, identifying himself as a fan, he asked Borysewicz—in French, once he realized Borysewicz spoke no English—what he was doing in the United States and what had happened to his cycling career. Borysewicz gave a bit of his story, adding that he didn’t even own a bike anymore. In fact, he hadn’t yet earned enough money on the odd jobs he was doing to be able to afford one.
Fraysse got excited. “Wait here,” he said, and disappeared into his shop’s basement. A few minutes later he emerged carrying a lime green, Italian-made Legnano bicycle with beautiful steel Campagnolo components. “Take this,” Fraysse said, and then insisted that Borysewicz join him that weekend for the North Jersey Bicycle Club’s weekly Sunday ride.
Borysewicz said he’d love to, but he warned Fraysse that he was out of shape and wouldn’t be able to keep up if the pace was too fast. And if Borysewicz got left behind, he’d have no idea where he was or how to get home. He needn’t have worried.
The following Sunday, Borysewicz, on his new bike, joined the large crowd of cyclists who had gathered at Fraysse’s bike shop. Fraysse and a few of his friends rode at the front of the pack, holding a steady and manageable warm-up pace. As the pack moved down the road, more riders, some from other clubs, joined, until there were about one hundred in all. Their bikes were handcrafted works of art, welded together by specialty bike builders all over the world. The men had shaved legs and wore special shoes with leather soles that gripped the small spikes on their pedals. Their feet were strapped as tightly as possible to the pedals so that they had complete control of the bike and were able to pull up on the pedals for more power. These were serious cyclists, and the ride was competitive—a chance for them to test their mettle against other fanatics from around the region.
Initially, the pack was loud with chatter as cycling buddies caught up on what had happened since their last meet. The din of “How are the kids, how’s the wife, how do you like the new car, did you get the job” could be heard as the pack coasted along at about twenty miles per hour. This went on for about half an hour or so, until Fraysse and some pals started to pick up the pace. Soon, the pack was moving at close to thirty miles per hour.
Within an hour, the group of one hundred had dwindled to about twenty-five. Fraysse and his friends were still driving the pace. Borysewicz was still there, too, hanging with the lead group. As the pack went up a long hill just north of Nyack, New York, a steep, grinding climb, most of the remaining cyclists finally dropped off. Now it was just Fraysse, a couple of his friends, and Borysewicz. They had annihilated half the cyclist population in the tri-state area. They circled Rockland Lake, taking in the scenery, and then rode back to New Jersey, stopping at a small Italian coffee shop in Fort Lee. As they sipped espressos, Fraysse congratulated Borysewicz on his ability to keep up.
When Borysewicz told him he hadn’t ridden a bike in more than two years, everyone at the table was stunned. How was that possible? Borysewicz explained in French, using Fraysse as a translator, that his ability to keep up had nothing to do with his fitness level and everything to do with technique. He knew how to pedal to conserve energy, exactly when to accelerate and when to slow down. “It’s about efficiency,” he told them.
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. Everything 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 professional-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.
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.”