Follow Your Heart — But Bring Along Your Head
I had, for the first time, hooked my heart and my head together and, in the alchemy of that combination, created something more powerful than the parts.
In 1993 I performed a miracle. Or maybe I was granted a miracle. To this day, I’m not sure which. I know this: it was the first time I rode with each element it takes to win a bike race — my body’s physical ability, my mind’s acuity, and the passion of my heart — fully integrated and working together seamlessly. I rode for one magic, tragic day with everything I was. After years of proving my mettle first with amateur teams in Belgium, then with smaller pro teams, I was in my second season with the Spanish team ONCE, a top-notch squad that regularly fielded Tour de France contenders and featured champions such as Laurent Jalabert and Alex Zülle (who at the end of the decade would battle Lance for the Tour de France crown). On such an exalted team, my spot in the hierarchy was clear: I was not a champion. I was not a superdomestique, either — one of those riders whose career exists only as a sacrifice to the team’s leader. I was something in between. I was a threat to win stages of the Grand Tours (the three major European stage races, including the Tour de France and the tours of Spain and Italy), and some one-day races, but my true value seemed to be as a kind of rolling strategist. I had a knack for reading races and racers, and intuiting what the winning moves would be. On the road, I was like a radar antenna, casting my attention across the entire field until I picked up some useful impression: someone’s pedaling style looked a little ragged that day, or something seemed slightly off in another team’s dynamics — maybe two of their riders had gotten into a fight the night before and weren’t going to cooperate. I think my brain spun faster than my legs sometimes. My combination of skills made me a good rider to have in the Grand Tours, where a team survived on savvy as much as on conditioning. When I finished ninth in the Tour of Spain that spring (the race now takes place in the fall), ONCE’s team director guaranteed me a spot on the Tour de France roster. I couldn’t wait to tell my father. As corny as it sounds, he’d always been my biggest fan — and not because he didn’t have competition. In Belgium, when a kid starts to win races, he gets adopted by locals, who form a kind of fan club. Mostly it’s an excuse for the neighborhood guys to get together and drink beer at the pub before clambering onto a bus to stand beside the racecourse and scream your name. It’s not so much that you’re a star, but that the guys need an excuse to socialize. Still, mix beer and bike racing and a bunch of guys in Belgium and the loyalties can get pretty intense. Even so, my father had always been, easily, my most ardent supporter. He didn’t care when, at eight or nine, I turned out to be horrible at soccer, which was roughly akin to not being able to hit a ball out of the infield in America. My dad simply kept introducing me to different sports. I was terrible at every sport with a ball — except Ping-Pong, which didn’t exactly herald the life I dreamed of. I’d always ridden my bike, of course — almost every kid in Europe does, early and often. And it’s not just for sport. We ride to school, to the market, into town on weekends, across town with our friends. Informal races develop — from street to street, then to the top of the biggest hill. Eventually, you’re out one day and you see a big, tight group of cyclists fly by — the air from the moving pack pulling at your hair. The sound is like a locomotive. Men are shouting at each other and laughing. They’re wearing bright clothes and spinning their legs impossibly fast. It seems more than anything else like a grand adventure, a bunch of grownups playing out beyond the boundaries of the schoolyards and practice fields that games are supposed to be limited to. You’ve just been passed by a local club, out for one of their regular training rides, or maybe one of the informal races they organize among themselves — maybe even their club championship. My father belonged to one of those clubs; the talent and fitness levels he and his friends were able to maintain in between their obligations to their careers and families were, naturally, far below the pro ranks. But they were also much more skilled and much faster than the average riders. They raced, hard and often, and at speeds that would frighten a typical weekend warrior; they were as serious about the sport as one could get while still holding down a full-time job. I began tagging along with my dad, and the first emotion I can remember from those timees is a feeling of being at ease. I just felt as if I belonged in that pack. By the time I was thirteen, I was regularly beating the adulllllts when we’d have sprints to the finish of our training rides, or up the hills around our house. I was a natural: my heart rate stayed lower than others’ as we streamed along in a tight, fast pack, and when we rose out of our saddles to sprint, it seemed as if I could spin my legs faster, or push one gear harder, or pedal with my heart jackhammering near its maximum for twice as long as the others. I also had a fluidity on the bike, not only in the motions of my legs and the way I sat, but in how I was able to navigate my handlebar through the bunch, or how I leaned into corners, or swooped around ruts, how I found holes to shoot my front wheel through when it seemed other riders were blocked. That I had some kind of gift for cycling was apparent. What none of us knew was how much of a gift. Was I going to be better than average or was I going to be pro level? And if I was pro level, was I going to be an average pro or something else? All we knew was that suddenly I was riding faster and farther and harder than my father’s friends, and he loved that. He laughed as I attacked out of the groups, and he patted me on the back at the finish of tough rides. I could hear him shouting encouragement from behind as I hammered away at the front of a group, splitting it apart. My father also knew how to encourage me in just the right way when I didn’t do well. In the first real race I competed in — the first one with an official number and an entry fee — I crashed badly; my father said, simply, “Nerves,” making my failure seem not like some insurmountable disaster but a mistake — an error I’d be able to easily overcome. Belgium is known, most famously, for its gritty, hard road races in damp, chilly conditions on cobbled streets, and for long, muddy courses that are as much tests of the soul as the body; those are the races that make national heroes out of my countrymen. Cyclists from other countries believe that we Belgians are born to the rain and mud, that it is our birthright to excel when a race is at its worst. A Belgian who wins a mucky race in his home country is held up as a symbol of the nation’s character. So it was sort of funny that, as my father exposed me to different kinds of racing, I turned out to be best suited to track racing. This is a very specialized type of racing that happens on a velodrome, an oval course, usually 333 meters around, that’s made of smooth concrete or wooden planks. The turns are steeply banked — picture an elongated toilet bowl — so you can pedal to the top of the track then dive down into the turns to hit speeds of 45 mph or more. The bikes have one speed, can’t coast — if the rear wheel is turning, the pedals are, too — and have no brakes. The frames are very short lengthwise, and the angles between the tubes and the handlebar and seat are steep, so the bike steers incredibly fast, can be whipped here and there at what feels like the speed of thought. Because of the velodrome’s smooth surface, the frames can also be made extremely stiff (a regular bike generally sacrifices some stiffness for the sake of absorbing bumps and vibration from the road), which means that less of your leg power is lost through flex; when you sprint on a track bike, it’s like setting off a cannon. It wasn’t so much the chance to deliver power to the pedals that made me a good track racer — exposed to greater competition, I was discovering that, as it turned out, I was not going to be one of the elite of the elite in terms of physical ability — but the nature of the racing itself. Because the bikes respond so quickly to input, and because there are no brakes to get in the way of the pack’s movement, track racing rewards snap decisions. I had a knack for divining which of my opponents was going to make a jump from the back of a pack, then finding my way to the outside of the pack so I could latch onto his wheel as he passed and sit behind him safe in the draft until the finish line drew near. I found that I could, better than most of my opponents, keep track of complicated events such as points races, in which points are awarded to riders throughout the race on designated laps; I always somehow knew which riders had scored each lap, and what their totals were, and how many places ahead of them I had to be on the next points lap to end up in the lead. I was not a champion of the mud, but I was a champion. From the time I was thirteen until it was time for me to enter the advanced education program that, in Belgium, is somewhere between a junior college and a four-year university in the U.S., I’d put together a respectable amateur career: some national championships in track events, a few race wins that anyone in Belgium would have known by name, and even, now and then, some attention from European teams looking to recruit. But my father helped keep my feet on the ground, helped me un...
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