Note: this is an excerpt from my book, Team 7-Eleven: How an Unsung Band of American Heros Took on the World – and Won. Published by VeloPress.
In 1980, there were exactly four professional bike racers in America. This was not surprising, given that there were no professional events for them to compete in.
While professional cyclists in Europe came up through a series of amateur teams, eventually earning a coveted spot on a prestigious international squad like Renault-Gitane or TI Raleigh, to become a pro in America, you needed only fill out a one-page form. Nowhere on this form were you required to state your qualifications, race wins, or years of experience. In a few weeks’ time, a hand-typed piece of paper would make its way through the mail from a small office outside Philadelphia. For a fee of $35, and the cost of a stamp, you would be a pro cyclist.
This document would state, in essence, that you were eligible to compete in the Tour de France. That is, if only you could find a team willing to have you.
No one would ever claim that cycling in America was a lucrative career. Amateur riders, while more abundant than pros, lived in a state of near poverty; if they earned too much, they would be classified as professionals, making them ineligible for prestigious events such as the Olympics. The very best riders—those who placed consistently in, say, the top five—could expect to make at most $250 per race. In the course of a long season, a top rider could expect to make $3,000. These meager winnings would often be accompanied by supplemental prizes, typically samples of the local fare—a jar of honey, some apple cider from a local farm, a gift certificate to a local shop.
Overhead was considerable. One hand-made racing tire, made of silk and latex, cost about $30, and a rider would need 15 to 20 to get through the year. Then there was clothing ($300), a bike ($1,500), food, travel, lodging, and of course, the mountainous amounts of food needed to sustain 20 to 30 hours of training per week.
All told, for an investment of 10,000 miles of training, and an equal amount of driving, a rider would enjoy the annual earnings of a gas station attendant.
But this was not an equation that a top rider computed or even cared about, for he was doing the one thing he loved best in the whole world. He would train 750 hours a year, ride in every kind of weather, and undergo inestimable pain. He would sleep at friend’s houses, wash his own clothes, maintain his own bicycle, drive through the night to get to the next race, or suffer the ignominy of sleeping on a friend’s floor or in the back of a van. While his body, ravaged by a burn rate of 10,000 calories a day, yearned for wholesome food, he would eat at McDonald’s to save a few dollars.
Nor could he expect much in the way of fame or notoriety. While professional riders in Europe were feted as national heroes and celebrated on the front pages of prestigious sports newspapers like France’s L’Équipe and Italy’s La Gazzetta dello Sport—papers with hundreds of thousands of daily readers—bike racers of any kind in America were an oddity, members of an esoteric fraternity that existed on the weird fringes of the sporting world. Instead of putting a race in public view, the emphasis was on reducing the potential nuisance to traffic and inconvenience to the community. It was not uncommon for races to take place at 7 a.m. Sunday in the parking lot of an industrial park. Spectators, what few there were, were friends and relatives. Cycling in America was the quintessential never-heard-of-it sport.
For a young Davis Phinney, pro cycling was something exotic and alluring, a sport he had read about in coveted issues of Miroir du Cyclisme, a famous French racing monthly. As a teenager he stacked the dog-eared magazines like cordwood in his bedroom, poring over them late at night, trying to divine the essence of the handlebar-banging style of his hero, world champion Freddy Maertens. It was nearly all he could think about.
Phinney’s attraction to cycling had come in an epiphany. When he was 16, he went to see a bike race with his father in downtown Boulder, Colorado. As he leaned on the race fencing, the experience was visceral, like nothing he had ever witnessed, a symphony of color and noise that prompted a simple, life-changing declaration. “I just got on my 10-speed and said, ‘I’m going to be a bike rider,’” he said. He was very nearly alone in his obsession. “I was the only bike racer in a high school of 200 students.”
Ron Kiefel, of nearby Wheat Ridge, Colorado, also felt the gravitational pull of cycling, but for different reasons entirely. As a teenager he struggled with the typical frustrations of adolescence, and had tried all the usual sports—baseball, basketball, track—with disheartening results. His father owned a small bike shop, and Kiefel started riding for pleasure and escape. Pretty soon he found himself leaving for a trip around the block, and coming back six hours later. At these moments, the world seemed large and limitless. Cycling was a facile pleasure, an elemental source of enjoyment unlike anything he had known, and it helped him overcome the social awkwardness he had been feeling. It was, in short, a form of salvation. “It kept me out of serious trouble,” he said. “All of a sudden I wanted to take care of my body—and race.”
