Chapter 41: Lydia And Meri’s New Jerseys

Mark

Lydia and I legged it straight back to the states just two days after returning from what would probably be our last holiday in Prerow. We had little time to prepare for the hectic activity during September and October.

One change over last year was that Meri would have a full team to support her during the National Championships this year. Due to her third place last year, and Lydia’s win in the time trial, their pokey little Dutch team had gotten an official invitation, so she could bring more than one non-American team mate this year.

As the team’s main sponsor Bill O’Connor was in Philadelphia too when Lydia rolled down the starting ramp for the time trial. As the still reigning champion, she wore the Stars & Stripes-themed jersey to denote that status. Having done no road races so far this year, this was the only time in the last twelve months she had actually worn it. The only other time she had worn it, was as a body painting in March.

Since the course in Philly was a lot flatter than last year’s in Seattle, she was using a proper time trial bike this time round and although the first two intermediate times looked less than promising, her ‘donkey mode’ paid off. In exchange for the absence of hills, the route was nearly ten miles longer this year and some of those who had set blistering early intermediate times, had obviously overcooked it and had withered towards the end. In the end she won it again, by just 15 seconds. A win is a win, as they say, but her obvious lack of actual race practice had shone through.

This was the reason why the six-women team for the road race did not include Lydia. Femke, Shirin, Amelie, Anneke and Katrijn were the ones chosen to support Meri. With a mostly flat route, a bunch sprint was a distinct possibility. Meri had proven during last year’s race, that in the shallow talent pool of American female sprinters she seemed to be the one-eyed among the blind, even when the hills had almost killed her off already, and that wasn’t even accounting for the fact that her sprint had gotten a lot better over the last year, especially due to the track cycling training.

The usual pandemonium ensued after the start with everybody and his dog trying to get into a breakaway group. Since Katrijn was available as a lead-out for Meri, Anneke was sent into the group as a chaperone, just in case that group would make it to the end, like last year. Not being needed for the ‘sprint train’ Amelie did a lot of work at the business end of the peloton to keep the gap of the breakaway under three minutes, but soon word got round that none of the six escapees was American, which meant that the winner would come from the main bunch anyway, so Meri’s team stopped doing any work. Since they had a rider in the group that was a perfectly legitimate thing to do in tactical terms.

Soon the other teams realized what was happening and things became awfully hectic, as nobody was keen to find out how quick Meri would be on a course that didn’t have any hills to drain her energy before the final dash. Several riders tried to go after the breakaway group to join it, just like Femke had done last year, but the team immediately reacted. As soon as a second breakaway had formed, Femke and Shirin showed up at the pointy end of the peloton and reeled them back in. This happened three or four times over the next three hours until the other teams bowed to the inevitable – the winner would be decided by a bunch sprint.

Due to this constant to-and-fro the gap of the escape group – which had grown to eight minutes at its peak – had come down to just above five, but with only 10 miles remaining, it was clear they wouldn’t be caught.

The teams hoping to win the bunch sprint were starting to organize. Since teams that had no American sprinter had little to fight for, the whole procedure was a lot less hectic compared to European races. The team’s wisdom of sending Anneke in the group paid off big time. As the lead-out for either Meri or Katrijn she was a decent sprinter herself and easily won the six-women sprint of the escape group.

Shirin meanwhile drilled it at the front of the main bunch, peeled off to hand over to Femke, who delivered Katrijn and Meri to the business end of the pack for the last half mile. Being a winning sprinter herself, Katrijn delivered a massive launch for Meri and when our favorite boob monster sling-shot around her team mate she was easily three bike-lengths ahead of anyone else.

Bill O’Connor, a man with all the exuberance of a British Earl, commented: “Splendid.”

John

“Well you certainly look like someone who has had a good time in Philly,” I said when I joined Bill in the study of his mansion in San Jose.

Being the Brit that he so truly was, despite living here since 1979, he served gin.

“Investing in that team has been the best idea you’ve ever had, mate. I invest in a Dutch team and end up having my logo plastered over two US championship jerseys, add to that, they won a lot this year in Belgium and Holland. My business is going places there.”

