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.
After the team’s successful foray to the 1985 Giro, Ochowicz began laying out a plan to achieve the biggest coup of his young career. Brimming with confidence in his riders, his organization, and his support from Southland, he plotted his team’s entry into nothing less than le grand boucle itself—the 1986 Tour de France. Heiden remembers the idea burning like an ember in his old friend. “Och had big aspirations,” he said. “He wanted to take an American team to the Tour.”
But from the outset, 1986 would proceed in typical 7-Eleven fashion—unimaginable glories accompanied by unthinkable disasters. In the early spring, the team departed for Europe to gain some pro racing experience and toughen themselves for the travails ahead. But they soon discovered the challenges of an expatriate lifestyle. Unlike other, more established teams, they didn’t have a home base. “We were living basically in a brothel in Ghent,” said team member Alex Stieda. “You could rent it by the hour. There were mirrors on the ceiling. We were the laughing stock of the peloton.”
A major part of the team’s preparation was to have been the three-week Tour of Spain, or Vuelta a España, in those days held in late April. As the team began to assemble for the race, Ochowicz got a call from the U.S. State Department. President Reagan had decided to bomb Libya, and for safety reasons, all U.S. citizens were to leave the country immediately. “There was all this preparation, then nothing,” said Stieda. “We had a huge party, went to the airport, and flew back.”
Faced with the urgent need to continue preparation for the Tour, the team had to fabricate suitable replacements. “We came back, did Redlands [a small stage race in California]—anything to prepare for the Tour,” said team member Chris Carmichael. American races in general were woefully short compared to the daily race distances of the big European tours. It was a struggle just to get in enough miles. “If we could race past 200K and still feel good, that was magical—a sign of not being amateur,” said Stieda.
While their training proceeded in its own haphazard way, an even bigger problem loomed; with the race just a few weeks away, the team still had not been formally invited to the Tour. A year earlier, Dell Oglio, the team’s great benefactor, had arranged for Ochowicz to speak with Tour director Felix Levitan for 15 minutes, which was tantamount to an audience with the Pope. But in the intervening months, no invitation had been forthcoming. After considerable lobbying, and with a scant two weeks to go, the 7-Elevens were added to the roster—the first American-based team in the history of the 83-year-old race.
Ochowicz launched into a flurry of logistical activity. To bolster his team lineup, Och added riders with European experience, including Americans Alexi Grewal and Doug Shapiro, and Raúl Alcalá, a promising competitor from Monterrey, Mexico. He attended to a hundred additional details, sorting travel, staff, and logistics. As the race start date loomed, he even found himself silk-screening jerseys with the 7-Eleven logo on the Descente assembly line in Switzerland and then hauling the boxes to Paris for the start.
It was, from everyone’s perspective, a characteristic leap into the unknown. Whatever the 7-Elevens lacked in preparation, they would, in typical fashion, make up for with enthusiasm.
For the team’s historic debut, they had chosen one of the longer Tours at 23 stages and more than 4,000 kilometers (almost 2,500 miles). It was also to be one of the biggest, with 21 teams of 10 riders each. Of these, the very last dossard—number 210—would be affixed to the jersey of the eager and effervescent Canadian, Stieda.
Stieda was one in a continuing series of Canadian riders who would be so important to the squad throughout its history. He grew up in Vancouver, British Columbia, where he’d ridden with Ron Hayman, a member of the original team. Together, they experienced the joyous and uncomplicated lives of young bike racers. For a while, the pair were part of a team sponsored by Roto-Rooter, an arrangement that had the further benefit of allowing them to earn money as plumbers in the winter.
After years on the Canadian national team, primarily as a track rider, Stieda was approached by Ochowicz in 1981. He found the irreverent and fun-loving 7-Elevens immediately to his liking. In his first race, in New York City, he remembered “driving the team van in Manhattan, shooting bottle rockets out the window on Fifth Avenue. I thought, if this is what it’s all about, this is cool. . . . It was a whole side of cycling I’d not seen before.”
For Stieda, the team’s carefree attitude was equally applicable to the Tour of Texas or the Tour de France. On the morning of the prologue time trial, held in the southwestern Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, he relaxed by playing the harmonica and being a tourist. Armed with a camera in his back pocket, he took pictures of the Eiffel Tower and other landmarks.
“It was my first time at the Tour,” he said. “There I was, in the heart of Paris. I thought, ‘I’m going to stop and enjoy this.’”
He could not possibly have known what the next 24 hours would bring.
