Clay Moseley: the interview: part 2

By Eugene Dougherty

IN PART 1 OF OUR INTERVIEW with Clay Moseley, the 1994 US national time trial champion, he spoke with us about his career and some missed opportunities. Here, in part 2, CR contributor Eugene Dougherty gets into a discussion about doping in cycling, racing and surviving in Mexico, and riding alongside some of the sport’s more quirky riders.

Moseley now resides in Los Alamos, New Mexico, with his wife, Dina, and their daughter, Mila. He’s an engineer for the County of Los Alamos and actively involved in cross-country skiing and the triathlon club.

ED: Doping has been front and center in cycling for several years. It seems that there was an increase in doping in the professional ranks in the late ’90s.

CM: Oh, it wasn’t in the late ’90s. The EPO thing came out in the ’80s, so as soon as that came out and became available at pharmacies in Europe, there were a lot of cyclists who abused it right away. That’s when all those guys were dying: Hans Daams, Johannes Dreyer. They were abusing it, but steroids were the big drug in the ’80s and ’90s. EPO became sort of the “safe alternative.” Guys didn’t think there were the same long-term effects. People started to know that the early steroid users were all dying of cancer. They knew that they were making a deal with the devil. Some of them didn’t care, and some of them were so stupid that they would believe anything some of these old-school trainers would tell them, especially a lot of the Eastern European guys who came over to the West.

ED: Some of the professionals from that generation would die in their mid-’50s.

CM: Yeah, that’s exactly right. Or, you would look at the guys who were still racing when I got into cycling: Marc DeMeyer, Hennie Kuiper, and that Belgian guy with the glasses, Jan Raas, they were just finishing their racing career when I got into the sport as a kid. Only a few years later, I got to see them in person, and they looked like very old men, way beyond their years. I think some cyclists knew that if you do that, you will age at an incredibly accelerated rate.

ED: Steroids have that effect?

CM: Yeah, a lot of those Belgian guys were heavy steroid users, and they had all kinds of ways of beating the doping controls, which were so far behind medical technology of the time. You remember Pedro Delgado. They were all taking these medicines for gout, and old-person’s medicines, to counter whatever the physical processes were from steroids that showed up in the urine. They would take a cocktail of stuff that threw off the test. You could tell when guys were ’roided up because their muscles had no definition to them. They were puffy, bulbous, and the skin was pulled tight around them.

The family that skis together: Dina, Mila and Clay.

I remember looking at—just throwing a name out there here—but I surmise that Djamolidine Abdoujaparov was probably a user. He was a great cyclist, but at that level, somebody was using all kinds of stuff. I would look at him and think Man, that muscle development is not normal. I saw a lot of guys when I was in Europe and everybody smelled like ammonia. To me, the smell of a European peloton was like this funky-monkey b.o. that was heavily laden with ammonia from ketosis. It also included that Sextone-brand embrocation ointment too. They would put this stuff on because I think a lot of those guys knew they smelled weird when they were on that crap. They would put this liniment stuff on to hide the smell. So, it was like a funky-jersey smell with whatever was a byproduct of their weird metabolism, and this incredible muscle growth, even among climbers.

I remember seeing Gert-Jan Theunisse and Steven Rooks. Here was a guy who was naturally very skinny, like a Jonathan Vaughters–type of physiology, but now with this incredible bulbous muscle growth. You could look at a picture two years before [and see muscles] that they didn’t have. For those of us who would actually notice, like, Huh, that’s not at all like what I would have expected this person to look like after seeing pictures of them as a first-year pro or whatever.

Some of the older guys had sagging muscles. It just didn’t look like any of the stuff you saw back home. I know it’s a different world but the human body is the human body and it doesn’t look that much different wherever you go.

ED: Drugs were an occasional news story in my amateur cycling career, but it seems like it’s come to the forefront in, say, the past five years. Is there a change in the trend that happened in the ’90s?

CM: I think what happened was doping was this hidden underworld thing that we were all exposed to. I was exposed to it. I knew who was doing it. You could go to whoever you knew. I knew guys, even locally, who did it. There’s a couple of guys still around who don’t do it anymore, but I knew that they knew where to get it.