“Not to forget the little racing whizz-kid,” I added with a chuckle.

“Yep,” he said, grinning, which for Bill counted as an emotional outbreak. “That little kid has single-handedly increased my business in West Germany by twenty percent. And her mother has whipped a whole army of office workers into speaking English properly, I can tell you that. Too bad she wants to leave for East Germany next year. No offer of mine could convince her to sign on full-time with me.”

“There’s no money in the world that would convince her,” I told him. “Mark says she simply can’t warm up to life in the western part of the country.”

“Maybe that rushed reunification wasn’t that great an idea after all,” Bill mused. “People living apart for forty years are bound to have different lifestyles. Look at me. I’ve been here for sixteen years now, and I still can’t shake being British.”

“Not that you would want to,” I pointed out with a chuckle.

“Is there something wrong with your gin?” he asked me, when he saw I hadn’t drunk any of it.

“Not wanting to be impolite, Bill, but I’ll have to drive home in the evening.”

“Bollocks,” my friend said. “I’ll have Sofia prepare the guest room, unless you have urgent business in the morning.”

“If it’s not too inconvenient...”

“Don’t be silly,” Bill harrumphed. “Mary would flog me if she would miss a chance to see you. It’s been a while since you’ve come to these parts the last time.”

I nodded and sipped some of the drink.

“By the way, who is Sofia? You have a new house maid?”

Bill nodded. “Young Hungarian girl. She fled to Canada as a fifteen year old seven years ago. It became necessary. My dear wife simply can’t cope with the fact that our son is growing up.”

“I know Mary is a bit on the prudish side, but it can’t be that bad,” I argued. “She’s a lovely woman.”

“That she is,” Bill agreed. “I didn’t marry her out of boredom. But she simply can’t cope with the fact that Ian is now fifteen and is understandably getting interested in the opposite sex. So, to end the constant drama whenever she finds an issue of the Playboy under his bed, I’ve banned her from his room and hired a maid instead.”

“Do you think he’s already...”

Bill shook his head.

“I wouldn’t mind, but so far his interest seems to be limited to the unclothed female physique. Considering who his father is, I’m not surprised that he’s mostly obsessed with airplanes these days. He’s still a year too young to get his PPL, but as soon as he was old enough for gliders, he started training for his glider’s permit. He should be hovering about the valley as we speak.”

Meri

Telluride, Colorado, is not a fun place to be at in late September. It was cold and it was damp, but it was what we had to make do with. Since the team had not only been invited to the USPRO Championships, but the hillclimb at Pikes Peak as well, courtesy of Lydia’s win last year, we had decided to stay in the states and put in a short altitude training camp.

Normally we wouldn’t have trained at altitude this late in the year, but Lydia, Femke and I weren’t the only ones in the team who wanted to keep their fitness higher than usual over the off-season. Getting used to the thinner air would also help with the Pikes Peak race, as we were about to race up to an altitude that none of us, except Lydia, had ever been at.

Mark

Due to her win of last year, everybody was watching Lydia like a hawk, not wanting to be duped strategically again. But the team had different ideas this time round. They mostly hid in the pack on the first two miles, which consisted mostly of false flats, stretches of road that looked flat to the naked eye, but were actually going uphill. When the gradient got steeper, the whole team except for Amelie and Lydia assembled at the front. Anneke and Katrijn had been exchanged for Joan and Lydia as both were pure sprinters and would not have helped much up this monstrous climb.

Meri was a sprinter as well, but she could get over more modest climbs and hills, which was why she was now dictating the tempo at the start of a main bunch to keep the gap to the breakaway group in check. That group had formed right from the start and consisted of eight riders. As far as I could work out though, it didn’t contain any riders who had featured high in the standings last year.

That was as much as I had found out so far, sitting in the backseat of the team car, with the DS driving upfront. I kept paging through start and result lists for previous years to get a bearing and I soon made a rather uncomfortable discovery.

