In this great future, Bob Marley sang, you can’t forget your past. I’ve buried my past in a country you won’t find on a map today. It crashed to the ground seventy years after it rose to the global stage in 1917.
We stood alone, our teachers taught. Surrounded by capitalism, we were the first nation on earth to start a new era in human history. We stood up from our knees to build a society of peace and prosperity.
In less than twenty years, we turned an agrarian empire into an industrial nation. We laid down thirty million of our fellow men to rid the world of Nazism. We crawled from the Second World War’s ashes to launch the first spacecraft in the humankind’s history.
To safeguard our way of life, we built a nuclear arsenal deadly enough to destroy the planet more than once. We watched the rotten world race for earthly possessions from birth to death. Watching, we went on to show socialism’s supremacy on the international sports arena.
We sent an ice hockey team on the tour of Canada and the USA in the 1970s to take on the NHL. We made Olympic champions by the dozens. We marched to the world dominance on all fronts in steady stride.
That’s what I believed when I started cycling at the age of twelve. The Peace Race and the Olympic Games were the two most important events in the sport. The pros had their Tour de France fueled by drugs and money. Take away the dope and we’d own them as we own everyone else.
My coach, Piotr Trumheller, drove his red Lada in silence on the way back from my first stage race. I was fifteen. As we drove, I looked out the window and played back every stage I raced. The kid I was before this race had faded away. The cycling I knew a week ago was a Mickey Mouse version of it, a comic strip.
The first stage on the frozen streets of Maykop was the divide between the mock cycling I knew and the real thing. Two hours of misery on a bike was a preface to seven more road races still to come.
We raced through sleet, rain, and mud in temperatures a single digit degree above zero. By stage three I ran out of dry cycling kit because I only had two sets. The place we stayed in had no hot water, no heating, and no showers.
I pulled on the soggy wool shorts infested with sand grains before the second stage. Couldn’t wash the sand off in a toilet sink’s cold water. The sand, it rubbed against the skin on my thighs with every pedal stroke. It didn’t bother me in the race as I fought to stay in the bunch full of guys years older than me.
I crossed the line with thighs burning as if someone spent the last three hours rubbing my perineum with sandpaper. I bled between my legs by the end of stage four. By stage five the wounds got infected and I had trouble walking, never mind riding. I finished stage six with a tiny blood creek going down from under my shorts to the sock.
Every night I went to bed hoping to discover a crack in my frame the next morning as an excuse to quit the race. I wanted to crash and break a collarbone, or an arm, or whatever. Anything to dodge another day on a bike in spring rain and cross winds.
Wish I cried at night but I didn’t. Wish I could say I soldiered on, full of perseverance. Wish I could say I reached out to the depths of my soul to stay in the race or some nonsense like that, but I didn’t. The last four stages I wanted to quit. I kept thinking about my schoolmates sitting in a warm classroom back in my hometown. Me, I’m standing on a start line, frozen to the bone and scared of the assholes around me who made my life hell.
I crashed on stage seven and ripped a hole in the palm of my right hand and sat on the road, nursing my wrist, pretending I broke it.
“Get up!” I heard Trumheller’s shout. He pulls to a stop in his car and runs toward me, grabs my bike and spins each wheel to check if they’re good. Yells again: “C’mon! Get up!”
Twenty kilometers later I’m still chasing the peloton. Not a chance to get back on. He pulls up alongside me and asks if I need anything. I show him my hand and tell him I won’t last long with this pain. I had trouble holding on to the handlebar on the rough roads.
He slams on the brakes. A minute later he’s back with his arm stuck out the car’s window holding a pair of cycling gloves. He kept them in his car, a habit from the racing days. “Put them on,” he says. “I’ll see you at the finish.”
I didn’t quit. The system I was already a part of didn’t allow it. You’re either in, or you’re out. You either commit your entire self hundred percent, or you don’t.
It’s okay if you don’t, but then we don’t want you and we don’t need you. Don’t waste our time. Go do something else. Play soccer. Study. Get a job. Build communism. Serve the country.
Making champions was the system’s purpose. Its rules were not spelled out. No rule book, no instruction manual, and no clear path to take. You listen to those who have gone before you, like Piotr Trumheller, and if you liked what you saw, you went for it.
I liked what I saw. This man behind the steering wheel was the best example I knew who played the system right and was now enjoying a decent life.
