Clay Moseley: the interview: part 1

By Eugene Dougherty

IN HIS HEYDAY former US pro cyclist Clay Moseley competed against the likes Jeff Pierce, Bob Roll, George Hincapie, and Lance Armstrong. He enjoyed a rather wild racing career, highlights of which included riding in races as varied as the Tour DuPont, Settimana Bergamasca, and the Pan American Games.

CyclingReporter.com’s man in Los Alamos and contributing editor Eugene Dougherty recently sat down with Moseley, the 1994 US national time trial champion, to talk about his career, some missed opportunities, how cyclists can survive on a diet of Cheetos and Coke, Bob Roll’s dark side, and upchucking while racing on the track in front of the president of Ecuador.

Eugene Dougherty: Clay, thanks for meeting with me.

Clay Moseley: Well thanks for remembering that I was once a bike racer!

ED: Could you summarize your road cycling career, which races were most significant for you, and which teams you rode for?

CM: Yes, let’s see, everybody gets their start locally and those are some of the most fond memories of cycling, but you’re probably more interested in when things got a little more serious. I was just a bike racer around New Mexico—not a whole lot of racers from New Mexico—and I began to have a little bit of success toward the end of my junior career. I was actually noticed more because of my friend and teammate Roger Marr, who was also from Ruidoso [New Mexico]. He was extraordinarily talented, and anybody around here from that era remembers him because he was a lot more of a talent, physically, than even Armstrong. At the time, he was absolutely the top junior around when he wanted to be, winning the Tour of the Future, the junior national tour. They took him to Europe and he just ripped everybody up. We would go to races and one-two punch much stronger junior teams. I was more of a journeyman, a slow developer, and he was just extraordinarily brilliant—able to put the screws to Lance during Lance’s big final push as a junior into early senior, back in 1990.

I’d been part of the national junior long-team program, but then my first year as a senior, they didn’t want to have anything to do with me anymore. I was on my own. Roger rose meteorically, and so people remembered me from him. He raced in Europe, with Lance and everything. It was the next year, ’91, that I got called back to the national team program, and I went on some foreign races. I did the Giro dl la Regioni, in Italy, and the Settimana Bergamasca, and those were a big, eye-opening experience. I was basically carrying water for some other guys, but that woke me up to what the level really is, and I got to race with the pros when I was twenty years old.

I wasn’t that successful, other than being a water carrier. They didn’t see anything else extraordinary because when you’re racing around Albuquerque and you jump into that, it’s a big difference. So I went back to Albuquerque, and I knew what I needed to do then. I started training hard—a lot more miles and started doing some big road races around Albuquerque. Kent Bostick, from Shaklee, as famous as he was in ’90, began to take notice of who I was, and we began racing together. In ’91 he took me under his wing and we started training together a lot more. Although I wasn’t on his team, he would pull me in, and I think he liked having this young guy who could hang with him and do what he asked. It was like that for a couple of years.

It wasn’t until ’93, when I rode for a Mexican team out of Chihuahua, that I became their most successful rider in the Mexican races. Those races are more European-style, much longer. I got them to come up and do the Tour of Redlands and started to do well even though I looked like some bike-shop hoser. I remember being in the same group as Hincapie, Jeff Pierce, and a lot of my idols. I even remember Greg LeMond in the A to Z race [Ohio] getting dropped in front of me, and George Hincapie getting dropped like a hot rock in the same group. I watched and was thinking, Man, Hincapie got blown. That was before he was the big star he is now, like ’93. I’m finishing in the big mountain stages now with Jeff Pierce and those guys, and that was a big thing for me. Shortly after, at the end of ’93, Kent [Bostick] had taken notice. He’d gotten dropped from some groups that I stayed with and pulled me into Shaklee at the end of ’93.

The following year I was a full-fledged member of the team, but I was still a low-ranking member. Nobody knew or had any respect for me yet. Slowly but surely, I proved myself in the spring by finishing near the top or in the break at the Tour of Bisbee and some other races. But still, it seemed like people just didn’t want to believe it until we went to the national championships and I won the time trial [1994].