“DS, we might have made a mistake. Three of those eight weren’t finishing very high last year, because they hadn’t been in the race. They are neo-pros. And two of them are from Ecuador. You can bet they know how to climb.”

The boss grunted something in Dutch that Femke had yet to teach me. A few year’s later it wouldn’t have been a problem. He would have just barked some tactical orders into the team radio, but in women’s cycling it wasn’t yet a thing outside some of the top tier teams. We had to wait until Amelie came back to the team car to fetch water bottles.

Loaded with refreshments and new tactical orders she made her way back to the front of the peloton. News spread quickly, and watching the official TV feed on a tiny screen in the car I could see that the team swiftly organized a chase while Amelie distributed the water bottles among her team mates.

Meri went to the very front and drilled a stiff pace, followed by Joan, Femke and Shirin. Only Amelie hung back, protecting Lydia in the pack. Proudly wearing her champion’s jersey, Meri worked her cute ass off to reduce the gap to the group, which quickly shrunk from five to four minutes. But then the chase stalled a bit, as the escapees had realized they were being reeled in. Due to the lack of team radio, they had only noticed it with a delay by reading the regularly updated timing boards on the TV motorbikes.

Meri’s work was done. For a sprinter she had stayed upfront much longer than anyone could have expected. Her energy spent, she dropped back quickly, and when we passed her, the DS gave her kudos for her massive work and handed her two water bottles, which Meri wordlessly stuffed into her back pockets. With that she slowly disappeared from view as we rode on behind the pack, or more like a group by now.

Joan had taken over from Meri and drilled it just as hard. The chase had become a tug of war between the chase group and the escapees. The gap came down than went up a little again, but kept hovering around the three minutes and thirty seconds mark. Over the next fifteen miles, Femke and Shirin both completely exhausted themselves. By the time Shirin too dropped behind our car, the group had been whittled down to just six riders, including our two, and the first of the escapees had already been caught and dropped too.

As I had guessed earlier, the two Ecuadorians were now on their own, still two minutes up the road. Amelie set off on her own with Lydia in tow, which surprised our DS, who had never seen her even change the pace, let alone following an attack. He knew that she, Femke and Meri had been working on it, but had never seen it in real time.

Of course, it did look more impressive than it was, as Amelie had not really attacked hard. She wanted to distance the other four riders, but not Lydia. With the baggage lost, Amelie drilled it like a woman possessed with Lydia following in her slip stream and now even the Ecuadorians up front had something to worry about.

Amelie kept up the massive work for a full five miles before she too was spent and dropped back. Lydia had to do the rest by herself. Switching back to her tried and trusted ‘donkey mode’ she climbed ahead, slowly nibbling away at the gap of the two Ecuadorians. All six other former escapees had long since gone backwards.

Alas, nibbling doesn’t get you far if you want to reduce a gooso-saurus to a pile of bones at Christmas, and no climbing talent can make up for a massive tactical blunder like ours. She got the gap down to fifty seconds, but ran out of distance and had to be content with a third place finish.

One who was content though, despite the mistake, was our DS. Two wins and a third place on the team’s first ever overseas trip was nothing to scoff at, and the good season in Europe had yielded an impressive points haul. In fact, if the team didn’t botch the final race of the season, a team time trial in Poland, for which they were odds-on favorites, they would end the season top of the standings in the Continental Tour. That would mean, enough sponsorship money provided, they would become a top-tier team in the following season.

Lydia

I was either starting to feel my age, or the missing race practice had led to the fact that the National Championships and Pikes Peak had bitten quite a chunk out of me, and our team’s physio was not half as talented as Mark, not to mention that his ministrations came without a certain benefit too.

The reason that we were deprived of Mark’s services had practical reasons. After my team mates had practically killed themselves for me at Pikes Peak, it would have looked very ungrateful to let them fly home on a commercial flight, while going to Europe on our private jet, so I had joined the team on the flight from Denver to Amsterdam. Mark meanwhile was driving the thousand miles back to Pasadena to get our plane and some clothes. As we were planning to stay the rest of the year in Germany, our little stash of clothing in Emden wouldn’t be enough.