With this wide-eyed perspective, and wearing his caboose number 210, Stieda warmed up on the circuit and noticed that it had “four corners, like a criterium course.” At just 4.6 kilometers—less than 3 miles—the race would take a little over five minutes, an elapsed time strikingly similar to the duration of an individual pursuit on the track, his specialty. It all seemed surprisingly familiar, and he felt his confidence growing.
Ironically, as the last numbered rider, he started first. That morning, Shelley Verses, the team’s soigneur, had bleached several riders’ hair blond, including Stieda’s. Helmetless and looking all the world like a California surfer, he proceeded to scorch the course, finishing in just 5 minutes and 33 seconds.
“I had given it everything,” he said. “I knew I had done the best I could have.”
As the first rider, his name went immediately to the top of the leader board. Defying belief, it stayed there a surprisingly long time. Rider after rider completed the course, and tick, tick, Stieda’s 5:33 clung to the top row. Eventually, some of the strongest teams’ top riders recorded better times, but when the final results were in, Stieda had not only done the fastest time of the 7-Elevens, but he’d finished 21st overall.
“That night,” he said, “I knew I was close on GC.”
The next morning’s race, at just 85 kilometers, or 53 miles, also had a familiar feel. “I thought, it’s 85K, which was as far as any crit I’d done,” said Stieda. “And there were time bonuses along the way. It was a classic North American-style race; just get away and get primes.”
And since it all felt familiar, he decided to use familiar armaments. “I showed up at the starting line with what I needed to carry for 85K,” he said. “Just a couple of water bottles.” He also wore a one-piece skinsuit—clothing that, at the time, was considered heresy in the tradition-bound European peloton, where everyone wore full jerseys with pockets in the back for food and extra clothing. Phinney, ever conscious of the team’s reputation, was sufficiently embarrassed that he put some space between himself and his teammate at the starting line.
Once underway, Stieda noticed that the “peloton was going slow, just watching each other and cruising.” Armed with the confidence of his previous day’s success, he began to hatch a plan. “Maybe I could just go up the road and they wouldn’t chase,” he thought. “Some guys ride up the road to pee, and they let them go. I thought, ‘Hey, I’ll do that.’”
At 22 kilometers, Stieda made his move. Carmichael remembers looking over and seeing him “attacking, wearing a skinsuit, with his hat turned the other way. Everyone is looking over, wondering, ‘Who is that guy? Is he even in the race?’”
Indeed, Stieda saw his move as clandestine. “I just stayed in the saddle and went as hard as I could. If you had seen me from behind, you wouldn’t think I was accelerating.” Of course, he had one other great advantage, which was that no one was inclined to take a North American rider seriously in the world’s most prestigious bike race. “They thought we were all American jokers,” said Stieda. “I was out of sight, out of mind. Pretty soon I had three minutes, four minutes, five minutes.”
Along the way there were several sprints for time bonuses. Stieda won each of them in turn, riding alone, subtracting a critical 36 seconds from his overall time.
Back in the field, the 7-Elevens found Stieda’s escapade to be mildly entertaining and a positive start to their first Tour. But gradually, there was a collective epiphany. At one point Pierce turned to Heiden and said, “You know, if Alex stays out there for two or three more sprints, he stands a chance of getting the jersey, because he had a pretty good time trial. He’s pretty far up there.”
The very notion that a North American rider in the first full day of his first Tour de France could garner cycling’s highest honor seemed entirely implausible—if not laughable.
“Eric looked at me and said, ‘Yeah, right. . . .’”
Ochowicz, of course, immediately saw the developing possibilities. To get the race lead, he reasoned, “You have to do a good prologue. Then you have to have the opportunity to get a little time. If the combination works out, you get the jersey.” And that’s exactly what Stieda’s escapade was leading to.
Meanwhile, Stieda was “burying himself,” in his words, to stay off the front. Eventually he was caught by a small group, including Australian star Phil Anderson. “He was a guy we looked up to, as someone who had broken through—an English-speaking guy,” said Stieda. “He said, ‘Alex, you’re in the jersey.’” At that moment, the possibility of the maillot jaune was less consequential than the fact that “Phil Anderson was actually talking to me,” said Stieda.
At the finish, Stieda was fifth out of a six-rider breakaway. “I remember just crossing the line and looking back, and there was the main field, just going full bore, a wall of riders, eight lanes wide.”
In that moment, he became the first North American in history to possess the leader’s yellow jersey in the Tour. His overall margin: just eight seconds.
Throughout the stage, Stieda had given little thought to the fact that, in less than three hours, the squad would be toeing the line for the 56-kilometer team time trial. It was a rarity for the Tour—a two-stage day.