I’d been finishing in the breakaways in a lot of the big stage races but hadn’t been back to Europe. At some tough Mexican races, down in Guadalajara, Leon, Guanajuato, I was still cutting my teeth. I was doing every big race in the United States I could get to using either my own or team money. Ninety-three was the year the University of New Mexico made a big punch at the collegiate cycling championships. We ended up third overall in the team rankings, taking third in the team time trial, despite losing two of our guys right off the bat. We were just seconds behind Colorado, which had pro roadies like Tyler Hamilton. We did it with three guys and they had all five, so that was a big thing. Then in ’94 things really started to happen.

Chris Carmichael came back and said, “I want you to start racing with us.” He put me on the national team in ’94 and ’95, and I did a bunch of Euro racing. Back at the Regio tour, I saw for the first time Jan Ulrich. I did the ’94 World Championships time trial and road race in Italy. The problem there was they put me on a mechanized training program that was tailored completely off of what Lance was doing. They figured everything on Lance’s physiology and what Lance was capable of. It was like a slow-cook process for me, and I wasn’t able to realize my best physical results throughout the rest of ’94, including the World Championships, because I was just cooked continuously.

They were constantly monitoring our body fat. Freddy Rodriguez, Chan McRae, Tyler Hamilton—all had 2 to 3 percent body fat. I’m just not naturally like that, hovering around 5 percent or 6 and feeling like the fat guy on the team. It felt like I was always slightly breaking down. I could hold it together and do well in some events, but it just didn’t feel like my best. Then, after the World Championships, I came back to the United States, and I fell flat on my face. My local adviser from Albuquerque, Rich Vigil, coached some very successful juniors back in the ’80s. He told me I should just stop riding altogether for like two weeks. I did what he said and started doing other stuff. I went back to work and, sure enough, the diversion and everything helped me recover. When the national team called me to do the Tour of Guatemala, I hesitantly said yes. It was November, but I went ahead and kicked butt there. I won all kinds of trophies and had top-3s in some stages. With my win at the national time trial, I had been chosen to do the Pan American Games time trial, which is why they had me racing over the winter.

The national team had a training camp over the winter in San Diego, but the resident pros—Jeff Pierce, Ron Keifel, the big guys—were all at this camp too. They were all friends with Chris Carmichael. They’d ride with us, up to 180 miles some days, rides like out to Palomar and back. I learned a lot from those guys; funny guys when you got them out on the bike. The common thread with all those guys is the peculiar dark side to their personalities. It’s a funny thing with cyclists: They’re all haunted by little things in their past. That came to the fore as I got to know them more at the camp.

I finally began to feel like a true professional cyclist, even though I was still an amateur for most of ’95. Back then, we used to race over 200 kilometers. Some American spring “Classics” were like 225 kilometers, and there were a lot of European pros in them. We went and did this race willy-nilly in Yuma, the North End Classic. All of a sudden I found myself driving the front with Saturn and LA Sheriff. Anytime anybody made a move I was on it, but when the decisive move went, I just missed it a little. I looked at that move, with guys being shelled out the back, said I can do it, and bridged a big gap in the wind past all the guys who were shelled. I got back with no problem and thought, Man, that’s the kind of level you can hit when things click for you and you get rest. I knew I was there and had complete and utter confidence when I went to the Pan Am games.

A lot of the guys I’d been racing with in the Central and South America were there. These were heroes at home in Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, guys who became European pros later on. They were all there. I won the race [a 55-km ITT] without even questioning my ability. Talk about keeping the pedal to the metal, the 55-k time trial felt like the 40k at Moriarty. This race was along the Atlantic coast in Argentina with wind gusting off the ocean. I was just flying past these guys who were heroes in their home countries.

That win opened some doors but shut others. Chris Carmichael was upset because I kept following Kent Bostick, one of his former rivals. Kent was still successful at the sport whereas Chris left too soon. As successful as Chris was, he broke his leg and his career was stopped short. I feel he associated me with Kent and had a bad taste in his mouth. I would take my cues from Kent and Chris just finally wrote me off. I understand where his direction needed to be aimed and he started following riders who he thought had more overall potential.

I started getting offers from Europe, but the best offer was from an Argentinean pro team. This was probably the fork in the road for me after the Pan Am games. I had finished college, had my degree, and needed to get my professional engineer’s certification, but here I was doing all this bike racing. I was torn between my professional ambitions and cycling. I stayed in limbo for years and never finished my professional licensing. Still, to this day, I’m working on my certifications.

