How could George Orwell describe the Soviet Union of the 1980s in 1947 is hard to explain, but he did. The new era we started in 1917 to rid the world of capitalism was near its end if the ‘telescreens’ told the truth. The adversary, the United States and its lackeys, is weak and about to crumble. “We Will Prevail!” shouted the slogans on the billboards, “The Victory is Ours!”
It rained outside the day I found out the world I believed in was fake. I came over to a friend’s place to borrow a book. His dad was a librarian. The apartment he lived in looked like a library too. His dad turned every wall into a bookshelf and filled them with literature.
It is here he passed on to me a hand-typed samizdat copy of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. At the time, to own this book, never mind giving it to friends, was a criminal offense with a long jail term.
Before The Archipelago, there was Amerika. The US Department of State published this magazine in Russian during the Cold War. In return, the Soviet-made The USSR went to the United States in English. To this day I’m not sure how this slight of hand by US government slipped through the Soviet thought police.
On its glossy pages with full spread photography, I read a story about secondhand cars. The sums of money the story mentioned, hundreds of dollars, not thousands. You couldn’t buy US dollars in the Soviet Union but we knew its value — seventy kopecks for one US dollar. We knew this from the state-set exchange rate published in Izvestiya five days a week.
With that rate, five hundred bucks was three hundred fifty rubles. You can buy a car for three hundred fifty rubles in America? What the hell? A beat up, half-dead clunker in the Soviet Union will cost you thousands and a new Lada more than ten on the black market. With an average salary between a hundred and hundred fifty a month, it would take a dozen lifetimes to save for a car. In America, a plumber could buy more than one secondhand car with every paycheck if he wanted to. Either the story was too good to be true or there was something wrong with the foreign exchange rate.
I woke up in a wooden cottage in the Lesnoye resort feeling someone’s hand on my skin. Opened my eyes and saw a guy next to my bed down on his haunches. He was holding my wrist in his hand. He wore an orange shirt and a cardigan only someone’s grandma would wear. Military-style haircut with a straight fringe made him look as if he lived in a science lab.
“Good morning,” he said in Ukrainian and smiled. “Checking your resting heart rate. Sorry to wake you up. You can go back to sleep if you want.”
Ukrainian words sifted through my mind in one sweep but I understood what he’d said. He spoke in a polite tone. Before that morning, I’ve heard two or three people speak like that. In workers’ paradise, we bark. No room for ‘please’ and ‘excuse me,’ never ‘sorry.’ Here, no one’s ever sorry for anything.
A PhD student from Lvov, Yaroslav was a relic of an era untouched by communism. He spoke with ‘thank you’ and ‘please,’ smiled and cared about you.
“So how’s my pulse?” I said.
“If I didn’t know you were a road cyclist, I would be calling an ambulance right now. It’s below forty.”
“Is below forty good?”
“Let me put it this way: your heart pumps the same amount of blood in one stroke as mine pumps in two.”
“Is that good?”
He smiled again, let go of my wrist and said: “We’ll know after the tests. Go back to sleep.”
The tests, everyone was talking about the tests. Titan’s head coach, Yuri Elizarov, believed in science and the tests. It bothered me I was up against an unknown threshold or a number I knew nothing about. Give me a rider or a clock to race against, not a threshold.
They drew the first blood on the first morning before the main ride. I rolled to the Lesnoye’s restaurant and saw two young women in white coats sitting behind a table. One was busy with test tubes, marking and sorting them in a microwell plate. The other was pointing down her index finger to a folding chair next to her. She looked pretty and it itched me to stop the bike with a rear wheel in the air to frighten the girls. If the stunt went wrong, I’d land on that table with all those glass tubes and would be on a plane going home this afternoon.
“I need your blood,” said the girl with the finger still pointing down when I stopped.
“Say please,” I said and stuck out my hand without getting off the bike.
She chuckled and said: “Sit down, cowboy, or you might faint when you see my tools.”