What Stieda needed was rest. But first, there was the traditional pomp and circumstance afforded the leader of the Tour. Clearly, his overall time had earned him the yellow leader’s jersey. What he did not know was that, by virtue of his bonus points throughout the stage, he was also the owner of the red jersey (for “Catch Sprints”), the white jersey (best newcomer), the polka dot jersey (best climber), and the combination jersey (for standings in all categories, a jersey discontinued in 1989 and no longer awarded). For each, he ascended the podium, and in turn donned the ceremonial jersey, was handed flowers, and kissed by trophy girls. After each one, Stieda kept thinking, “they’ve run out of jerseys.” Finally, it was time for yellow. As he dragged himself to the podium one final time, he was so tired that a photographer had to remind him to smile. “I was elated, but I was so exhausted,” he said.
In those days, Tour riders did not enjoy the sanctuary of luxury hotels or motorhomes. Instead, the peloton retired en masse to a local school, where they lay down on cots in an austere gymnasium. For Stieda, it was a fitful sleep, his mind racing with thoughts of the afternoon’s stage.
“I had put out so much,” he said. “I didn’t realize how depleted I was.”
He was about to find out.
The 7-Elevens had the thing they wanted most in the world—a prize emblematic of the pinnacle of the sport. It had been an unbelievable stroke of luck. And now, it would prove their undoing.
The team time trial is one of the most technical disciplines in cycling, with riders at the thin edge of exhaustion, arrayed nose to tail and striving to stay within inches of each other to ensure maximum draft. While many on the team were experienced in the discipline (Phinney and Kiefel had won an Olympic medal in the event in 1984), none of them had done a 10-man version, where the need for precision—and the risks of a crash—are exponentially greater. And, unlike more experienced teams, they had not pre-ridden the course. “We could have been better prepared,” said Ochowicz in a remarkable understatement.
Stieda was even more succinct. “We had no idea what we were doing.”
As the team of the yellow jersey, the 7-Elevens started last. Just a day earlier, they were nobodies. Now they were the toast of the cycling world. “It was heady stuff, with motorcycles all over the place, and helicopters overhead,” said Phinney.
At 18 kilometers, Phinney, following a lead motorcycle, led the hard-charging group into a downhill corner. What he didn’t know was that there was a traffic island just around the bend. Kiefel remembers thinking that Phinney was “going way too fast. He was amped and excited.” The first few riders made it through safely, but others, farther back, weren’t so lucky. The unsuspecting Heiden was first to pile into the median. In an instant, riders and bikes were scattered like a yard sale.
From there, things went from bad to worse. Doug Shapiro, an experienced American rider who had won the 1984 Coors Classic and been brought onto the team by Ochowicz in 1986, was oblivious to the carnage behind. “He kept sprinting up the hill, thinking the rest of the team is on his wheel,” said Kiefel. While team mechanic Richie Gilstrap was attending to broken bikes, the leading riders had to make a decision: should they keep going, or wait for the rest of the team to catch up? “It was complete disarray,” said Phinney. “We’re just arguing among ourselves. That was going to be indicative of the day—it went from bad to worse as the race went on. Tempers started to flare.”
Once back in formation, they found themselves in an open area with a strong crosswind, where it was critical to draft and maintain a close following distance. At one point new team member Alexi Grewal, gold medal winner in the 1984 Olympic road race, went to the front. What happened next is subject to dispute—according to different accounts, he was either pedaling roughly, failed to position himself for optimum draft, or both. Whatever the case, Grewal and Shapiro were suddenly engaged in a shouting match at 30 mph. In the next instant, “Shapiro takes a bottle and wings it at Alexi’s head,” said Kiefel.
It had taken only a few hours for the 7-Elevens to resume their accustomed position as the comedic element of the peloton. Even worse, said Kiefel, “it was all on French TV.”
No sooner had the team assembled itself for the second time, than another, more serious problem was revealed—Stieda, in all the excitement, had forgotten to eat lunch. Spent from his effort that morning, the awards marathon, and the scrutiny of the world’s cycling press, he began to unravel. “Alex was gassed,” said Ochowicz.
The usual tactic in these circumstances is for the exhausted rider to drift to the back and enjoy a draft, leaving the bulk of the work to his teammates. But for Stieda, even this proved impossible. “With 15 or 20 kilometers to go, my legs are starting to go,” he said. “I just can’t hold the wheel in front. I’m getting gapped more, and digging in to get over the hills.”
Seeing the impending embarrassment of the yellow jersey being dropped, Neel instructed the group to ease up. But even after slowing, “Alex just couldn’t do it,” said Pierce. The risk was not just that Stieda would lose precious minutes, but that he might finish outside the time limit and be eliminated from the race entirely. If that weren’t bad enough, Heiden, Kiefel, and Alcalá, all punctured.
