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graduation, until it was time to drop us off at the dance.
My mother was happy again, and settling into a new relationship. When I was 17, she met a man named
John Walling, a good guy who she eventually married. I liked him, and we became friends, and I would be
sorry when they split up in 1998.
It's funny. People are always saying to me, "Hey, I ran into your father." I have to stop and think, Exactly
who do they mean? It could be any of three people, and frankly, my birth father I don't know from a bank
teller, and I have nothing to say to Terry. Occasionally, some of the Armstrongs try to get in touch with me,
as if we're family. But we aren't related, and I wish they would respect my feelings on the subject. My
family are the Mooneyhams. As for Armstrong, it's as if I made up my name, that's how I feel about it.
I'm sure the Armstrongs would give you 50,000 different reasons why I needed a father, and what great
jobs they did. But I disagree. My mother gave me everything. All I felt for them was a kind of coldness,
and a lack of trust.
FOR A FEW MONTHS AFTER GRADUATION, I HUNG around Plano. Most of my Plano East
classmates went on to the state-university system; my buddy Steve, for instance, got his degree from North
Texas State in 1993. (Not long ago, Plano East held its 10th reunion. I wasn't invited.)
I was getting tired of living in Plano. I was competing in bike races all over the country for a domestic trade
team sponsored by Su-baru-Montgomery, but I knew the real racing scene was in Europe, and I felt I
should be there. Also, I had too much resentment for the place after what had happened before my
graduation.
I was in limbo. By now I was regularly beating the adult men I competed against, whether in a triathlon, or
a 10K run, or a Tuesday-night crit at the Plano loop. To pass the time, I still hung around the Richardson
Bike Mart, owned by Jim Hoyt.
Jim had been an avid rider as a young man, but then he got shipped off to Vietnam when he was 19, and
served two years in the infantry, the toughest kind of duty. When he came home, all he wanted to do was
ride a bike again. He started out as a distributor for Schwinn, and then he opened his own store with his
wife, RJionda. For years Jim and Rhonda have cultivated young riders in the Dallas area by fronting them
bikes and equipment, and by paying them stipends. Jim believed in performance incentives. We would
compete for cash and free stuff he'd put up, and we raced that much harder because of it. All through my
senior year in high school, I earned $500 a month riding for Jim Hoyt.
Jim had a small office in the back of his store where we'd sit around and talk. I didn't pay much attention to
school principals, or stepfathers, but sometimes I liked to talk to him. "I work my butt off, but I love who I
am," he'd say. "If you judge everybody by money, you got a lot to learn as you move through this life,
'cause I got some friends who own their own companies, and I got some friends who mow yards." But Jim
was tough too, and you didn't fool with him. I had a healthy respect for his temper.
One night at the Tuesday crits, I got into a sprint duel with another rider, an older man I wasn't real fond of.
As we came down the final stretch, our bikes made contact. We crossed the finish line shoving each other,
and we were throwing punches before our bikes came to a stop. Then we were on each other, in the dirt.
Jim and some others finally pried us apart, and everybody laughed at me because I wanted to keep duking it
out. But Jim got mad at me, and wasn't going to allow that kind of thing. He walked over and picked up my
bike, and wheeled it away. I was sorry to see it go.
It was a Schwinn Paramount, a great bike that I had ridden in Moscow at the World Championships, and I
wanted to use it again in a stage race the following week. A little later, I went over to Jim's house. He came
out into the front yard.
"Can I have my bike back?" I said.
"Nope," he said. "You want to talk to me, you come to my office tomorrow."
I backed away from him. He was irate, to the point that I was afraid he might take a swing at me. And there
was something else he wasn't too happy about: he knew I had a habit of speeding in the Camaro.
A few days later, he took the car back, too. I was beside myself. I had made all the payments on that car,
about $5,000 worth. On the other hand, some of that money had come from the stipend he paid me to ride
for his team. But I wasn't thinking clearly, I was too mad. When you're 17 and a man takes a Camaro IROC
Z away from you, he's on your hit list. So I never did go see Jim. I was too angry, and too afraid of him.
It was years before we spoke again.
Instead, I split town. After my visit to Colorado Springs and Moscow, I was named to the U.S. national
cycling team, and I got a call from Chris Carmichael, the team's newly named director. Chris had heard
about my reputation; I was super strong, but I didn't understand a lot about the tactics of racing. Chris told
me he wanted to develop a whole new group of young American cyclists; the sport was stagnant in the U.S. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]