When he raced, he wasn’t a star. Well known, reliable rider but not the sports historians’ material. And yet, he was better off today than some former Olympic champions he raced with. Piotr Trumheller understood how the system worked. He used it to shape a life for himself and his family most Soviets could only dream about.
He asked me what I thought of the Maykop race and I said I suffered like a dog from start to finish.
“What did you expect?” he said. “A walk in a park?”
I didn’t expect a walk in a park but if cycling was what I went through in Maykop, it wasn’t for me. I wanted to quit. Every stage I was thinking about quitting. I didn’t know how I made it to the last stage.
“I was afraid to quit,” I said. “But that’s what I wanted to do.”
“Oh yeah?” he said. “Let me tell you something. Let’s say you quit cycling. In two years, you’ll finish school. When you turn eighteen, the state will conscript you to the army and you might even end up in Afghanistan. You’ll either die there or come back with a messed up head. By twenty, you’ll get a job in a factory making some useless widgets. After two years of mindless labor, you’ll start drinking. By thirty-five, you’ll wreck your liver and will be good to go out of this world by forty-five. You might linger on for a while and die in your own vomit wondering what you could have become had you kept racing. How’s that sounds for a life story?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Instead, make something good from the pile of shit we live in or even break loose from this dump.”
“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”
Silent for ten seconds, he said, “I love my wife and my kids. I live a good life here in the Soviet Union. One thing I regret though is not staying in Italy when I had the chance. I thought I could leave this hole behind when I wanted to but that trip to Italy was the only one I’ve ever had.”
He paused, thought about something and said, “I’m an ethnic German. It’s possible the KGB smelled something or someone ratted me in, who knows. Snitches, a lot of snitches around. Riders, coaches, mechanics, you never know who’s telling on you. They figured I could be a ‘runner.’ Never went anywhere after that trip. Stuck here for the rest of my life. Stupid.”
He looked at me and said, “I don’t want you to make the same mistake. Don’t waste your chance the moment you have one. Don’t wait. The first Western country you go to, run like hell, don’t look back.”
We drove without saying a word for several minutes. What he told me, if KGB found out, they’d lock him up for a long time. Teaching a fifteen-year-old kid to make a career in sport only to commit an act of treason was a serious crime.
“I’ll help you grow,” he said. “When you’re ready, I’ll talk to the right people. We’ll find the right team for you if you want to work your ass off and make it in this sport.”
The life Trumheller was talking about was what I wanted. Big races, riding Colnago in a Castelli kit and making money. And now, clear out of the Soviet Union and doing the Tour de France one day. Mad.
One scenario after another rushed through my head. Is it real? Can I do this? Do I have what it takes to do it? Will I live somewhere in France, or Italy? Yeah, Italy, I like Italy.
I said, “I’ll do whatever you say. Anything.”
He went quiet again. Not looking at me, he said, “If you’re going to do this, cycling will be your job for the next fifteen years. Start living like a pro now. Your body is a tool to make a living with, like a hammer or a shovel. Learn how to look after it. Learn how to read it and know when you’re in form and when you’re tired and need rest. Everything you do will make you either faster or slower. Live for training and recovery. Eat because you need to ride and sleep because you need rest. All other things — blot them out of your life. You listen?”
“Yes.”
“One other thing,” he said. “You can be the next Eddy Merckx, live like a pro and still fail. Remember this — keep your mouth shut. I told you about the snitches. You’ll never know who they are. Trust no one. The guy you think is your best friend can rat you out. Don’t talk to anybody about what we’re talking about now. The KGB, they won’t lock you up if you haven’t done anything. If they think you’re a ‘runner’ they’ll never give you a passport and you’ll never leave this country. Not now, not in twenty years. Once they blacklist you, that’s it, you’re done, it’s a life sentence.”
Darwin’s survival of the fittest theory matched the Soviet road cycling machine. A state religion married to a selection process designed to sort out the wheat from the tares.
Teachers said we’re animals, sophisticated but still animals. We play chess and write poetry, build nuclear weapons and scorch each other with fire. Examine the human history, they said, and see what a bloody mess it is. Look as far back as you can and what do you see? War after war after war. We never stop, do we? You either kill or someone else kills you.
Mask Darwinism with communist rhetoric. Brainwash everyone about how bright and glorious the future will be. Even the West, those ignorant idiots, will see the light of Marxism one day and believe in it. After that, they’ll hang everyone who doesn’t and join us in our man-made heaven on earth. In the meantime, toughen the hell up. The sport you chose will bring out that primeval animal from within you. Either give in and join the pack or it will spit you out as a lukewarm waste.