I didn’t take some of the big offers because it was too much of a commitment and would keep me from being an engineer. So I stayed in this little part-time job I had, a cowardly way out, but a full-time job while I was around home. I never committed to either one 100 percent. If I had it to do again I would make a different choice. If I hadn’t questioned things so much, I would have been more successful in cycling. I kept running back home worried that I was too far away from work, and didn’t accept the offers. I did accept one offer to race, temporarily, for Olympia Dortmund in Germany.

So, I kind of went there with a friend and raced for three months doing a lot of Belgian kermess races. The national team hadn’t given up on me and saw I was back to racing in Europe, so they picked me up to go do the Tour of Poland. I was all ready but got into a bad crash in a race in Germany, where I broke my tailbone. That put me out of the Tour of Poland. Roy Knickman, the national team coach, was really mad at me. That was the end of it. I think Chris had filled his head with Here’s a guy who does nothing but what Kent Bostick says.

I probably would have been the team’s best performer at the Tour of Poland but instead went back to work in Albuquerque. You know, living a domestic life and figuring things out. I recovered quickly and had a brilliant end of the season. I won all these hill climbs, which was rare for me, and then went over to Arizona and won some hill climbs there against some top climber guys.

That year, the World Championships were in Colombia, so all these national teams were in the Southwest. Banesto went to Colorado Springs, and all these euro teams went to New Mexico, Flagstaff, and Colorado. Anytime we did a local bike race, all these national teams showed up—Estonia, Latvia, Finland. It was a lot of other countries that you wouldn’t see. France and the other big countries have their own secret training locations, but a lot of these other countries were like, Hey, man, we’re just going to go over there and start racing at those altitudes with the local guys. We’d go to a race outside Albuquerque, up in Tijeras canyon, and it was all national teams, like 150 guys from all these other countries.

What was funny was, I didn’t get picked for the Worlds that year, but I was recovered from this tailbone crash and my European racing. I’d done the Tour DuPont and done well in the national cup series, so I had it all in my legs to do well. My body was at this whole other level, though I was just this local New Mexico guy. Kent Bostick would just be foaming at the mouth because there was real competition. Of course, he wasn’t picked for anything either, so I think he had set his mind to make the Olympic team the next year. When he got into that mode, it was like Crusherville.

We would start a race, just him and me on our team, and if there was even the slightest crosswind, we would gutter-ball everyone. We had done this all season and had an altitude advantage over these international guys. One guy who would always seem to hold onto us was Kenny Zimmerman, a tough guy from New Mexico, too. He worked hard and became a really decent cyclist. Kent and I would put the screws to everybody, and we’d look back and there would be five or six guys left, including Kenny. By the end of their preparation for the Worlds, Kent and I were just feared by these national team guys—really funny!

After one of the races where Kent and I had just one-two’d them big-time, they asked, So when do you guys leave for Colombia? We were like, Oh, we’re not picked for any teams. And they just thought that the American team was going to be indestructible ’cause if we’re guys who aren’t even being picked, how good are the guys being picked?

ED: You mentioned that a big training day with Kent Bostick might involve three hours of cross-country skiing, and then a round-trip mountainous ride to Albuquerque.

CM: That was then New Mexico was riding the crest of a wave from the ’70s and ’80s, when we had all this snow around here. Cross-country skiing was still really popular. We’d do a local Nordic race here in Los Alamos or Santa Fe. Kent was part of the corporate cup competition, so we would go do a cross-country ski race in Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Red River, then he always knew this perfect training route to get back to his house. So we would do the race, do some more skiing, and then get our bikes down off the car. His fiancée and later wife, Carol Anne, would drive back to Albuquerque and we would ride back. This was in the winter, so we’d ride across the Caldera [mountain range] and ride through the snow. We’d ride all the way home, and it would be well past dark before we got back.

ED: This is a 10-hour training day.