Femke in the seat next to me gave me a lopsided grin and a surprised look when I slapped my forehead.

“Something wrong?”

I shook my head. “I’ve just mentally compared our physio to Mark and then I realized, why not hire him for the team?”

She started to giggle. “I’m not sure all in the team would appreciate his more advanced techniques.”

“Not all would be getting them,” I said with a giggle of my own. “John won’t like it much, as Mark has brought in a bucket load of new clients, but at least we wouldn’t be separated that often.”

Mark

I arrived in Emden two days after Meri and Lydia had done so. Since everyone was at school, college or team training, I had to drive myself home. Meri had delivered the Granada to the airport in the morning and had deposited the keys at the OLT desk. Like always, the folks at the airport let me drive straight onto the apron to unload our plane, but this time I had to wait until an incoming OLT flight from the island of Borkum had landed, stopped, and the plane had been tied down.

I used the time alone to get showered and then parked my jet-lagged carcass on the sofa. Like always I laid down with my face to the backrest. That way, in case I turned around in my sleep and fell off it, I would be landing on my back, not on my face – a vital lesson I had once learned after a few beers too many.

I woke up again a few hours later when I received a smack on the ass.

“Hey, having trouble sleeping too?” Regina asked me to my sleepy face, smiling, and as naked as I was. “It’s a good thing you slept on your left side. You were walked in on by Bea and Jenny. There are some things she’s still too young to know, for instance that her uncle Mark is hung like a horse.”

“Sorry,” I muttered.

“Don’t fret it,” Regina said and gave me a kiss. “Bea had missed that the Exxon Valdez was in the driveway, else she would have used the other entrance.”

“How can you miss that thing?” I asked, rubbing my eyes. “It’s the size of Holland.”

“Probably because she always arrives in a cloud of two-stroke fumes. We really have to convince her to let go of that old Wartburg. And now hop into a pair of shorts, just in case Jenny gets too curious about what the front half of ‘uncle Mark’ looks like.”

I caught the boxer shorts she threw me.

“Good luck trying to wean her off that pile of sheet metal,” I said and chuckled.

“Are you going with the team to Poland on the weekend?” she asked me as she brought me a beer.

“Nope,” I answered while flipping the bottle cap off with a Zippo. I didn’t smoke, but every German had a Zippo or a comb on him to open a bottle, and technically, I was still German, even if my passport said otherwise.

“Good, since Meri will go with Bea to Jenny’s race, we’ll be alone this weekend and I have a favor to ask of you.”

“Your bum needs a good seeing-to?” I asked and grinned.

“Well, there’s that too,” Regina admitted with a smile. “But mainly I need someone to practice with. My probationary period starts on Monday, and I want to test some of the methods I’ve worked out.”

“Probationary period?”

“I have to go into a normal school for three months and teach, under the supervision of the head teacher. I’ll have to do music and English lessons and guitar lessons in the afternoon. When we wrote that song I noticed how easily you picked up the basics. You would be an ideal practice partner. You seem to have the talent for it.”

“Nothing to do with talent, honey,” I said with a chuckle. “During those two years in Lübeck, ‘86 and ‘87, I had guitar lessons. I just never took it up again when we emigrated to the States.”

“Even better,” Regina chirped happily.

“Well, you’ve got yourself a training partner for the weekend,” I proclaimed. “And we’ll both have time to give each other’s rear-end a good pounding.”

“You’ll mess up the sheets again,” she teased me.

“Have you ever heard of ‘an condom’, dear?”

“A Condom,” she corrected me with a giggle. It had become a bit of a running gag between us.

Lydia

That was a sight I hadn’t seen for a long time. Mark had never even touched his old guitar again after we had left for America. Granted, it had stayed back in Germany with my sister Bea, who had kept it all those years. But even here in Emden he had never shown any inclination to get it out of its case again. In fact, it only hadn’t started to rot because Regina had used it until she had bought her own acoustic guitar. Her electric guitar wasn’t of much use when teaching in school.

