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.
For the first weeks of the ’88 Tour of Italy, the sun had cast long shadows across the roads, the riders comfortable in their shorts and Lycra. Meanwhile, on the high passes, the snowplows had been doing their work, preparing for the passage of the great spectacle.
But the day before the famed Gavia, it became clear that severe weather—including snow—was in the offing. For Ochowicz and Neel, the world at that moment revolved around this stage, and they moved forward with military precision. Ochowicz started by visiting a local ski shop, astonishing the proprietor by buying 10 pairs of thick winter gloves—in May. The two men mapped out a plan that included two strategically positioned support cars. One, with Neel, would stay behind, with warm clothes and hot tea for each rider. Ochowicz, meanwhile, would take the other to position himself near the summit with a musette bag of warm clothes prepared for each rider for the long descent to the finish in Bormio.
For Hampsten, there was succor not only in the physical support, but in the simple fact that people would be there for him, like sentinels in the wilderness. “Psychologically, that was really important,” he said. “Other teams simply weren’t prepared.” Suddenly, the American newcomers were looking like veterans of the high mountains.
Neel had his own menu of solutions, which included a mix of science and folk wisdom. First, in the morning, he had them all eat steak to fortify themselves against the cold. Then, in a move that would pay huge dividends, he had the soigneurs completely cover each rider with Vaseline as insulation against the weather. Only their faces were left bare, leaving them all feeling a little like Italian olives.
In his role as diviner of spirits and psychotherapist, Neel tried to calm the boys before embarking on what was clearly going to be an epic day. His ploy was to frame the horrific conditions as an opportunity. In doing so, he was suppressing his own very real concerns about the stage and what might happen. “People are going to freak out,” he warned them. At the same time, he knew Hampsten was in peak condition, and what might have been a small margin on a good day, he said, “would be magnified” by the conditions. “Our plan is good,” he said, “so don’t let weather ruin it.”
Thus prepared, and hermetically sealed against the elements, the team went forth to uncertain fate.
That morning, in the village of Chiesa Valmalenco, they had awoken to a mix of rain and snow. Seeing this, the boys, many of them from Boulder, knew immediately what it was going to be like on the high passes. “Half of us lived in Colorado, we all knew about snow,” said Hampsten. “I grew up in North Dakota, so I knew perhaps more about riding in snow than most.”
When they reflected on the war plans that Neel and Ochowicz had put into place, they wondered why other teams weren’t similarly girding for battle. How could the Americans know what others apparently did not? Hampsten’s simple assessment was that the U.S. squad did the math. “We were going up to 2,600 meters, and we were at 600 meters at nine in morning and it was snowing—snow turning into rain. So there would definitely be snow up there.”
For a moment at the start, 7-Eleven’s carefully assembled plan seemed in danger of being derailed when riders on the other teams threatened to boycott the stage. They were “grumbling and bitching, shouting, ‘Let’s not race,’” said Hampsten. Fortunately, the tempest passed. “It was nothing cohesive,” Hampsten said, and with no organized resistance, the race commissaires soon had everyone toeing the starting line.
Once the race was underway, Neel and Ochowicz’s meticulous preparation began to pay dividends. No sooner had Hampsten begun the climb, he said, than Neel “had riders bringing me tea every three minutes.” Drinking hot tea on a bicycle is no simple exercise. The thin-walled plastic bottles would “kind of droop into my bottle cage,” said Hampsten. “After three minutes, it was just right. After eight minutes, it was frozen.”
Once on the Gavia, despite the horrific conditions, Hampsten felt his confidence growing. Bike racers read their fellow competitors like books, and what he saw spoke volumes. “I started looking at other people, looking at them in their faces—they were definitely suffering more than we were,” he said. “And they were way more scared than I was.”
Team doctor Max Testa, who grew up skiing in the area, had supplied a precise picture of the road ahead. After six kilometers, the course turned to dirt, on grades approaching 14 percent. Neel called it simply, “a goat path.” But fortunately, he noted, “we were prepared for a goat path.”
The moment the pavement changed, Hampsten attacked. Unfortunately, “all my competitors were on my wheel, expecting I would do it.
“But it was the only stick I had. People were so worried about the weather, I thought I would attack from the very beginning.”
At the same time, he had shrewdly decided to leave something in reserve. It would be simple enough to make it to the top, he thought, while he was generating his own heat—but the real race would occur on the frigid descent to Bormio. He had to remain coherent, and just as important, physically able to navigate the descent.
It was, in such fearsome conditions, a remarkably lucid realization.
Neel himself could barely get up the mountain in a car. At one point he found himself stuck and had to enlist a fellow director, Peter Post, to extricate him. Ochowicz, meanwhile, gingerly made his way up the pass behind a snowplow. Once he got there, the snow was so deep he could hardly find a place to park.
At one point Hampsten decided to don a neck warmer and hat. Before putting them on, he reached up to brush water from his scalp, and was astounded when “a snowball came off my head and rolled down my back. . . it had really accumulated.”
Ochowicz, stationed near the summit, could see solitary riders coming toward him out of the whiteness, leaving little tire tracks behind. Johan van der Velde, a Dutch rider renowned for his climbing ability, was first to arrive, and he found little cause for celebration once he got there. At one point Neel, feeling magnanimous, had handed the suffering rider hot tea, which he promptly dropped on the ground. “He was frozen like a statue,” said Neel. “He couldn’t even hold the bottle.” He would eventually lose the better part of an hour to the leaders.