They took blood two, sometimes three times a day before and after the main ride and later at night. In three days the finger’s tip swells and it’s a torture to draw blood after that. The vampires only pricked middle and ring finger. The other three, they said, were too hard to squeeze the blood from. After a week, I ran out of pain-free fingers. Grumbled one morning about how painful it was to squeeze a water bottle and the vampire goes, “No problem, we’ll use your ears until your fingers heal.”
Then came the heart rate monitors. These were not your twenty-first-century wrist devices. The receiver traveled in the team car housed in a box the size of a portable fridge. We glued transmitters with rim glue to the skin on our chests because no one thought of straps when they made them. Titan didn’t have time for elegant solutions to logistical problems. If rim glue works, we use rim glue.
It was the vampires’ job to glue the transmitters. Take your jersey off in front of two young women and let them smudge your chest with rim glue. Brilliant. A bottomless pit of saucy jokes. The payback came after the ride when they ripped the transmitters off along with the chest hair. The wimps shaved a spot on their chests to skip the torture. The rest, we basked in the pain.
The lab test came without warning. It was a rest day and we were at the end of a short ride. Nikolai Rogozyan drove up to me and said I need to pack a pair of shorts, shoes, and socks for a trip to Kiev after the ride.
“Our science brigade can’t wait to see you,” he said smirking. “You’ll enjoy your time in the lab. Try not to vomit.”
The test was in a large room full of strange medical equipment. A Monark stationary bike with a belt drive stood in the middle of the room with a pool of sweat under it. The air in the room was heavy with body odor and cigarette stench.
A man and a woman buzzed around the room navigating between German-made machinery. They told me to get the shoes on and mount the bike to warm up.
A tall, slim man with an evil look on his face said what the test procedure will be. He pointed at a metronome near the bike and said I had to match my cadence to the metronome’s ticks. “Until you collapse,” he finished the instructions.
“How long should I go for?” I said.
He grinned and said, “That’s what we’re here for to find out.”
I was set to peg out when Dr Evil left his command and control station. He came over and stood in the sweat puddle next to me, put an arm on my shoulder and said into my ear, “Keep going. Thirty seconds more.”
He pulled out a stopwatch from his white coat and pressed the start button. After at least an hour had passed, he said: “Five seconds.”
Another hour, “Ten seconds.”
With another five seconds gone, I wanted to stop. The lights went out and the noise from my own heartbeat was so loud in my head I couldn’t hear the metronome.
Who cares if I do another fifteen seconds or not? Unless the thirty seconds after you’ve emptied your legs is the test. This torture festival is a preface, a twisted warm-up for the last thirty seconds. They want to know how far they can push you with a quiet ‘keep going’ order.
They didn’t crack me. My cadence was out of sync with the metronome but I turned the pedals until Dr Evil told me to stop.
By the end of the season, I settled into the team and roomed with a guy who loved AC/DC as much as I did.
Titan’s boss, Yuri Elizarov, was a tall, stout man with bulky face features and bushy eyebrows. You wouldn’t want to punk the guy. I burned myself more than once trying to play him as our jagged relationship grew. It was stupid to fool around with him and test his patience because he had little of it. Late for a ride or breakfast, he’d fire you if he was in a bad mood. No offense was too small. Do what we tell you to or butt out. Yuri Elizarov had no room for second chances.
A former mountain climber, he pioneered systematic high altitude training in Soviet cycling. He believed the sum of small-scale advantages in minute details is key to race results. He ruled Titan with an iron fist in a dictatorial style and had no fear of authority in the sport above him. With no friends in cycling, he set out to pipe down the establishment with his training methods.
Titan had won five rainbow jerseys and an Olympic gold medal in ten years before it folded in 1992. Elizarov’s project capped with Viktor Rzhaksynskyi’s gold medal in 1991 world road race. Titan rider had won the last Soviet rainbow jersey.