While Stieda continued his trip through purgatory, the time check was getting worse for everyone. It wasn’t just Stieda’s fate that hung in the balance; if the team stayed with him, they might all be eliminated. (The rules stipulated that riders must finish within a percentage of the stage winner’s time.) Seeing the impending disaster, Neel asked Carmichael and Pierce to drop back and provide an escort for the exhausted Stieda, allowing the others to ride ahead.
In the end the threesome were able to nurse each other to the line. Stieda, having lost the yellow jersey, just made the time limit. The team finished in 19th, tied for second to last. Suffering the ultimate indignity, Kiefel noted that only the Colombians—never known for their time-trialing prowess—were slower. Stieda had been in the yellow jersey for a little over three hours. To many, it had been the quintessential 7-Eleven experience: lofty heights, quickly followed by towering ineptitude and miscalculations. The whole thing was fantastic fodder for anyone wanting to resurrect the old charges of American incompetence.
One journalist had the audacity—or the simply the candor—to ask if they had ever done a team time trial before. “I was so mad that I just gave him the cold shoulder,” said a disgruntled Phinney. “But actually, we couldn’t have done any worse if we’d tried. On the first day of the Tour, we go from having yellow, and everyone talking about us, to going to last place with everyone laughing at us.”
It was, said Stieda, “the worst thing we’d ever done.”
But the race wasn’t over yet.
As much as anyone, Phinney carried the mantle of the team. Having suffered the indignity of the previous day’s race, he now set about resurrecting their reputation in the eyes of the peloton and the public.
The third stage, at 214 kilometers, or 133 miles, was the team’s first experience with a lengthy road race in the Tour. They found it daunting—a quantum leap in intensity and competitiveness compared to anything they had experienced in the United States. It was a Darwinian atmosphere in which a breakaway, even if ill-fated, could justify a year’s salary, and all manner of risks were taken for a moment in the sun. Just maintaining a position in the field was a never-ending dogfight. “There’s so much tension in the race,” Phinney moaned. “There’s all this humanity on bikes, trying to squeeze in, and it makes it very hard to keep your place.” He found he was “fighting, fighting, fighting.” But for what? “You’d finally get to the front, and in a minute, you’d be at the back of the peloton again.”
At one of these disheartening moments, another rider, Robert Dill-Bundi, came flying past. Seeing an opportunity to advance, Phinney thought, “Sweet—I’ll just get on his wheel and take it to the front.” But Dill-Bundi had other, more grandiose plans than merely moving up in the field. “He gets to the front, and doesn’t pull off—he just puts it in a larger gear and keeps cranking,” said Phinney, who had every intention of capitalizing on Dill-Bundi’s unintentional gift. “All of a sudden, in short order, I’ve gone from the back to a breakaway.”
At an intermediate sprint, Phinney accelerated to test himself. His spirits soared when he discovered that he was “easily the fastest guy in the group.” He began optimistically plotting for the finish.
Just then, a Spanish rider attacked and managed to establish a gap. In that moment, Phinney’s hope for a stage win seemed to evaporate. “All of a sudden, the whole mentality changed,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh, I guess we’re racing for second.’”
As he had predicted, Phinney easily won the bunch sprint. “I was so totally relaxed because we were only racing for second,” he said. “I just chilled.” From his perspective it had been a nice confidence builder—second place in his first Tour de France road stage.
What he didn’t realize was that the Spanish rider who had gone off the front had punctured. Phinney and his breakaway companions had passed him on the roadside without realizing it.
“Right as I came across the line, [journalist] John Wilcockson said, ‘You won! That was incredible!’ I said, ‘Yeah, I won the group sprint for second.’ He said, ‘No, you won!’”
It was a consummation of all Phinney had worked for. Ochowicz, beaming, called it “a great win—the beginning of the second phase of his career—his first real international win. That’s a credential you can hang your hat on the rest of your life: a stage win in the Tour de France.”
But it was more than that. It had been, in the pantheon of the team’s accomplishments, a miraculous three-day adventure. They had soared, fallen to the ground, and soared again. “It was maximum glory and maximum embarrassment,” said Phinney. “We had the Europeans just shaking their heads.”
Thanks to Phinney’s stage win, Ochowicz was once again holding his head high in the face of skeptics and detractors. Feeling magnanimous, he decided that his band of expatriates needed a dose of Americana to serve as motivation for the road ahead, in the form of some artery-choking junk food. “The first thing I did was to go to McDonald’s and get a big sack of French fries, burgers, and milk shakes,” he said. “I went around to all their rooms. They loved it.”