I gave in and joined the pack the moment I walked into a boiler room in a brick building after the first stage in Maykop. Next to its entrance was a three-meter tall mountain of coal. The boiler room was full of naked men. They waited for a turn under two shower heads that stuck out from somewhere above their heads. A layer of wet sand and grime covered the cement floor. Jerseys, shorts, socks, cycling caps, all covered in mud, laid on the floor in separate mounds.
I turned my head and looked at Trumheller. My bowels churned inside seeing a mass of naked bodies in the room.
“I’m not going in there,” I said.
Less than an hour ago, I finished a race I didn’t know I could finish. It wasn’t the speed that wrecked me, it was the cold.
I was fine the first hour until my wool jersey and shorts drenched in icy water and hypothermia set in.
The feet went first. It’s a major pain in the ass not to feel your own feet when they’re the only link between you and the pedals. I didn’t care. We trained in winter on wet roads and because I was too pro to use fenders, my feet have often been wet and numb. Annoying, but I could handle it.
The body started to shiver next. Nothing serious at first, it was getting more violent toward the end of the race. I’d miss a brake point before a corner and lock the rear wheel, panic trying not to smash into others. A mess but not a rout.
Frozen fingers were the knockdown. Braking and shifting gears kept my hands busy. Four ninety-degree corners per lap. A down tube two-gear shift before and two shifts after each corner forced the blood to flow into my fingers. After an hour, the body gave up and unlocked its self-defense mechanism. Shutting you down buddy, game over.
The first time I couldn’t squeeze the brakes before a corner, I stab into some guy’s rear wheel and knock him over. Come out from the corner and this dude screaming obscenities in my ear whacks me across my back. Looked like I crashed his teammate or got him frightened. By now, I don’t give a shit. I took note of his mud-spluttered number and swore to pay him back later. No one goes unpunished, Piotr Trumheller told me. They bite you once, you bite back twice if you want to survive in this sport.
“It’s a pack of wolves,” he used to say, “Don’t let them maul you.”
Two more laps and I can’t shift anymore. Take the hand off the handlebar to shift, the fingers stay closed as if I’m still holding to the bar. Shifting with a closed hand and using the edge of my palm instead of fingers, I keep missing the cogs I want. Every shift I go too far down the block on the up-shift or too far up on the down-shift.
I give up, stick it into 53×14 and pray I won’t get dropped. Coming out of corners at slow speed and getting on the gas over-geared, lap after lap, it kills your legs. Chase and close the gap after every corner until you come to the next one. Mess with the brakes, save a crash, and repeat everything all over again.
I rolled to Trumheller’s car as soon as I crossed the finish line thinking about a stash of dry clothes I had in it. I saw him running toward me, gesticulating something with his hands.
“Don’t stop,” he yells. “Ride to the hotel, you need to keep yourself warm.”
I opened my mouth to tell him that I’m past the point of needing to keep myself warm. Talking wasn’t worth the energy to move my tongue. I had no idea where our hotel was. I saw my teammates pedaling away somewhere and I followed. Minutes later Trumheller’s car was in front of us. We sat behind to hide from the wind and the sleet and rode home where warmth was. Except there was no warmth where we were going to.
Trumheller was waiting outside the hotel’s foyer when we arrived.
“No hot water and no heating in the hotel,” he said when we stopped and circled around him. “See that brown brick building over there with a tall chimney? It’s a boiler room. It’s got two shower heads and hot water. Grab your stuff and run in there as quick as you can. More people are coming down from the race and it’s going to be full.”
I took off the shoes and the muddied socks, grabbed my bag with dry clothes from the car and hobbled to the boiler room. The building looked like a Nazi gas chamber.
Behind the door was a room packed with bloodied, naked bodies floating around. Add monsters and knives to the scene, and you’re looking at Hieronymus Bosch’s Hades.
“I’m not going in there,” I said to Trumheller.
“Come again?”
“I’ll come back later when they finish,” I said.
“No you won’t,” he said. “You need a hot shower now, not later. Take your clothes off and get in the queue. They don’t bite.”
I spat on the floor and began to undress.
We’re all animals, so act like one. Muffle your idea of the North Caucasus’ male dignity. Join the pack of wolves to see if you can coexist with the beasts. Better still, become one yourself.