Hampsten followed a minute later, and decided to take a rain jacket from Ochowicz, along with a musette bag filled with gloves and a bottle of hot tea. In any other circumstance, putting on the jacket would have been an easy task, but Hampsten’s hands were nearly frozen. “My judgment had already lapsed,” he said. “If I’d been smart, I would have stopped, put my foot down, and my hands through the sleeves.”
In the brief time he wrestled with his garments, Hampsten was caught by Eric Breukink, one of his chief competitors. It was now raining, which Hampsten interpreted as a good sign—it meant that the temperature had managed to eke above 32 degrees.
Together, the two started the long descent to the ski village of Bormio, through the blizzard.
The descent included moments of clarity, punctuated with abject fear. Success in the race—and survival, no less—started to occupy Hampsten’s thoughts in equal proportions. “I was pretty worried about what was happening,” he said. His main concern was that “if I get really hypothermic, I will fall over.” There was also the ever-present temptation to crawl in the team car—if one could be found—or that perhaps he might “see the team hotel and just stop there and get in the hot tub.”
Hampsten’s judgment may have lapsed earlier in small ways, but he was coherent enough to realize that he had to keep his bike functioning. Cog by cog, the snow and slush had enveloped his bike’s rear sprockets, turning the assembly into a frozen mass. “I knew I had to keep one gear working,” he said. “I kept it in the 53×14 and pedaled the whole way down. I never stopped pedaling, so it never stopped working.”
With Breukink still at his side, Hampsten found the descent to be a terrifying wilderness. “There was no lead car, no follow car, just us and the snow,” he said. At one point the pair came upon a mechanic by the roadside in a state of near delirium. He was like a sentinel at the gates of hell, a visitor from the netherworld. “He was muttering and cursing, saying the race was abandoned,” said Hampsten. When the two flashed past, “he shrieked he was so surprised.”
A person in a survival situation can have a variety of reactions, many of which are counterproductive. Hampsten had made his choice long before, which was to fight.
“It was the place where I was able to push myself the most,” he would say, years later. “Everyone had to go places in their mind, just to get down the mountain.”
Nearly every rider involved has a story about that day, June 5, 1988. While Hampsten may have been the protagonist, a thousand dramas were being played out in the peloton, which extended for more than an hour behind.
His teammate Veggerby, while descending at 70 kph on snow and ice, in a moment of insanity, took his hands from the handlebar and began clapping himself to stay warm. “Someone in a service car was hammering on the horn, telling me to be careful,” he said. “I thought he meant I should go faster. I was desperate and lucky. I was just going with no brain, no fear. It was a terrible day.”
Kiefel, meanwhile, found his hands had become useless clubs. “It got so cold—and we had down tube shifters—that I couldn’t brake or shift,” he said. “I’d just hit them with my fist.”
Roll, never one for half measures, employed a unique survival tactic, and spent the descent screaming at the top of his lungs.
From Lauritzen’s perspective, back in the field, the race resembled an arctic wasteland. “I was all alone,” he said. “No one else could see me from the front or back. I was just crying on the bike. If you went off the cliffs, no one would have seen you.” He would eventually finish more than 21 minutes back, calling it “my worst nightmare on the bike. . . one of the hardest days in my life. I was a paracommander,” he added, referring to a former stint with the Norwegian Army, “and I knew pain, but that day was terrible. It was lucky that riders didn’t die.”
Hampsten’s earlier calculation—to conserve energy for the descent—would now prove its value. Wearing the neck warmer and wool hat that Ochowicz had given him at the summit, he managed to stay with Breukink, the pair gaining more than four minutes on the field.
But with 18 kilometers to go, Breukink moved ahead, and Hampsten couldn’t respond. “To him, it looked like I was asleep,” Hampsten said. “I was so cold, I couldn’t jump to get on his wheel,” even though he thought “it might be warmer on his wheel.”
But there were more important things at stake than the stage win. Although Hampsten finished second on the day, seven seconds back, he had captured the pink leader’s jersey by 15 seconds over Breukink. Third place in the stage was more than four minutes behind. Van der Velde, who had been first to cross the summit of the Gavia, had cracked entirely, losing 47 minutes.
Hampsten crossed the line and was overcome with a wave of confusing and contradictory emotions. “I was in a rage, psychologically,” he said. Before long he found his old friend, Neel, who had kept the car running, with the heater on. Hampsten crawled in and asked to be alone.
Then he started to cry.
For Hampsten, and many of his teammates, it had been a day spent on the threshold of life and death. No sooner had the leaders come across than the finish line was transformed into a triage unit, with hypothermic riders collapsing into the arms of soigneurs and managers.
Of all the 7-Elevens, Roll seemed to have placed himself in the most precarious position physically. Video footage shows him hyperventilating, a support person embracing him from behind, trying to shake him out of his torpor. “He was the worst one,” said Neel. Added Kiefel, “That guy could suffer.”
While Roll and others paid dearly to count themselves among the finishers, others may have taken a more expeditious route. Looming large over the day has been the persistent rumor that many riders simply got in their team cars and hitched a ride to the finish rather than face the epic conditions. Lauritzen, for one, was insistent on the point, saying that “there were 30 or 40 riders who got in the car—then they were on their bikes again at the finish.”
Ochowicz and Neel were both unfazed by the apparent scandal. “I don’t care if they did,” said Neel of the scofflaws. What was far more important was that their man was wearing the maglia rosa, the pink jersey of the race leader, with seven stages remaining.
Erminio Del Oglio, the team’s great sponsor and benefactor, was nearly prostrate with emotion at the sight of Hampsten in pink. The team doctor, Testa, had to treat him for palpitations.
“He had to stay home for rest of race,” said Lauritzen. “It was too hard for his heart.”
(Cor Vos Photo)