The Sixth Man

Chapter 1

THE KID FROM THE CORNFIELDS

It was one of the tougher moments in Greg Strock’s unfulﬁlled career in cycling: the moment when he had to accept it was over. The dream of becoming a professional cyclist had ended much too soon. He was just twenty-one. At the same time, the 1993 Tour de France was winding its way south toward the Alps, and he was in Madison, Wisconsin, riding among fellow Americans in a race that slipped under the sport’s radar. Though he now felt a long way from the elite peloton, there had been a time when Strock imagined himself among them. At the age of seventeen, he had been offered a place in the amateur squad of Spain’s Banesto team. He thought he would go there, impress the locals, and earn a place on a top professional team. But that was then, before illness sucked away his energy, drained away his ambition.

He waited almost two years for his body to recover. Ever so slowly, it did. It improved enough, anyway, for him to feel normal and to try to resurrect his career. And though his second coming had its moments, in the end he couldn’t get back to where he’d been. One day he felt strong, rode well, believed it was possible. The next morning his body spoke to him, not so much of aches and pains but of overwhelming tiredness. To be successful, a cyclist needs to recover fast. Now Strock knew he wasn’t going to be a successful racer, and on that July afternoon in Madison, he let it go. “I can’t do this anymore,” he said to his coach, René Wenzel, on a street not far from the ﬁnish line. “I’m going to go to medical school, because I can’t do this anymore.”

This wasn’t what Wenzel wanted to hear. Part of the reason he had taken the assistant team director’s job with Saturn was so he could work again with Strock. He’d had him as a junior in the U.S. squad three years before and liked him. Though Strock was now telling him it was over, he didn’t accept that. What’s wrong with persevering? “This will come right,” he told Strock. “You can still get back. You can be very good again.” What began as a heart-to-heart conversation ended as a full-blown argument. Wenzel yelled as Strock stuck by his decision. In the midst of the coach’s accusations and the rider’s stubbornness, Wenzel saw tears well in Strock’s eyes, and that made him emotional but he didn’t want to cry, not in front of his rider, and so he kept shouting. Eventually, emotions calmed, and with that came the certainty that it was over. Wenzel had to accept that one of his favorite riders was leaving the sport. That evening they shared a beer and tried to end things the right way.

After that they went their separate ways and over the following years they would drift apart. Accepted into medical school at Indiana University, Strock wasn’t left with a lot of free time. Wenzel continued with the Saturn cycling team, got laid off, then got rehired; to better make ends meet, he started his own business, Wenzel Coaching, from his home in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon. Coaching bike riders was something he was good at. But, seven years on from that angst-ridden scene in Wisconsin, Strock reentered his life. Wenzel was in Bermuda with a women’s team due to race the Bermuda Grand Prix when his wife, Kendra, called. “Your buddy Strock is going to sue you,” she said.

You could have knocked him over with a feather.

On an afternoon in January 2001, in a Starbucks coffee shop in Indianapolis, a young man with a latte sits at a table. Over the following two hours, he will turn back the pages of his life and recall a remarkable story.

He is now Dr. Greg Strock, having just graduated from Indiana University medical school, and will soon begin his residency. He was born in Anderson, a town northeast of Indianapolis, and his story began as simply as a fairy tale. From his cousin Dan Taylor, he got the longing to ride a racing bike. Taylor would go for thirty miles at a time, and when you’re his impressionable twelve-year-old cousin, that seems a long, long way. Perhaps it was the promise of a world beyond his little Midwest town, the allure of cobbled roads in Belgium, or maybe it was just the thrill of speed, the cut and thrust of competition. Whatever it was, the boy dreamed of being a bike racer. To get his ﬁrst bike, he mowed neighbors’ lawns and saved his earnings until they were enough to trade for a bicycle. When his parents wondered if it was right to spend so much time on a bike, the boy worked harder at his schoolwork and earned the right to his bike time.

As his grades improved, so, too, did his parents’ attitude toward cycling. Soon there existed an unspoken pact: as long as he took care of his academic work, they made sure he had a lift to the next race, money for the next wheel, and a smiling face to greet him when he returned from a training ride. Adolescent life is simpler when it is controlled by one passion, and back then Greg Strock existed to ride his bike. Everything was arranged so that when the time came, as it did most days of the week, the boy could escape on his bike onto long, straight roads hedged by ﬁelds of corn.