I think the United States had always been against it. Not to say that Americans don’t cheat—they’re just like everybody else. I think some of the biggest frauds of all-time cycling are American. But what happened in Europe recently was the underground thing. It wasn’t so well known that the sport was so affected by it, but it was the industry of betting—gambling that changed things really. Once the gambling industry began to get the hint that things were being altered by the doping, there was a pressure put on by that side of it to say Hey, you guys are messing with another big industry by doing this and you’re throwing a lot of things off. It was affecting gambling outcomes, and once people’s money is involved, then a bigger monster is involved. Once guys began to get caught here or there, it’s like the woman who spilled superheated McDonald’s coffee on herself. The legal side began to get involved.

The people in the gambling industry cried foul, and that they were cheated out of their money. They got the lawyers involved, who began to get down to the root cause. That causes the governing body to go Oh, I never thought about that terrible byproduct of it. There began to be higher and higher consequences of it, then more a culture of control.

Moseley leads at the 2003 masters nats in Anchorage.

ED: When do you think that wave started hitting?

CM: Late ’90s. I think it got to be such a problem throughout the ’90s with the advent of online betting. The gambling industry was initially kind of a small-potato thing, a guy with a cigar going to the track, more those types of people. Then, in the late ’90s with online gambling, everybody was doing it from their office or whatever, just for fun. Johan-Schmohan, from his office in Ghent, would throw a little money on the local hero in Paris–Roubaix, because he could. He would make like a $4 bet, no big deal. Everybody was doing it, and it was starting to become big money. Anytime there was a doping infraction, for everybody who had their money vested in that, it became a stakeholder problem. No longer was it just the rider, the team, and the race who were stakeholders. Now it was people from the outside who weren’t going to put up with that. The pressure was put on the organizations to clean it up. The mafia is full of shady under-characters; they’re not going to mess around with that.

I saw on FasterSkier.com, the cross-country ski racing website, that it’s now going to be a major criminal offense with prison time in Austria, where there are notorious ski dopers. That’s it for your athletic career. I noticed that like, Man, this doping thing, they’ve really gotten out there. It became a legal situation, like smoking in America. Once there is that legal condition, “cause of harm,” now you’ve affected all these people. The legal ripples happened to go into a very powerful industry.

If this were just sports for sport’s sake, it would be like these Kenny Williams situations. No big deal, a couple of years and you’re back in it. That’s kind of what it was like before, like Kim Anderson, the Danish racer who kept getting caught. How many times did he get caught? And it’s like, well, he’s back in it because not many people cared.

ED: I’ve long thought that cycling would make a great subject for a mockumentary movie of strange characters, like Best in Show. You must have met a lot of characters in your racing days.

CM: I was around a lot of the old-timers, and there were guys telling me that they had deals with another rider to take out Thurlow Rogers once. You know, to crash him out. There were certain riders who were so down on their luck that they were willing to take a rider out. The funny result of that story was that they guy who was going to take Thurlow out ended up crashing on accident and took Thurlow out just by chance. It was a complete accident, so the first guy had to pay the guy off. There was some argument over Hey, that wasn’t meant to be but then It got done—I was gonna do it anyway. Poor Thurlow Rogers.

There’s just a bunch of stuff like that. These characters, like I said, I think there’s actually something wrong with most cyclists at that level. They’re not normal. You see these guys who are superstars and superheroes with funky weird lives, multiple divorces if they’re the marrying type. Yeah, you would have a field day with picking any one of these characters. They’re all strange.

Probably the most interesting guy I met in all of cycling is a guy named Matt Koschara. He won that Trenton race. This gives you an idea of how brilliant American cyclists were, but we live on this island of cycling. We’re our own thing where we compete against each other, but when push came to shove and you put Americans into the real show, even nondoped ones, we did quite well against a lot of doping and stuff. So, Koschara got off into a break with Oleg Galkin in Trenton, and this is against Festina and the ProTour teams. Oleg was the Ukrainian pursuit world champion at the time but couldn’t stay with Matt around the corners. You know, American crit racing, and other than Europeans like Roberto Gaggioli, or Aussie/New Zealanders like Graeme Miller, they just don’t adjust to the American chariot-style of racing very well. Matt just starts winging around corners, many of them cobbled, and he’d be pedaling through them. They asked Matt at the end, “How did you do it? You were able to drop this incredible racer.” And Matt was like, “Yeah, me and Oleg, we were really working well together, but toward the end, he wasn’t going around corners fast enough, so I had to ditch him.”

