Prologue

So returning home as the Olympic Silver Medalist in the Urban Road Race was such a big deal ... NOT! I think I could have traded my Olympic medal and five buck and gotten something that resembled a cup of decent coffee at Starbucks! And I was the coach of the Starbucks Women’s Cycling Team!

I mean, yeah, I was on a couple of daytime news magazine shows, and Nike and Trek seemed to want to shower me with gear and small-ish endorsement deals in exchange for wearing and using gear I already loved and had used for years, so that was a total non-brainer! But as far as face recognition outside my sport? Nope! Oh, and about those daytime news shows ... That’s where things got a little sticky...

Melody had flown up to be with me for the talk show tour, and had held on to me when I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat and a shaking panic! She had put up with a lot of shit being with me, but this round was truly above and beyond what one human could expect to survive without resorting to heavy daytime drinking! Yet, here she was being my rock through all of it. She knew I didn’t really want to do the talk show thing, didn’t want to hold it all in and not actually let the truth speak freely ... And was still there, sitting with me in the green room, holding my hand like it was nothing whatsoever! I’m not sure what I ever could have done to deserve the unconditional love and support she showed me for the last couple of weeks, but whatever it was, I was resolved to never, ever, do anything to lose it!

I was on Good Morning America (the second or third news magazine show in as many days) which is not, by any means, a hard hitting news show, when I got the first taste of how these things were going to go. After a few minutes of introducing me to the audience, and showing a very short clip of the finish of the race, and of course having me hold up my medal for everybody to ‘ohh’ and ‘ahhh’ over, they cut to the chase, which I had already expected and tried to prepare for ... You see, “The Boss” had gotten more of America’s attention with his appearance on Oprah, which of course broke along the usual lines ... If you believed him all along, and could manage to swallow the bullshit he was trying to spin into silk along the way, then you were a supporter (or in denial). If you had lived it, believed it, and had drunk so much Koolaid, your skin tone was changing to match the Koolaid guy, and then been thrown under the team bus by it all, well ... So, even as I was attempting to come to grips with my emotions, and the feeling of having been lied to by someone I had known for as long as I had ... I really only had two choices: make happy talk and say I understood ... Or, go completely off the rails and lose my shit!

Since I had ridden with the man on several rounds of the grand tours, and knew EVERYONE who was involved in what had once again become a giant media circus, I was as close to an actual authority on all things Lance as GMA could get their hands on! I mean, the airwaves had been chock o’ block full of people both defending and attacking Lance and everything he held dear for months on end ... The head of the USADA had been on “60 Minutes” and had said that pretty much everything Lance said in the Oprah interview was an out-and-out lie! It was just my luck that I had dropped back into the available media market while things were at a high rolling boil! US Cycling had taken me aside in Beijing and let me know what I might be walking into once I got back stateside. So even though I had won an Olympic medal in an event I wasn’t expected to even really finish (once again, had things gone to plan I would have been riding in support of Lance, of all things), no one seemed to actually care ... All they wanted to hear about, talk about, scream at the heavens about, was “The Boss” and doping! Fuck!