CM: Yeah, 10-hour-plus training day! We’d done a Nordic race, with everything you had, and then skied some more. That was a full day of ski training for most people, and then we’d get on our bike and ride 110 miles back to Albuquerque. That was what he did all the time. Quite often we would ride with our skis strapped to our bikes. I’d ride to his house in Corrales, strap skis to our bikes, ride up to the tram, go up the tram, cross-country ski on the Crest like all day, come back down, and ride home. Just huge days—hard to describe. And then if we didn’t ski, we’d ride the monster ’round-the-mountain loop. We’d ride from Albuquerque all the way to Santa Fe, then down State Highway 14 and back home, in the wintertime. That’s a mountainous 120-mile day. We had some huge training efforts.

ED: Did you know Bob Roll?

CM: Oh yeah. I have a lot of pictures racing with him. He was on the Z team when he lived around here. There used to be a big stage race in Santa Fe, the Santa Fe Bicycle Classic, with a big-money purse, and all the big teams came. I have pictures with me in a breakaway with a lot of big riders in the sport, a lot of my idols, going up San Francisco [in Santa Fe] and across the Plaza, we’d race right across the Plaza on the bricks. Back then, it was more bricks instead of pavement, so a lot of that crit course was cobbled. If you were to remove just a little bit of that pavement, you’d see that it’s all cobblestones up in that area. Bob Roll lived in that area. He lived in Espanola and Santa Fe. He was always real strong, but he wasn’t an indomitable rider or anything. He kind of went out to pasture with the mountain biking thing, but he was still tough as nails.

Once, when we were at the Tucson Bicycle Classic, another one of those years when Bob was on Z, he was just too cool for school. He started getting kind of weird, I think. He wasn’t quite the easy-going, happy-go-lucky guy everybody thought he always was. He was kind of in a disturbed, dark state and bent sideways about everything. He didn’t want to start with the rest of us peons, so he started 200 meters up the road.  We didn’t think the organizers were going to do anything, you know, famous Bob Roll and all, but they disqualified him. They didn’t say anything, he did the whole road race, and they DQ’d him. Kent Bostick was like, Serves the idiot right. Bob just did weird things but was one of my heroes, and I saw how good he was at the windy road race with all the big pros at the Santa Fe Bicycle Classic. Really tough, man.

One of the funnier stories started in ’92, when I was a first-year Cat. 2 and getting shelled in the big stuff. I was probably doing better than joe local Cat. 2, but the hardest thing for me in those years was crit racing ’cause we don’t do those kind of races around here much. We went to Ecuador, to the Pan American Cycling Championships—not the Pan Am Games. It was in Quito, Ecuador, at like 9,000 feet. I had trouble getting my passport and getting everything all together, so I showed up the night before. I was supposed to do some 100-mile road race, in a country I’d never been to before, no idea, and I didn’t realize that the altitude was like 10,000 feet. At this time I was living in Albuquerque and Las Cruces. So I showed up a couple of days later than the rest of the team. I’m jet-lagged, it’s a crazy airport, I have no idea where I am, who is picking me up, whatever. Got to bed late, got up early, and I’m on the starting line of this crazy road race. I got dropped early on a monster climb that had no switchbacks, just straight, and had to abandon—that stunk.

Now, all the other guys ended up getting sick, because they had never been to some of these places. Since this was an overall cycling games type of event, there were all these track racers there. They were all sick, so I stayed on and volunteered to race on the track. I had ridden at the Colorado Springs velodrome a couple of times, and that’s it. So I was like, Well, I’ve ridden on the track, so I’ll do it. So here I am, in an international field, grabbed some track bike and lined up for the 30-k points race. I had never done a points race in my life—didn’t even know what the point was! To backtrack a little, we were all feeling a little off and were staying at this funny little hotel in a slummy part of Quito. The food was real questionable, like not five-star, or even close.

Every morning, we’d have like these corn flakes with warm, cheesy, yellowy-creamy milk. It was borderline turning into cheese. I would try to eat as much bread and drink as much Coke, because I knew this tactic from racing in Mexico—you can live off of Cheetos and Coke for a certain period of time without getting sick. Anything processed was fairly safe. I was trying to live off processed stuff but in the morning, I just needed some breakfast food. So that morning, I’m not feeling so good either but I had committed to doing this points race. I was nervous about it and told this kid, who was running the place, “You’ve got to get me up at 6 a.m.” Well, he overslept, so I woke up and went down to the kitchen in a hurry. I woke the kid up and said, “Juan, you need to get up. I need to eat breakfast.” So he’s like, Uhhh and throws open the refrigerator door, tosses out whatever he finds, and goes back to bed. I wolfed this stuff down and I didn’t feel very good. Then I was waiting out on this street corner for my ride. Back then everyone was still using leaded gas, and even two-strokes. I had a constant headache from the altitude and horrible pollution, and felt totally terrible.