The road to the top of the cycling pyramid turned out to be more rutted than I thought it would be. At first, nothing seemed too complicated about it. Win or finish on a podium at the Russian state championships to get selected into the Kuybyshev team. Do that and you’re one step away from the top, the national team.
Kuybyshev was the biggest, the most powerful cycling team in the USSR. Funded and tied to the Soviet Army, its chiefs ruled the Soviet road cycling landscape. They could pick and choose any talent from anywhere in the country. It didn’t matter if you were from Russia or Estonia. They’d sign you for a five-year military-backed contract, bottle you inside their system and watch if you come out alive or not. Survive and you can make it to the national team. If Kuybyshev’s meat grinder didn’t ravage you, you were the right kind to race in the red CCCP jersey.
A lot of national team riders came through the Kuybyshev machine. Snatch any talent you can find anywhere in the country and throw him to the wolves. Keep the ones that survived and dump those that didn’t. Kuybyshev was the epitome of the Soviet road cycling system. A cut-throat world where winning by any means was the law.
I knew what Kuybyshev was like from Piotr Trumheller and one of my older team-mates. They took the guy in as a state silver road race medalist. He came back nine months later refusing to ride more than a couple of times a week before he quit cycling for good. He told me bikes are stupid, that he’d rather rot in a factory than cripple himself racing. His fall from the top of a talent ladder daunted me but there were no other routes. If you’re from Russia and want to climb the pyramid, you go up either via Kuybyshev or you don’t go anywhere at all.
I blew two chances I had at the state championships to show Kuybyshev my worth. Dude, we used to say when we wanted to mock someone, you’re so full of crap, you didn’t even make it onto the first sheet. They used to print race results on paper sheets in those days with about thirty places on the first page. You were a loser if you didn’t make the first sheet.
I failed to appear on the first sheet in every race that mattered. Trumheller scolded me after each flop. Doubts if I was good enough sapped my drive to keep going.
“You know what’s wrong with you?” he said after I bombed again. “You don’t push yourself as hard as the other guys. You think you can win anything you want if you go hard, but you never do when it counts.”
“I gave it everything I had.”
“And went two minutes slower than a week before?”
“That was on a faster road.”
“Not by two minutes. You know why you don’t push? It’s all too easy for you. You don’t want to suffer like the other guys to get a win. When you come to a serious race, you don’t want it bad enough. You think the race will fall into your hands by itself because you’re so special. You know what? You’re wrong. You won’t get anywhere until you fight like a dog. These other guys out there who did well, they know what they want. They’ll cut your throat if you get on their way. Stop acting like you’re Eddy Merckx. You’re not Merckx. If you want to be him, race like him. All I see is a princess on two wheels.”
My last chance to step up the ladder came in May 1983 in Kaliningrad. A twenty-five-kilometer time trial and a road race were all I had left to play with if I wanted a future in cycling.
The road race was pancake flat with a guaranteed bunch sprint. I didn’t rate my chances and focused only on the time trial. Two days before we flew to Kaliningrad, Trumheller told me he had built a pair of time trial wheels for me. He kept a stash of gear since his trip to Italy. A pair of twenty-eight-hole Campagnolo Record hubs, Nisi rims, and Clement silks. A frugal German, I knew how important my last test was in his eyes if he pulled out this prized kit for me.
“This is it,” he said when I pulled up to a taxi we hired as a team car after I finished the warm-up. “Blow this one again, and you’re done, in the boots by next spring. Goodbye cycling, arrivederci Roma.”
He swapped the wheels while I changed into the dry jersey and wiped the silks clean with a bare hand. On the road with my bike, he waited for me until I got out of the car.
“Four minutes to go,” he said and placed his hand on my shoulder when I came up to take the bike. “How bad you want it?”
“I’m not going to the army,” I said. “Not with these wheels.”
I plunged into the race from the gun and scorched it as if it was a five-kilometer interval. Pushing, hovering over the red line until the race’s weight crashed down on me toward the end. I took it head-on and kept going. Didn’t slow down because you always know when the race is in the bag and no amount of pain can stop you.
I lost by six seconds to a national team member. For someone who couldn’t make it onto the first sheet when it mattered, a second place was a triumph. I still worried if this was enough for a place in the Kuybyshev team.