He sent away for videos of cycling’s biggest races and watched them over and over again, especially the one-day classic race from Paris to Roubaix. True cycling men know this is the hardest of the one-day races, and Strock dreamed of winning it. And all the time, he nurtured his dream. Through the ﬂat cornﬁeld countryside around Anderson, the wind was his constant enemy and, to ﬁght it, he imagined he was chasing breakaways on the cobbled tracks to Roubaix. When the Indiana weather worsened in winter and it was too bad to be outdoors, he rode a stationary bike indoors and took pleasure in the pain. By the time he was ﬁfteen, he was Indiana’s best young cyclist and one of the best in the country. That was conﬁrmed a year or so later when he went to the junior national championships at Allentown in Pennsylvania and beat George Hincapie to win the individual time trial. That performance won him a place on the U.S. team for the 1989 junior world championships at Krylatskoye in Moscow, a serious achievement for a boy who would still be a junior in 1990.

At this time cycling in America was run by the United States Cycling Federation (USCF), an organization that would merge with an umbrella organization, USA Cycling (USAC), in 1995. Strock’s selection to the team for Moscow meant that he was invited to training camps at Colorado Springs, and he impressed with his performance in physiological tests. “That’s better than Roy Knickman in his junior year,” they marveled, because Knickman had been very good at that age. They made him do an ergometer test, riding against resistance, and he beat the record for sustained power set by Greg LeMond eleven years before. He ate well, he slept well, he didn’t ﬂinch on training, and through it all he didn’t feel like he was making a sacriﬁce. “I was just this kid from the cornﬁelds who found a sport he loved and a sport he was good at.”

His experience at the 1989 junior world championships in Moscow sharpened his ambition. He raced in the four-man time-trial team, which didn’t suit him, and though they did not get a medal, the experience gave him a taste for serious competition. He returned from the world championships with the belief that he could do a lot better, and after speaking with USCF coaches, it was agreed that for the following season he would compete in the stage races he preferred. Another part of the plan for 1990 was to train even harder, and as he had graduated from high school that January, his parents didn’t object. Two and a half years away, the Barcelona Olympics was a target; and after that, he wanted a place on a professional team. So determined was he to make it happen that he agreed to an international exchange with a talented young Spanish cyclist, Igor Gonzalez de Galdeano, which meant he would spend ten weeks racing in Spain during the spring of ’90 and Gonzalez de Galdeano would come to the United States for the same amount of time later in the year.

He won three of the six races he rode in Spain, beating many of the best young riders in that country and delivering the performances that got him the offer from Banesto’s amateur squad.
So far, so good.

As Strock was packing his suitcases for Spain, the USCF appointed Chris Carmichael and René Wenzel to coach and manage its best amateur racers. Both were ex-riders, and both were young and ambitious. Wenzel thought he was hired to look after the senior amateur squad and that Carmichael would take the juniors, but when he showed up at the USCF ofﬁces in Colorado Springs on February 2, 1990, he realized Carmichael was getting the seniors. Carmichael had started the day before, and though Wenzel suspected the change came from a desire to have an American in charge of the more important senior squad, he didn’t mind. He would prove himself with the juniors.

He was born René Wenzel Olesen in Copenhagen on April 20, 1960. The middle name was his father’s ﬁrst name and he took the name Olesen from his mother, as his parents were not married. Cycling was in his blood. His father had been a professional cyclist, even if Wenzel Jorgensen’s career had been diminished by the onset of the Second World War. Jorgensen retired in 1959, but when young René was ready to ride, his dad was still competing in masters’ races and father and son trained together: six- or twelve-mile rides, enough to get the kid into the sport, more than enough to ease the old man out. People saw them together and sensed the kid’s longing. They called him Wenzel after his father and the boy didn’t ﬁght it. It said René Wenzel Olesen on his passport but he was known simply as René Wenzel. Eventually, he would ofﬁcially drop Olesen and his passport would catch up with the reality.