And they needed fortification. The papers were calling the race the “tour of crashes”—and, unfortunately, many of them involved the 7-Elevens. Heiden and Pierce both required stitches from their get-offs in the team time trial. After his earlier glories, Phinney crashed heavily in stage 15, and was forced to withdraw with a wrist injury. In a dramatic televised moment, he was shown reclined in an ambulance, anguished over the indignity of having to abandon. “All I want to do right now is finish,” he said tearfully.
Heiden, a source of all good things for the team, fell on a descent in stage 18, resulting in a concussion and hallucinations. For a moment he lay on the ground, inert and bleeding. TV footage shows Ochowicz looking on, not with the concern of a team director, but with the raw emotion that a father would exhibit toward a son. “It was, for all of us, a frightening moment,” said CBS Sports commentator John Tesh. Heiden was forced to withdraw and would never again compete in the Tour.
While many of these events were tragic or poignant, others were purely embarrassing. At one point team member Shapiro glanced over at a TV camera, only to ride right into the back of Pedro Delgado—a future Tour winner—causing the Spaniard to crash, break his collarbone, and abandon the race.
The incendiary Grewal also proved to be a public relations liability. While he was capable of astounding performances when fueled by his own anger and iconoclastic nature, among the fraternal, fun-loving 7-Elevens, his rebellious personality was immediately problematic. He was a strict vegetarian, and arrived in Europe carrying his own grains and cooking equipment. In the evenings, the smell of garlic and herbs would waft from his hotel room. From Neel’s perspective, “he was starving to death.”
Even worse, he failed in two of the team’s most sacrosanct tests: “He didn’t go drinking or chase girls,” said Stieda.
At one point in the Tour, Grewal was struggling in a climbing stage. Annoyed by a motorcycle cameraman who began chronicling Grewal’s every pedal stroke, he first waved off the intruder. When the journalist persisted, Grewal spat venomously at the camera. The incident, combined with other transgressions later in the season, would lead to his dismissal from the team.
All these dramas were brought home to an American television audience by CBS Sports, providing an unprecedented window into the sport for an uninitiated but increasingly curious public back home. Under the creative hand of producer Dave Michaels and anchorman Tesh, the network televised five segments during the race, including same-day coverage of the final stage and American Greg LeMond’s eventual ascent to the top step of the podium—the first American to win the world’s most important cycling event. Tesh, with his emotional commentary and artfully composed music, brought the race to America in the most personal terms. The network would play a huge role in popularizing the race for years to come.
By the final week, they’d lost Phinney, Heiden, Grewal, Shapiro, and Carmichael to fatigue, illness or injury. “From then on, we were just trying to get to the finish,” said Ochowicz. “It became survival.”
Kiefel, despite having placed second in stage 7, was vowing never to come back. “Five days before the end, I remember thinking I had to finish, because I was never going to ride this stinkin’ race again,” he said. “I told myself that to get to the finish.” (He would, in fact, do the race another six times.)
For his part, Pierce’s most enduring memory was that he “suffered like a miserable dog.” The top-placed 7-Eleven rider was Bob Roll, at 63rd. Stieda, despite his spectacular blowup early in the race, managed to finish 120th.. Other team finishers included Pierce, Kiefel, and the new acquisition Alcalá.
To apply salve to their wounds after the Paris finish, the team went to Café Pacifico, one of the few Mexican restaurants in the city. In typical 7-Eleven fashion, it was a small act of culinary defiance. “Everyone else was going to the Moulin Rouge for a big dinner, and we’d go to Café Pacifico,” said Ochowicz. It would be the first of many such visits.
It was a race that most of the team remembers as a reckoning, a sobering end to the exuberant, charmed life they had led up until then. The team was in the big show now, and the old formulas no longer worked. “When we went to Europe, a lot of what we had done—our elitism—went out the window,” said Phinney. “We were new kids trying to fake it.”
But they were also learning by degree. They had endured the taunts, the jibes, and the rigors of the world’s most famous bike race. They had earned yellow, if only for a few hours, and Phinney had won a stage. All things considered, it had been a glorious experience. “I wouldn’t rewrite it in any way,” said Neel.
Hayman, one of the original team members, had watched the race on TV back home. He found himself in a state of utter disbelief at how far the team had come from the rowdy and raucous days of the Ranch Dog, back in 1981. “It was the vision of one person that did it,” he said of his old friend, Ochowicz. “One person who believed in it so strongly that he dragged everyone along with him. Before they knew it, they all believed it.”