That same afternoon I’d been lying on a bed in my hotel room. Legs up against the wall, watching tea leaves floating up and down in a two-liter glass jar of boiled water, waiting for tea to brew. Razor in hand, I went over my legs to cut down every last string of hair I could find. If the time trial didn’t get Kuybyshev’s attention, I had to win the road race tomorrow. There was a little hill with less than two kilometers to go. If I could position myself right coming into it and pick up some speed before we hit it, I could attack in that spot. If the peloton hesitated for ten seconds and did nothing, I could gain a gap and hold it to the line. Ten seconds, all I need is for the peloton to freeze for ten seconds.
I heard a knock on the door and someone had entered the room, a man in a navy blue Adidas tracksuit, and stood in front of me. The USSR state emblem on his chest placed him somewhere high in cycling’s hierarchy. Even without the chest tag, I knew who he was. Pavel Grigoriev, a man in charge of Kuybyshev’s development program.
“How you doing?” he said, grabbed a chair and sat next to my bed with his legs crossed. In my underwear, I couldn’t figure out what was less embarrassing — pretend I wasn’t embarrassed or stand up, walk across the room to get clothes and put them on.
“Fine,” I said and sat up on my bed.
“Do you know who I am?”
“No,” I said.
“You did well in the time trial this morning,” he said. “Came out of nowhere and finished second.”
“Last chance to get on Kuybyshev’s radar.”
“Look, I don’t have much time right now. Will make it quick and simple. If you want to race for Kuybyshev, show us what you can do.”
I told him I would love to and he said I’d have to travel to Ivano-Frankovsk in Western Ukraine next month. “Training camp to prepare for the Yunost stage race,” he said.
“If you make the team,” he said, “and do well in the race, I’ll keep you at least until the end of next season. Make the team and we’ll see what kind of a rider we can make from you.”
He stood up and said that he’ll talk to Piotr Trumheller tomorrow after the road race. He stuck out his hand for me to shake it and walked out.
I sat and poured some tea into a glass and added a teaspoon of mom’s blackberry jam I brought from home. “Made it,” I said out loud.
The best day of my life was about to get better. Ten minutes later, the door opened again and Trumheller walked in with a man I’d never met before.
He had dark, short hair with elephant ears sticking out as two satellite dishes. Close-seated, brown eyes sat on top of a large nose which gave his face a prankster look. He wore khaki chinos with a chequered short sleeve shirt unmatched by a plaid patterned white and yellow necktie. A pair of white sneakers completed the outfit’s hodgepodge.
“This is Nikolai Rogozyan. He’s from the Center of Olympic Development Titan in Kiev,” Trumheller said. “He wants to talk to you.”
I plopped onto my bed again, still in my underwear, and they took the chairs.
Like Grigoriev before him, Rogozyan didn’t waste time and went straight to business.
“I came here from Kiev to scout riders for Titan,” he said. “You did well this morning, so Piotr and I had a chat after the race. We think you should fly to Kiev and get evaluated by us to see if you can fit in into Titan’s program.”
I looked at my coach. Tell them about Grigoriev’s visit and wreck my fresh professional cycling career. The ‘we’ in Rogozyan’s talk flagged Trumheller’s blessing of my trip to Kiev. No choice, let’s dump the news on them anyway.
“Grigoriev stopped by to talk to me. Says he wants me to fly to Ivano-Frankovsk with them next month.”
Neither of them looked too bothered by what seemed to me a complicated situation now.
“Look,” Trumheller said. “I know you see Kuybyshev as the next step but it’s not the only one. With no other options, sure, Kuybyshev is the thing. Forget about them and go to Kiev.”
“Why Ukraine if I can stay in Russia and race for the best team in the country?” I said.
“Kuybyshev is not a team,” Rogozyan said. “It’s a machine. Sweet if you survive it, sour if you don’t.”
He went on to tell me about how Titan was set up a year ago by Ukrainian agro-industrial complex with tight links to Kiev’s Sports University. A group of scientists, masseurs, a doctor, and two mechanics were on the payroll. They had people high up in the army to take care of the military conscription. “You won’t see a day in the boots,” he said. They paid Titan riders a salary. “A factory will hire you and you’ll earn a wage every month. You won’t know where that factory is and what it does.”
They had access to all top races in the country, a privilege not every team had. Titan hand-picked their riders and treated them as assets, not as stock. They took them in at a young age and built them up using training methods few people knew much about. Titan had links with Kiev’s Sports University and riders could study in it if they raced for the team. Something to fall back on if a crash ends your racing career before its time.