Like the young man he would coach ten years later, when Wenzel was in high school, he dreamed of becoming a professional cyclist. School was okay but not what he wanted, and ﬁve months into his ﬁnal year, he quit and headed for Belgium. Deinze is a Flanders town close to the spiritual heartland of European cycling. He arrived in early 1979, a young Danish kid with a little money and a lot of hunger. At ﬁrst he competed as an individual, but he rode well enough to be taken on by the local club, KVC (Kronica Velo Club) Deinze. It wasn’t the happiest time in his life because he was only nineteen and unused to being away from home; he found all the free time hard. Good results would have helped, but he struggled on the cobbled roads used in so many of the races in Flanders.

Wenzel was not stupid and knew the people who befriended him at his new Belgian club expected him to get results for KVC. If the results didn’t come, they would move on to some other wannabe. He also sensed that no one much cared how good results were achieved. If some racer found a pill that worked or accepted that kind of help from a friend or trainer, that was a private matter.

One KVC club member helped the foreign riders in Deinze. Took them from the airport to their lodgings, brought them to races, showed them where to shop, and tried to be their friend. Before one race at Mariakerke on the coast, this man gave the teenager two tablets. “These are good vitamins,” he said. Wenzel accepted. “He was my guy,” he says now, “the guy that I was with and I didn’t think it was doping.” Wenzel took the tablets and twenty minutes later felt his heart begin to beat faster, so strong it pounded against his chest wall. Though the Mariakerke race was insanely hard, he was able to keep going. So many times he wanted to quit but something pushed him on and he made it to the ﬁnish.

He didn’t sleep that night, or the following night. His heart raced on, faster than normal, thump, thump, thump. Sometime later, when he understood more about drugs, he realized he had been given amphetamines. The thought of turning down the help never entered his mind. Pills and tablets were part of the sport, and at the time, he was happy to accept they were “just vitamins.” After all, it’s easier to say yes when you’re unsure what you’re getting. About the worth of the forbidden fruit, he was of two minds: it had helped, but seventeenth place wasn’t much compensation for two sleepless nights. The dream of being a pro survived that season in Belgium, and early in 1980 he left Copenhagen for Paris—another country, another chance. This time the arrangements were better. He rode for a club in the southwest corner of suburban Paris that provided accommodation, a bike, and a small allowance. He and two other Danish riders shared a decent apartment, and the season in France was more enjoyable than his year in Belgium.

Wenzel’s experience of cycling’s doping culture while in France came when he and his teammates were blood-tested. “We were taken to a doctor,” he says, “a man we knew as Dr. Bernard. His full name was Bernard Sainz. We felt like pros when we went to him because if we were being put under medical supervision, that meant someone was taking us seriously. We also knew that Dr. Bernard worked with Bernard Hinault at this time, and that was part of the sell for us. We felt honored that Hinault’s doctor would agree to work with us.”

In 1980, not much was known about Bernard Sainz. He rode in the ’50s and ’60s on the track, and after retiring, he worked as a trainer and homeopath with the French GAN-Mercier team. They called him “doctor” even though he had no medical training, and it was also thought that he was a veterinary surgeon but, again, that wasn’t true. His relationship with Bernard Hinault was important because in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Hinault was the world’s best bike rider. In 1978, he won the ﬁrst of ﬁve victories in the Tour de France at the impressively young age of twenty-two. As well as working with Hinault, Sainz had also helped the 1976 winner of the Tour, the Belgian Lucien Van Impe. To their minds, Wenzel and his teammates could not have been taken to a “doctor” with more impressive credentials.

Over the next two decades, ofﬁcial attitudes toward doping and toward those who helped riders dope would change in continental Europe, especially in France. And the police would eventually catch up with Bernard Sainz. In 1986 he was investigated on suspicion of dealing in amphetamines at a Paris track meet, and thirteen years later he was placed under investigation by French authorities on suspicion of breaking anti-doping laws and illegally practicing as a doctor. During this time, he was prohibited from meeting with athletes, attending any cycle races, or having any involvement in the training and preparation of cyclists. He was also ordered not to leave France, and after being stopped in Belgium on a speeding offense (he was visiting the cyclist Frank Vandenbroucke), Sainz was imprisoned upon returning to his native country. In 2005, he was named as a key ﬁgure in a major investigation into the doping of racehorses, and though that inquiry is ongoing, Sainz has not been convicted on a doping offense. Philippe Gaumont, a former professional rider who has admitted doping, says that Sainz gave him legal homeopathic medicines to help rid his body of doping products that were supplied by others.