For some, Yuri Elizarov was an eccentric dreamer, others thought he was mad. When he told me I will be ready for my first hundred-kilometer team time trial by the end of the season, I thought he was mad.
The classic four-men team time trial was cycling’s golden standard. It’s a complex, technical race. To do well in it, you need all four riders to perform without a glitch on the same day. It’s what makes it different from other races.
It’s a mistake to liken a team time trial to an individual one. The only thing the two have in common is that you race against the clock. The dynamics and the type of riders suited for these races are not the same.
The race is a two-hour job in an uneven rhythm. You open the throttle near full gas at the front for half a minute, swing off, get on the wheel and rest for ninety seconds. Repeat. For two hours.
Mistakes, even small ones, will cost you. Take longer than you should to get on the wheel after the pull and you shrink your recovery time. Missed the last wheel and had to close the gap to get back? Pay up. Keep boobing and you’ll crack.
Riders who could take the pace up if it fell by a fraction without hurting the team-mates were rare. It took an incredible engine and a sharp sense of speed to do that. You find this kind of a rider, you treasure him as a gem. A world-class team would stand or fall if it did or didn’t have a guy like that. If it did, he would have to be good on the race day for the team to nail the result. Having four riders in top form on the same day was the team time trial’s feature that fretted every coach.
It was common for at least one guy to pop. Seasoned coaches knew the pop was hanging over in the last quarter of the race. They hoped it would come as far into the race as possible. Ninety-kilometer mark was a safe distance not to lose ground and save the race.
Before Titan, I never thought of myself as a team time trial specialist. I liked the race and its tough character but my heart was in the road races. I had a decent kick and could survive hills as long as they were hills and not long climbs. With an engine of a time trial machine, one-day classics were my flair.
In Titan, it didn’t matter what I liked. Getting out of the Soviet Union was the goal now and team time trial would be the ticket.
Piotr Trumheller, my first coach, floated the idea to me. Team time trial is a better bet to build a name than a road race. It’s you and your teammates against the clock and no tactics or breakaways to deal with. Crashes and punctures are rare. The race is pure performance and your rivals have no power over it.
In the 1970s and 1980s, qualify for an Olympic or world’s team time trial and you have a ticket to a medal, often a gold one. The race’s outcome was in the riders’ hands more than an outcome of a road race. Put four world-class specialists on the road and they will deliver the result you want. You want a rainbow jersey and its perks, team time trial was the way to get it.
When Elizarov said we’re aiming for two hours four in my first hundred-k team time trial, I thought he was mad. This time would place us on the level with the best in the country. He wanted me to go from a nobody to a team time trial ace in three months.
Thousands of kilometers later and a lot of racing we clocked two hours four at the end of the season as he said we would. Not a madman. A pro who knew what he was doing.
I don’t think there was another seventeen-year-old in the country who did anything close to this kind of time. Under the UCI rules, I wasn’t even allowed to race that. As with a lot of other things in the USSR, we ran our own show behind the wall.
That autumn in 1983 Titan started the season in Gagra, a cute resort town on the Black Sea coast. The training camp kicked off with a team meeting in a room dwarfed by Elizarov’s towering silhouette. He sat on a wooden chair in front of a large window at the end of the room.
“You’re here to learn your individual goals for the next season,” he said. “You’re not here for fun and to waste time fooling around. We’re here to breed world and Olympic champions. We’ll assess and reassess your progress as we go along during the season. If you don’t perform and don’t show commitment, we’ll kick you out.”
He gave us time to digest his words and opened a thick, leather-bound notebook. For the next two hours, he talked about each rider’s targets for the upcoming season.
He spoke results. No phrases like ‘you should do well in this race’ or ‘you should try your best in that race.’ He spoke in numbers and actions. First place in that race or qualifying for this or that.
He laid out everyone’s goals in the open. He set team’s hierarchy without spelling it out and marked everyone’s rank with results. It set Titan’s internal mechanism in order. Everyone knew each other’s goals and each rider’s responsibilities.