You look at some of the guys who are still racing, they’re all strange. I knew Chad Gerlach a little personally. The guy who’s smoking crack in Sacramento, even though he made a comeback this year to, was it, Amore Vita? He was racing in Europe and started to win races again. I think he got fourth behind the Lance Armstrong juggernaut in Nevada City. He’s back on the street smoking crack again. Some people said, I think he was high on crack when he did Nevada City this year. It’s just sad. He was so brilliant.

Anyway, another story that I sometimes think about took place in ’94. After I had taken a month off, I had a friend call me up from my Mexican connections and says in Spanish, Hey, man, there’s this big race down here in Leon. Big money, and we need some guys. They were in Chihuahua, and we were going to meet up in Juarez. Can you get another gringo friend and come down here? You guys will make some money if you ride the way you do. There was some huge prize put up for this one race. I said I would find somebody. I’d been racing with a guy from Kansas, but he was moving around Boulder and other Colorado places—kind of one of these bicycle nomad guys at that time. So I call him up and he says, Yeah, I’m in. I need some money. So I get him to come to Albuquerque, and we go down and train for a few days in my hometown of Ruidoso. It’s getting late in the year and is kind of cold. We make the trip to El Paso, meet my friend Alonso who is helping organize the whole thing, and we get the management stuff together. We were supposed to meet this team manager guy in Juarez and put together the team.

After Leadville 100-mile XC ski race.

I was familiar with this guy, but he was some kind of shady-type character that nobody ever knew what he did but always had money and was into cycling. So we all get together and get across the border. This guy Alonso was a Mexican friend of mine who spoke English. We get across the border, meet up with this character and see these two big Chevy Suburbans. They were for four guys, then we were going to pick up another down in Chihuahua. I was thinking, That’s a lot of vehicle for us. So we start driving across Juarez in these Suburbans with flashy bike stuff all over them to a checkpoint on the south end of Juarez.

The guards get us all out and start taking everything apart, and I’m thinking this is really unusual. Why are they looking through all of our stuff? The main manager guy is in there, talking and talking, and finally the guard walks right out, walks directly to one of the Suburbans, looks underneath the vehicle, gets some guys, and gets out some cutting torches. They start cutting something off, and these big racks fall down. Guns! The guy is trying to run guns down to Chiapas! So now I know I’m in trouble. These Mexican guys start pushing us around with the butts of their rifles. They’re like, How long you been in on this? How long you been doing this?—in Spanish, and I was like, I don’t know anything! No, I’m just a dumb gringo bike racer—look! And I showed them my skinny-arm tan lines. I say, in broken Spanish, Yo soy solomente corridor de ciclismo. I was trying to tell them, and one of the guys comes up and says, “You are in a lot of trouble.” And I was just sinking and felt sick. So my buddy was like, Great! Great! We’re all going to Mexican prison! The guard takes us in and sits us down and, it reminds you of that scene from All the Pretty Horses. We’re going to be in Mexican prison, man—Mexican federal prison for this! You are in a lot of trouble.

Then this other guy comes in and starts speaking perfect English like he knows me. “I don’t know how you got mixed up with him but we’re going to send you back to El Paso. A guy will come pick you up. We’ll get all your stuff, no problem. Just don’t talk about this.”  We’re like, Yeah, yeah! So they let us back over and Alonzo comes with us. We get the call from the dude in Chihuahua, and he’s like, What’s happening? We’re freaked but relieved and reply, “We don’t have a way to get there.” He suggests the bus, so we give it some thought and figure why not? We didn’t need that shady manager character anyway, so we took a bus over the border to the main Juarez bus station for a transfer to Chihuahua. We rode the bus from Juarez to Chihuahua, which was actually not bad, more like an airplane. There, we picked up this rich kid whose dad is a veterinarian for all the big ranchers down there, so he was rich, rich, rich.

We go to his house and we’re like, Wow! With maids and fine art and European stuff in their house—very swanky with big security walls and all of that. And he has a new bike, a brand-new Hooker, from Hooker headers car racing parts company, a road bike like the ones we got to use sometimes on Team Shaklee. He had no idea how to put it together. He was a rich kid going to BYU. He said, “You ever seen a bike like this?”

“Well, yeah, I have one back in the States.”

“Then you’re going to put it together for me.”

“I’m like, I’m not putting that together because it takes forever. You have to fish cables all through it.”