Needless to say that Meri and I had been quite surprised to walk in on Regina and Mark sitting in her studio room, playing guitar and singing. It looked so different to eight years ago. Mark had been a scrawny twelve year old when he had last played it, and it had looked ridiculously oversize. Now, with him looking like a night club bouncer, it looked almost small.

“Looks like you found your training partner for the weekend,” Meri said with a grin and kissed her sweetheart.

“And a good one,” Regina said, beaming.

“You never told me he was this good,” she said to me.

“We never told you I had lessons in the first place,” Mark explained. “We both don’t like talking about that time, and not only because we have to be wary of people who don’t know who I really am. We’d rather forget about those three years, or nearly three years.”

“Is that why you never used it, even here?” Regina asked.

Mark nodded. “I was afraid it would bring back bad memories. Well, I guess I found out that isn’t the case.”

“Femke will love the naked concerts,” Meri said with a giggle.

“Speaking of unexpected talents,” I said. “Have you thought about what I emailed you? About the job with the team?”

“I haven’t only thought about it,” Mark answered. “Before I left Pasadena I made a few phone calls. There’s a physiotherapy center in Wilhelmshaven. I have an appointment on December 4th. They’ll put me through an exam to see how much I’ve already learned from Jonjo’s brother and then decide what lessons I’ll have to take before going straight to the exam.”

“Great,” Meri said enthusiastically.

“Don’t celebrate too early,” Mark curbed her enthusiasm. “I have a lot of practical experience, but I’ve never done any theory – anatomy and the like. We’re still looking at probably a year.”

Femke

As Lydia and I rode side by side on the roll to warm up for the race, I though about what they had told me on the long bus ride here. Apparently Mark was quite a good guitar player, and Lydia had known nothing about it although the two of them had been together since 1992.

As it was, some unspecified childhood trauma had frightened him into never playing it again, Well, since he was American I had a pretty good idea what that trauma had been. News from America that kids at school had been gunned down came in several times a year, so it left little to guess what that trauma had been and I knew better than to ask any specifics.

“What do you think,” I asked Lydia with a giggle. “Will they be rocking the bed or will they be rocking the house right now?”

She laughed. “Right now they’ll probably be watching us, trying to make sense of the Polish commentator.”

“Don’t tell me he speaks Polish as well?”

“No, but Regina does, or at least a little. There’s an ethnic Slavic minority in the region where she’s from, called the Sorbs. Regina speaks Sorbian and the language is closely related to Polish and Slovak.”

“A bit like German and Dutch,” I said.

“Even closer,” Lydia said. “She can understand Polish quite well if it isn’t spoken too quickly.”

“Jeez, among the five of us we cover half the world when it comes to languages.”

“What did you have in school?” she asked me.

“French and English. And if you live that close to the border, you learn German by default, really.”

Lydia chuckled.

“Didn’t you and Regina learn Russian in school?” I asked, knowing that both of them were born in Communist East Germany.

She nodded. “I forgot most of it, but Regina is still fluent. She’ll take her A1 exam at college in Russian. If you’re looking for the real braniac among us, look no further than Regina. She speaks five languages – German, English, Sorbian, Russian and Latin.”

“How does that work out?” I asked. “I can imagine there’s still enough Russian language teachers around in the East, but in the West?”

“Colleges and universities have no choice but to offer Russian as one of the mandatory foreign languages for at least another ten years. It had been the primary foreign language in the East and you can hardly tell all East German graduates that they can’t study at West German universities.”

“Alright ladies, let’s get out there and win something,” the DS interrupted our talk.

Regina

As Mark had feared, the only feed we found was on Polish TV, and even that required realigning the satellite dish to a different satellite. Normally that would have been a task for Lydia’s sister Bea, she was better with tools than either of us, but in the end after a lot of swearing and huffing, we had managed it and we could now flip through a lot of Eastern European TV programs.

Thankfully my Sorbian was good enough to make sense of some Polish websites, so we found which network carried the broadcast.

I had worried that I would have to live-translate for Mark, but he was quite used to watching races with foreign commentators. I relayed important infos, if I understood them myself. Polish and Sorbian were closely related, but that particular commentator seemed to be paid by words per minute and I had a pretty hard time to follow.