Phinney and Kiefel were typical of a new generation of athletes competing in the late ’70s, a group of ingenuous and energetic riders on the cusp of something larger than themselves. Bike racing, at that moment, was the most improbable path to athletic stardom that could be imagined. Although cycling had been a national passion at the turn of the 20th century, packing Madison Square Garden to the rafters with spectators for six-day track races, it seemed no more popular than lawn bowling by the Second World War. By the post-war era, cycling had been thoroughly eclipsed as a means of transportation by the automobile, and as a sport by America’s homegrown big three of baseball, football, and basketball. To be sure, there were a few particularly driven and talented American athletes who left their marks in cycling in the intervening years. Jack Heid, a track racer from New Jersey, won a bronze medal at the world championships in 1949. In the ’60s and early ’70s, American riders like Sheila Young-Ochowicz, Audrey McElmury, John Howard, and Jackie Simes III won medals at the Pan American Games and world championships. While these riders were deserving heroes to their brethren—the people who knew and raced bikes themselves—they were utterly unknown to America at large.
Meanwhile, the sport thrived in Europe. Bike racers were feted as heroes, and tens of thousands of cheering fans lined the roads for three-week-long races, called “grand tours,” in France and Italy. For cyclists in America, the Tour de France was something unimaginable. Its fantastic dimensions—a 21-day race over thousands of miles of city streets and country roads, through vineyards and villages, in heat and cold, from the sea to the Alps—fomented an irresistible attraction. In the late ’70s, when American riders like Jonathan Boyer and George Mount went off to try their fortunes as European pros, they might as well have been going to fight in a foreign war, far from the view of their native country. In general, when American riders arrived on the scene in Europe, they were considered interlopers, and returned chastised and exhausted.
But the irony and beauty of the bike rider’s circumstance was that poverty and anonymity would not deter him. Quite the contrary; it would make him stronger, hungrier, more willing to submit to the pain that is the constant currency of racing. For elite American racers, these many sacrifices put a fine edge on their existence, defining their lives against a backdrop of convention and normalcy.
When young riders like Phinney and Kiefel took up cycling as part of a new generation, they were propelled by a thing they hardly understood, but that was as powerful as anything they had ever experienced: a simple and uniquely American love of riding the bicycle. They immersed themselves in an insular and ritualistic world, helping to resurrect a sport that had languished for decades in the U.S. While these riders were aware and respectful of what had come before, it was a sport they would necessarily remake in their own image.
European racing, for decades, was a proletarian discipline, an exit ramp from the hardscrabble existence of being a shopkeeper, miner, or farmer. But this new generation of American riders came from circumstances of comfort and convenience. Their parents were academics, lawyers, engineers. If these young men were to forgo college for racing, as many of them did, it would be an act of volition rather than necessity. They were prepared to work hard, to be sure. But it would be hard work of their choosing, and it would be viewed through a uniquely American prism of enjoyment and even indulgence. They were the progenitors of a new sport, stewards of a pastime that was waiting to be reborn and popularized in a way that had not occurred since the earliest days of the bicycle.
For these athletes, the thought of a career in cycling seemed improbable at best. For the average rider, contemplating the road ahead, there always seemed to be another level, just out of reach. In the U.S., cyclists are divided into “categories,” based on accumulated placings. A good rider is a category 3 or 2. Above that is category 1—essentially national caliber—of which there are only a handful in any given state. Beyond that lies a select group of U.S. professionals. And beyond that are those professionals who may be able to stake a claim in Europe. Even today, their numbers are small. Before 7-Eleven came on the scene, they could be counted on one hand.
Phinney, Kiefel, and their contemporaries did not stop to contemplate past failures, or the preposterous odds against making any kind of career in bicycle racing. It didn’t seem there was any road that could get them there, but that didn’t matter. In bike racing, if one confronts the enormity of what lies ahead—if you look at the endless switchbacks that snake to the top of an 8,000-foot pass—the task seems impossible, too large to even consider. So they did not. They loved the act of riding a bike, drew pleasure from the discipline and the pain. They put their heads down, and they raced.
But inborn talent and youthful bravado were not in themselves sufficient for success on a world stage. Even the most gifted athletes cannot will themselves to victory. While isolation and independence drove the athletes, there wasn’t a single one who thought, at some point, that their efforts shouldn’t be worth more, that sacrifice and physical prowess should amount to something in this world. Hard work was always a tool they had at their disposal, but it was not sufficient.
Cycling, perhaps even more than other sports like running, did not exist in a pure and unfettered universe. The sport required money, and lots of it. They needed coaching and organization to channel—and, in the case of many of them, to rein in—their exuberance. They needed the best equipment, and the wherewithal to travel and compete.
It wasn’t so much that they deserved it, as athletes. It was that the sport deserved it. Surely, the beauty, pathos, and pain of bicycle racing could appeal to anyone. Someday, they thought, it would get the attention it deserved.