“As our name implies,” Rogozyan said, “we’re in a business of developing Olympic champions. We’re backed by people in the government who want to see more Olympic medals go to Ukraine. It’s a project with serious goals and serious backers.”
I landed in Kiev Borispol airport two weeks later. Strange Ukrainian language came at me from the PA system and the signage displays. Nikolai Rogozyan was waiting for me outside in UAZ-452 off-road van built to eat Siberian dirt roads for lunch.
“Chuck your stuff in,” he said and opened the van’s rear door. Plain on the outside, there was no mistake what purpose this van served in life once I saw its inside. Half a dozen yellow sidewall tubular tires lay on the bare steel floor. Spare wheels, a plastic glue bottle with a nozzle made from a brake pad for clean glue jobs on the rims. Water bottles, leather hairnet helmets, and a set of rollers with wooden cylinders placed on its side between the seats. A faint smell of Finalgon, an embrocation of choice among Soviet pros, permeated the van’s interior. I slotted my bike next to the rollers, threw my bag inside the van and sat in the passenger’s seat.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“Training base in Lesnoye resort. An hour drive from here, west of Kiev.”
On the way, I learned how different my life would be from now on.
Unless you see rocks falling from the sky, Rogozyan said, we ride. Three times a day. Forty kilometers before breakfast, up to two hundred later in the morning, and another forty in the late afternoon. It’s normal to clock four thousand a month or more.
Titan redefined the meaning of a professional cyclist’s rest day. Fifty kilometers in the morning after a sleep-in and sauna in the afternoon. That’s how they thought a pro should rest at the end of a training cycle.
Cruising two abreast was minimal. They spent a lot of time in a single file groups of eight riders doing long intervals at different intensities.
They rode at speeds somewhere near forty. The speed wasn’t the point, the intensity was. Two decades of tests showed better adaptations riding near that speed’s intensity.
This workload was hard to handle without rest and nutrition. When not riding or eating, Titan riders were either sleeping or lying in bed talking trash and cracking jokes. The team had its training camps away from civilization. Sleeping was the only option during riders’ free time. No one could leave the training base without permission.
They banned girlfriends. “You’ll see a lot of gymnasts at the Lesnoye resort. The Ukrainian female state team is there right now,” Rogozyan said as we crossed Paton Bridge over Dnieper River. “If I see you within five meters from any one of them, I’ll send you home. Trust me, I know every excuse in the world about why you think you should be near a girl. Don’t even try. If you have a girlfriend at home, write a letter and tell her you’re through with her. End it now.”
Two or three times a year, riders could go home for four days. Rest of the time, you live with the same people and travel all over the country from race to race and from camp to camp. Driving in the van and listening to Rogozyan, this life-style was a bedtime story. Except I didn’t know yet what it’s like to share a room with the same guy for several months.
Titan’s crew did its best to take care of riders’ nutrition but no one could guarantee quality food at all times. Through its military connections, Titan found a way to the cosmonauts’ food supplies. Boxes of space food traveled with the team everywhere it went. They used carbohydrate gels packaged in hundred-milliliter aluminum tubes before gels became common. Road race or a space station, didn’t matter as long as it worked.
None of this talk would mean anything if I failed to make the cut. I waited for a break and said, “Am I in Titan already?”
“No, we still have to go through a selection process.” He told me they want eight new riders from sixteen candidates they’d invited to the training camp. More than twenty guys would be there but some of them are already on the team.
The first round is the ramp test at the Kiev Sports University’s lab. “It’s a bit of a torture. We have to ensure we’re not wasting our time with someone who’s got no physiology to race at the top level,” Rogozyan said.
Those who pass the lab test will stay and race a stage race for the candidates. “We booked the Chaika race circuit for a week. You’ll do six stages, about hundred each. Twenty guys in the race, nowhere to hide. The circuit is flat. You’ll have to race like mad pit bulls to show us who you are. Hard going, it’ll push you to the limit. Which is what we want.”
We turned off the Brest-Litovsk Highway into a narrow side road. After driving through a thick forest, the UAZ-452 stopped near a group of timber cottages.
“Lunch is in two hours,” Rogozyan said and pointed at one of the cottages. “Get your stuff and the bike in there and start unpacking. You should be good to go for the afternoon ride.”
I got out of the van and breathed in a lungful of sweet, crisp forest air. This was adulthood. My parents, teachers, my first coach, and my friends have all stayed back on a planet I left for good. Was on my own now with no idea how to maneuver in this new life by myself.