My heart sunk when I heard my name. “Nikolka,” he used a nickname he gave me. “Gold medal in a team time trial world championship in August.” This, he explained, was the main target. And the steps to get there, he’d mapped it all out for me.
First, he said, the Samarkand stage race in April. It’s a qualifier race for the national team. A stage win gets you in. Team time trial is the stage you want because that’s the race you’re going for. If we win, and we should, at least two riders will join the first national team’s training camp in May.
Next three months is the selection period. They’ll scrutinize every race, every training ride, every hour of your life. They’ll start with at least ten team time trial specialists in May and select the final four by the end of July. It will be a cut-throat time which will get worse as the weeks go by. We want that gold medal.
He spoke as a man who thought through every step and I had no reason not to believe him. No detail escaped his mind. The confidence in his speech blew away all doubt out of my mind.
I won the first time trial stage in Samarkand and we followed it with a team time trial win. A day after I topped it up with another first place in a road race. If one stage was enough to qualify, how about three in a row? The national head coach came to our team car after the third stage to shake my hand and welcome me to the national team. I was in.
Qualifying meant going to races in Western Europe and, if I had the nerve to bail out, never going back to the USSR.
The first trip came in June, the Schleswig-Holstein Rundfahrt stage race in West Germany. I had two days to kill before flying to Hamburg. I jumped on a plane and went to see Piotr Trumheller in Nalchik, my hometown.
He poured me a vodka shot when we sat down to dine at his apartment, a man sharing a meal with another man. I told him the East German national team was on the start list with Olaf Ludwig, road world champion Uwe Raab, and Uwe Ampler.
“Are you worried?” he said.
“Yes. Sukhorouchenkov smashed them in the Peace Race couple of weeks ago. They’ll want a payback and here we come, in our red jerseys. These mad dogs will go after us.”
“They’ll give you hell, for sure,” he said. “But that’s the kind of guys you’ll be racing against next year. The earlier you learn what it’s like, the better prepared you’ll be. It’s the same thing we did in Maykop. You went against guys a level above you to harden up. It did work, didn’t it?”
He said it’s funny I’ll see Germany before him, an ethnic German. I said he should travel to Berlin and jump the wall.
“Who is going to look after my wife and kids if I do that?” he said.
We stopped talking for a moment and had another round of vodka.
“Are you coming back?” he said and poured us another shot.
“Don’t know. I want the rainbow jersey. Then I’m gone. What if I don’t qualify for the worlds? Then what? Should I defect in Germany?”
He left the room for a minute and came back with a pile of tubulars bound in industrial wrapping paper.
“One hundred,” he said, nodding at the pile with his head. “A stash I prepared for you when I heard you made the national team. Take it to Germany, make some money before you go to France, and then run. You need that gold medal.”
Ruble a worthless paper outside the USSR, Soviet tubulars was the currency we traded in. The math behind this socialism-induced business was simple. The street price of our tubulars in the Soviet Union was four rubles. The US dollar fetched about the same on the black market. One tubular, one US dollar. You spend two hundred rubles on fifty tubulars and sell them to Italians or Germans for ten bucks each. Same quality stuff in Western Europe costs twice as much.
Once you’ve got your foreign cash, you bring it home and sell it on the black market for under four rubles per dollar. The five hundred bucks you brought back from a race is close to two thousand rubles now. My parents made four hundred rubles a month together. I could make two grand from a single race in Europe if I brought fifty tubulars across the border and sold them.
Flying out of the country didn’t worry me as much as coming back did. Losing two hundred rubles’ worth of tubulars if customs confiscated them was business. Bringing the dollars in a was not. Owning, buying, selling, or smuggling foreign currency in or out of the USSR was a criminal offense with a jail term longer than I cared to know. What you do, you learn from a been there teammate about the seat tube.