To the French press, he became known as Dr. Mabuse after the dark character in the 1922 Fritz Lang movie of the same name. It was an alias that did not cause Sainz excessive concern: he wrote the story of his life in 2002 and called it “The Astonishing Revelations of Doctor Mabuse.”

Young and undoubtedly a little naïve, René Wenzel was pleased to have Dr. Bernard examine his blood. The follow-up to the test came a week or so later. “We had ﬁnished a training ride one afternoon,” Wenzel says, “and those of us who lived in the area were told to stop by at the directeur sportif’s house. There was a box containing envelopes with each of our names on them. Inside each envelope was a bunch of tablets, one or two ampoules of liquid, and enough syringes to cover the doses outlined in the note describing what we were to do with the different products. There was also a substance that we were to take, one drop each day placed under the tongue.”

When a young rider is given syringes and the hermetically sealed glass container holding what seems a precious—perhaps magical—liquid, and when this substance comes from someone who is described as a doctor and serves as the champion’s preparatore (preparer), it is natural that he willingly submits. By agreeing, the young rider enters another world and perhaps for the ﬁrst time sees a picture of sport that is cynical, brutal, and tawdry. Once he accepts the drugs, his view of sport is changed. The virtues that attracted him as a child are overtaken by the reality of what it takes to win. Passion is replaced by a more businesslike attitude, and though success may follow, there can be no realization of the original dream.

“We, the three Danish guys, had no idea,” says Wenzel. “We hadn’t injected ourselves before and so we ended up injecting each other. The French guys knew exactly what to do. The supply lasted about six weeks. There were tablets we had to take one or two hours before the race, different ones for different races. If I remember correctly the tablets were for the smaller races because there was the possibility of drug controls at the bigger races. In his note telling us how to use the ampoules and tablets, Dr. Bernard didn’t say what the products were and there were no labels identifying them. At the time I didn’t think of it in terms of doping, but later on, yes.”

After returning from France to Denmark in the winter of 1980, Wenzel felt listless and weak. He tried to continue racing but the effort drained his strength and made him want to lie down. For much of the following six months, he was forced to stay in bed. His recovery was slow and he remained sick for a year and a half. Mononucleosis, a debilitating condition caused by an excess of leukocytes (white cells) in the blood, was diagnosed and Wenzel was not able to return to action until the spring of 1982. Even then his body couldn’t take a heavy training load and he had to back off at the ﬁrst hint of fatigue. Eventually he would get back to a high level of racing, but he never returned to where he had been before.

Twenty-six years have passed since Wenzel was an amateur racer in France, and with the passing of time has come clarity. “I would be really surprised if what Bernard Sainz gave us was all legal. If it was, he could have just given us a prescription and sent us to the nearest pharmacy. If it was legal, I think the labels would still have been there. I have no doubt that the shit I was given was probably what made me sick.”

Wenzel left Denmark for America in the spring of 1983. His plan was to train in California and then race on the U.S. circuit through that summer. Midway through the season it was obvious his body wasn’t ready for the demands of bicycle racing, and for the following two years he raced a little and seesawed between his native country and the United States. By 1986, his health had improved enough to allow a full return to racing and he competed on the U.S. circuit in ’86 and ’87 before immigration ofﬁcials caught up with him and suggested his U.S. vacation had gone on for a little too long. But it had been good while it lasted, and soon after he returned to Denmark, Wenzel was offered the job of cycling coach to his old club in Copenhagen. He worked as a postman to supplement his income and kept in touch with American friends in the hope that something might turn up in the United States. In late 1989, it did. Jiri Mainus, coaching director for the United States Cycling Federation, called and asked if he would be interested in a coaching role with his organization. It was precisely what Wenzel wanted, and on February 2, 1990, he walked into the ofﬁce he would share with fellow coach Chris Carmichael at the USCF’s Colorado Springs headquarters in Colorado.

Wenzel’s ﬁrst important assignment was a trip to Europe with his junior squad, where they would compete in France before carrying on to the prestigious Dusika tour in Austria. The trip to Europe would show him what the riders could do and allow him to get to know them as young men. He had met all but one at a training camp in Colorado Springs before leaving for France. The one he hadn’t met was a guy from the cornﬁelds of Indiana who people said would be one of the stronger riders in his group.