Finally, our favorite Dutch team aligned for the start. Since this was a team time trial, they rode as a group of six – Lydia, Femke, Shirin, Joan, Anneke and Katrijn. We all knew their names by heart, especially Jenny. Unfortunately she would have to watch the recording as she was currently zipping around an indoor kart track in Berlin.

As was usual in team time trials, they all rode single-file in each other’s slip stream, taking ‘pulls’ at the front. Having done their work they would peel aside, drop back and queue at the end of the line again. That way the hard work in the wind was shared among all riders.

Femke and Lydia, being the specialists for time trials did noticeably longer stints at the front. Lydia was of course not hard to make out. Not only was she by far the most slender rider in the team, she also stuck out by wearing her Stars & Stripes themed champion’s jersey. She only got to wear it in time trials, while Meri got to wear hers in all but time trials. That was a bit of a bummer as it looked good on her. Okay, a burlap sack also looked good on her, but the design was beautiful. Americans often went overboard with their designs, but this was nicely understated, still making it clear which nation she was the national time trial champion of.

At now thirty-five Lydia was one of the oldest competitors. While quite a good age for marathon runners, in cycling riders usually thought about retiring at that age. But things seemed to be a bit different in women’s cycling, as France’s Jeannie Longo was still winning a lot of races, and she was nearly three years older still.

Right now though, Lydia and Femke tore up the until-then best intermediate times. With no top tier teams present they had been odds-on favorites to win, and it looked like they were delivering in style. At the last intermediate time before the finish they were a whole minute up on the next best team and Joan didn’t queue back at the end of the line, dropping back completely. This wasn’t too much of a problem as the time was taken after the fourth rider, so losing one or two wasn’t problematic, other than that there was now one less person to share the hard work at the front.

Not all of the remaining five even got to go to the front again as Lydia and Femke took extra long pulls in the wind before Shirin lead the team across the line. They had blasted the opposition into the weeds by one minute and eight seconds.

Mark

The points haul from that win was enough to secure the victory in the Continental season standings, which meant that the team had become eligible for a top tier license, and Bill O’Connor had already confirmed that he was staying on as the title sponsor and that his company would cough up the necessary dollars to substantially expand the team to top-tier size.

There was one final race in Curacao, but the team had taken a rain check on that for cost-saving reasons. Even if the second-placed team would sweep the podium, they would still remain second in the standings.

Such a win had to be celebrated in style of course, so after I had gently molested Regina’s pussy and rear-end, we reversed the roles after a shower and she gave my hind quarters a jolly good pounding. Sometimes the simple solutions are the cleverest. To prevent my chap from vomiting all over the place, when I inevitably came like a freight train, we had simply put him in a rubber poncho – problem solved.

Regina

When Bea and Jenny arrived back from Berlin, late in the evening, we were sitting on the couch, drinking wine and beer respectively. Of course we were prepared and had the clothes deposited in arms reach. Well, Mark already wore his boxer shorts, so he only had to throw on a shirt, while I quickly donned one of my cycling pants and a shirt, not bothering with a bra. Since we were well sated there was no danger of ‘nipple alarm’, as Mark called it when they were visibly hard under a shirt.

Having learned from the couch incident, they had gone in through their entrance and Lydia’s sister asked over the intercom if it was safe to come over.

They arrived with a beaming Jenny presenting two little trophies. She had finished second in both heats and had climbed to second in the Championship, although the latter by default, because the previous holder of that position had not contested the race weekend in Berlin.

“Where’s my better half?” I asked Bea.

“It was only eighty kilometers to Stettin, so she hired a car to meet her team after the race. She’ll come home with them in the night.”

Chapter 42: Changes Ahead

Lydia

Szczecin, the town the race was held at, was not far from the Baltic sea. At first I at balked at even trying to pronounce that name, until Regina had explained that I just needed to say ‘chat-sheen’ in English quickly to get it halfway right. She had also warned me not to use its old German name Stettin while in Poland.