I learned about the seat tube’s smuggling properties when I wondered aloud what’s the safest way to get a wad of cash through customs.
“Roll it, rubber-band it, and drop it into a seat tube. They never check the bikes. Luggage, yes. They’ll search you if you look worried. Bikes — never.”
I qualified for the world championship and we flew to France. The Los Angeles Games the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc boycotted had ended days before. Our championship was the first event after the Games where Soviet and American athletes met. The country’s leadership, the national team’s boss told us, doesn’t want to see Americans win. Not even one race.
The organizers put us in the same hotel with the Yanks. We come from a training ride one morning and see them in stars and stripes track suits unpacking bikes from a bus.
The time trial equipment they pull out of their bike bags looks like aliens built it. Frames with aero-shaped tubes. Small front wheels with tall rims and rear disc wheels. Aero helmets the size of a bomb. What was even more strange is our coach chatting to the American one. We pass them by on our bikes and they speak Russian.
“Eddie Borysewicz, an old friend,” our coach says at the lunch table. “Defected to the United States from Poland years ago. Used to coach the Polish national junior team, works with the Americans now. Says his boys are on fire and you’ll be lucky if they won’t catch you. They’re last to start, remember? You go two minutes before them.”
We chuckled at the idea of another team catching us. Dreamers.
We put twenty seconds into Americans in the first ten kilometers. The gap grew after that at every time check. Working as a Swiss clockwork, pulling thirty-second turns without a glitch, we sailed from start to finish in one breath.
With one kilometer to go, we started smiling and shaking each other’s hands. We were more than a minute ahead of the second-placed team USA.
We won the gold. And it didn’t hurt.
We took six riders to France and two spots were available to do the road race. Its lumpy course with a long finishing straight suited me well and the coach asked if I wanted to do it. Spent from going through the selection process, the training, I said no.
With the rainbow jersey in my bag now, I had nothing to race for and wanted a break. And, while everyone would be at the road race, I was going to make the run.
On my trips around Caen where we stayed during the championship, I scouted a police station. I could ride to it from our hotel in fifteen minutes. From the stories I heard on Radio Free Europe about other defections, going to the police was my best option. If I told them my life was in danger and I didn’t want to go back to the USSR, they would have to let me stay.
Once everyone had gone to the road race, I packed my rainbow jersey, the medal, and the cash into a rucksack I bought for the run. Went outside, hopped on the Colnago and rode toward the police station in the city center.
My heart pumped blood through my veins in steady blows and something tickled me in the guts. The legs felt as overcooked macaroni even though I was on a low gear. Two hundred meters on, I turned my head to check if the KGB officer assigned to mind us was following me.
This is it, ten minutes and I can kiss the Soviet hellhole au revoir. Will they forget about the bike I’m riding now in this defection mess I’m about to make? A Saronni red Colnago Nuovo Mexico was only two weeks old and I wanted to keep it.
Nah, they won’t. Will this be on the news? Here in France, for sure.
“A Soviet World Champion Defects Days After the End of LA Games.”
What about back home, will they even mention it in the newspapers?
My dad, he was silent on the phone when I told him I was going to France to race the worlds. He was silent because he cried. Yuri Elizarov, this guy, I’d want to look into his eyes, shake his hand and thank him. My mom, she said I’ll quit cycling in two weeks when I got into it and now I wanted to show her my medal.
“See? I didn’t quit.”
I stopped in front of the police station and stared at the door. Three steps and I’m in, never to return, never to wear the red CCCP jersey again. I looked across the street and saw a bistro a hundred meters away. Sit down, have a beer and think it through one more time.
I didn’t make it to the bistro. I couldn’t leave, not like this. Turn around to go back to the pigpen you came from because you’re one of them. A pig in a pigpen and you want to rub shoulders with other pigs and suck in the due homage.
Have a rainbow jersey now, give me high five, oh and let’s see what else I can do.
The run, it can wait. Can leave any time I want.