Climbing out of the back of a little Datsun pickup, we got to the velodrome, which is this beautiful stadium complex. Track racing is a huge deal in South America, especially in Quito, Colombia, Peru, Argentina. It’s huge and very popular. The president of Ecuador was going to be there this day, because the biggest Ecuadorian sports hero at the time, Mario Pons, was a track racer. He had medaled at the World Championships and was close to medaling at the Olympics. He was more of a kilo rider but did all the other track races.

We’re down there warming up on rollers and the president and his entourage come down into the pit. They’re all talking, and I was the one and only American guy who could pull himself out of the depths of despair and make it to the track. I could understand the president enough so I say hello and I talk for a moment while riding on the rollers. He tells me good luck and everything and he can’t wait to watch me. So here I am at the start line of the 30-k points race trying to figure out what to do. They had to tell me that you hold onto the track railing in a diagonal line of riders, then you have two neutral start laps and then you get going. So we get going and I’m really nervous, so I figure I’ll just ride this race like a crit. That was my idea. I had ridden on the track enough that I didn’t try to stop pedaling and what not. Also, there were some future superstar sprinters in this field.

We start picking it up and picking it up more and more, and I get so nervous and excited that I come around, New Mexico–style, in the wind, and get to the front. With a lap to go before the first sprint, I just hammer my brains out. I’m so amped up on adrenaline that I’m just shaking. The bike was trying to go into a wobble coming around the turns in the steep embankment, but I ended up second in the first sprint. I was thinking, Hey, that’s pretty cool! So I went up the bank and got back in the field to settle down. Well, the first point doesn’t matter very much to the guys who were going to make this thing happen, so all the Cubans start getting up real high and they start coming in like jet fighters, swooping down, one after another. Before I knew it, the heat had turned up real high. I’m struggling, holding on for dear life, while the temperature gauge was going off the charts. I’m hurting like hell, and thinking Man, you gotta hold on! You can’t get dropped by yourself, in front of the president and everything! So I’m hanging on and hanging on, and finally the points prime hit.

The pack wasn’t settling, so at this point, the cheesy stuff I’d had for breakfast wasn’t sitting very well. I was holding on and not going to give up. Finally, the pack sort of mushroomed up. It had slowed down after one of the points, after which an attack had gone off, with other team riders controlling the pace. At this point, I totally did not care what happened in the race ’cause I was feeling pretty bad. I had lava gut going on and was thinking, Oh no! Oh no! Here it goes! Before I knew it—and right in the middle of the pack—I mean, complete ralph ball! I’ll never forget watching it go off the top tube and land—splat!—onto this smooth velodrome surface, just a massive splash all over. The field instantly mushroomed, and everything bad I’ve ever heard in Spanish, you know, pinche, gringo, this and that. They didn’t want me in the field and knew I was sick.

Now it’s in the middle of the velodrome and right in the path of travel. When the race got hard, no one was taking the time to miss it, so I watched that mess get everywhere. It became disgusting and was all over everyone. I actually felt better, hung on, and did okay. I finished on the same lap except for the two winners and ended up with some points, so I did all right. I think I was the last-place guy of everybody still on the chase-group lap.

That night I’m staying with this guy who’s deathly ill with cholera. That’s what everybody was getting. So he’s sitting there, death warmed over, and I’m just sitting, trying to be in my own space, after some traumatic experience like this. We’re all quiet; he’s on his deathbed; and we get a knock on the door. It’s a news crew, lights and everything! They wanted to interview me because they saw this happen on TV. I was their national sports joke that day. It was like a John Madden situation, where they kept backing it up with the chalk on the screen and showing it in freeze frame and circling it. They were wondering if I was eating too much, enjoying way too much “holiday.” Ecuador, you know, the way they talk is with British English. If I was “on holiday” and eating too much! You can imagine the scene, all kinds of stuff. That was probably one of the funniest things that happened to me in cycling.

Read part 2 of our interview with Clay Moseley here.