After all these years, still looking fast in full TT mode. Atomic Man 2008.

Well, we weren’t leaving until I went to this little hole-in-the-wall shack-barn bike shop, found this other bike mechanic guy to help me, and we stayed up all night putting this bike together.

The next morning, I haven’t slept, and we get on the road. We gotta be at the start line of the prologue the next day. Dammit! So all these Mexican guys and me, there’s like six of us, are packed into one car and we’re driving. These guys had no way of dealing with finances; we had to get money for these guys from ATMs and credit cards. They had no way of dealing with their own country, No man, we have no ATM. This was kind of weird.

So we make it down there, and my buddy Chris and I start doing well in the race right away. I got like seventh in the prologue, and that evening, we had to do this hard, hard circuit race with a cobblestone hill that we hit at Mach 5. I flatted on the first lap, so for the whole race, I had to work my way back to the front with blood coming out of my eyes. I finally recovered, and all the other Mexican teammates on our team were completely shelled early. This was one of those races where it was like groups of guys until it was just an elite field of pros and me and Chris.

I was wearing my National Champion jersey and Chris was wearing a National Team jersey, because maybe we’d get a little more respect, and we did. I don’t think guys messed with us because we were wearing them. Chris was on fire, and I finally recovered, so he comes back to me and there’s like twelve guys left. He’s like, Dude, you got anything left? Can you lead me out? I said, I’ll do what I can, and just because he said that I felt much better. I led him out and he won the stage.

Later on, I started to win some primes, like all the intermediate stuff, and Chris just rode out of his mind and placed like fourth overall. We came away with so much money. They were giving it to us in checks. We weren’t really, officially, part of the race. In the beginning the organizer said, “I will let your team in because of you two gringos, but you have to pay your own way.” We were like, Okay, fine, because these races are all like the Tour where everything’s covered with your entry. We were paying our own way until Chris won that stage. I mean, I led him out, boiling down the road until it was just him and me. “That was very exciting. I like to see that,” the organizer said in a voice that was very scratchy. “I’m going to make sure that everything is taken care of from here on out for you and your teammates.” Five-star everything. We were living it up.

It was crazy, we were kind of in these little side hotel rooms they used for storage, but they were feeding us and everything, and the hotels were first class. The race continued on for four more days. All our Mexican teammates ended up quitting because they didn’t understand the real professional level. They all wanted to go home but Alonso was like, You can’t leave! These guys are your way back now. So they had to stay and had to tell them, like, You gotta start giving us feeds in the races now. In the end, I think I pulled away $1,500 and Chris $3,500, so we did all right and split the money with those guys who helped us, especially Alonso.

We got on the podium one day, the two of us, and all these women were in bodysuits, sponsored by the beer companies. They were like, Hey, are y’all Americans? We’re from Dallas. They’d been hired out of a modeling agency! It was the funniest race, so well done and a big deal. We’re like, Wow, right on! So we went out and were hanging out with these models. That was fun.

That first day, though, things could not have been any worse. It was raining for the prologue, and Chris didn’t do very well. At a restaurant, he came out from the toilet and said, Hey, man. Is it normal to shit blood? I was like, Oh yeah, yeah. That happens all the time. Don’t worry about it. That happens to me. I shit blood right away. The first 24 hours, I was just lying to him and he’s like, Dude, what are you getting me into? He’d never been there. I’d done the other big Mexican races before, so I was just hoping this thing didn’t collapse on me and get us really in trouble.

So the whole race worked out fine, but at the postrace party, they had this huge spread of exotic food and had this one thing called fungo de maiz, which was like corn-fungus that they mix into cheese and put in tortillas. It tasted so good to me! I was eating it, and let me tell you, I had never turned inside-out in my life this badly, and I had a long trip back to Albuquerque like this. We had to stop every five minutes. I was like Dude—dude—dude! And it was like something out of Dumb and Dumber the whole way back.

We’re driving like this weird version of a Mexican Oldsmobile back to Chihuahua, and Chris and I are starting to run out of our own money, so we needed to cash the checks. We needed to go to a Mexican bank. We made it back to Torreon, I’m just dying, and we go into a Bankomex bank from where the checks were drafted. We walk in with these big-money checks and we’re like, We need to cash these. They’re like, No, you can’t cash those here.

At New Mexico state crit champs in 2001.

