As many people know, and some of the juniors I am sure do not know, I rode as a professional for 13 fantastic seasons.  I was lucky, in a lot of ways, to be part of some high powered programs.  Teams loaded with men oozing with talent.  More talent  in their small toes than 10 of me added together.  The lucky part for me is that these teammates recognized, and more importantly, acknowledged team sacrifices.  These men laid the ground work for who I was to become as a pro.  They all showed me the way. 

So when asked what my favorite win was as a pro that becomes more of a question of what was my favorite team win as a pro.  As a rider, I won my fair share of races, but I spent 90% of my time helping others win races.  In a 5 year period, with Mercury, I was part of a team that won nearly 500 races.  I, personally won very few of those, but I contributed to most of those wins in one way or another.  For me, many of those wins, although taken by other men and teammates gave me as much pleasure as if I crossed the line first myself.  Often my teammates were the ones who bestowed that importance on the teammates that contributed to the bottom line.  So with that, some of the most satisfying wins where those we took in Europe.  In races and against riders that we were told we could not beat; races like Criterium International and GP Denain.  But, by far and away, the best wins were the 3 times I was part of the winning teams at the First Union GP (also known as Corestates or USPRO).  Those were the crème of the crop.

As I left cycling as a full time rider, and moved to the director’s car, the idea of team work and racing as a team became the core of my belief system.  Those are the ideas that I want to pass to the riders I work with.  Those are the ideas that I try to bring to the table when I organize a race strategy, and those are the ideas that I hope I instill in riders as they move beyond me and my programs.

The thing about my belief system is the fact that it was not formed and nurtured by me alone.  It was formed and driven home by my teammates and men I still call friends to this day. Horner, Fraser, Vogels, Bouchard-Hall, Cooke, Peters, Wherry, Moninger….