To backtrack, we’re driving back and it’s pouring rain. We were on the free roads, which are crap in Mexico, so we got on a toll road—a brand new autopista, nice new highway. I paid the toll and was like, We gotta get back home; I don’t care how much it costs. This highway bypassed Aguas Calientes and all of a sudden while I’m driving—smoke! There’s smoke coming out of everything. I pull over, we open the hood, and big flames pour out. A bearing had frozen and the serpentine belt caught on fire. We’re screwed. There were no other cars on the autopista; everybody is too poor to take it, and they had a phone way back but we weren’t sure how to get there.

Alonso and I ran cross-country across fields of mesquite and cactus in the rain. Probably ran four miles back into Aguas Calientes and found some guys eating and drinking beer at a repair shop. We asked them and they said, Yeah, sure, we’ll go out. We said, We’ll pay you and everything. They wanted beer money, I think. This big fat guy worked on the car all night long. He didn’t have the right parts, so they were over there machining and fashioning parts. We’re thinking, We’re screwed! We’re screwed again! But they get it working. Then they’re like, You ready to pay? I’m thinking it would be something like $200, so I say “How much is it?” and they say “How much you got?”

We start putting money together. You always hide a little bit, but the team was like butterflies, so it was up to Chris and me. It wasn’t enough, and I said to Chris, “We can’t give them all the money; we gotta get gas; we gotta cash those checks.” We couldn’t cash them there. So this rich kid Marco had a bunch of fancy-ass Air-Jordans, Jordan-this and Jordan-that, and we’re like, You gotta start giving them some stuff. They were like looking at his stuff, and we made all these deals, and Marco had gotten to the point where he’d given away as much of his stuff as he was willing to. We were all still there sitting at an impasse.

So I told them, with as much broken Spanish as I could, how scared we were and that we just wanted to get back, and that these guys are going to owe you. We’re just trying to get back to the States. We have no money; we’re not rich Americans. They had pity on me, and they let us go for what we’d given them and we were like, Thank God! It was like a speech out of a movie: I’m very scared we’re not going to make it back and we’ve been fronting these guys as much as we can. They could see we were bike racers and asked us about it.

So, early in the morning, we roll into the bank and they wouldn’t cash the checks. We were like, What are we going to do? What are we going to do? I said we’ve got to cash these checks in Mexico because nobody is going to believe them in the United States. Maybe in El Paso they would. We needed the money right then and there. I told them, like, I need to speak to the manager, and they said, You’re going to have to wait; he doesn’t come in until such and such a time.

So the manager finally comes in and pulls us into his office. It’s all nice, all leather, and we’re grubby and I’m sick. I said, “We need to cash these checks. Can you call the race director? These are out of your bank.” I mean, this is why people have this idea of why Mexico is like. I said, “This is why we think of Mexico as a third-world country. Where else am I going to cash a Mexican check except at the bank from which it was drafted?”  The guy says, “Let me think about it.”

Whatever, and we left and were sitting out in the lobby. He comes in and says, “We’re going to cash your check.” He cashes it and it was a bag of money. We had to carry a sack of money and I was like, Man, is there any other way we can do this rather than carrying bags of money out of a bank? So we kind of like willy-nilly doo-dee-doo, you know, and get to the car as fast as we could. We got to the car, hit it, and had enough money to make it back.

We make it back to Chihuahua, to Marco’s rich dad, and he was like, So what all happened? Alonzo told him what happened and was like, These two guys are what got him back. Your son wouldn’t give them anything. He was terrible; you need to get on him about this. It was like two or three months later I get this letter in the mail and in it was two $100 dollar bills and a note from Marco. So, he paid us. Probably to this day, somewhere, my friend Chris is telling someone this exact story, but maybe in not so much bloated detail.

There’s so many little things I could have told you about. It’s just so crazy. That was some trip to Mexico—so much by the seat of our pants. I’ve raced in a lot of Mexican races but never on such a whim with so many crazy things happen like that.

A month or so later, I went to the Vuelta a Guatemala and it seemed fairly mundane in comparison. The worst thing that happened there was that I got a “bomba de agua” (a plastic bag filled tight with water and tied off on the end) launched right to where the sun don’t shine as I was in a two-up break with a German guy and we were in the final kilometers giving everything we had before the finishing finale. Let’s just say I didn’t win that sprint but drew a lot of laughs from their team service car.

ED: Thanks, Clay! And best of luck.