Pizza. At an Italian restaurant in a strip mall just outside an idyllic town in the Blue Ridge Mountains, seven teenage mountain-bike racers and two coaches crowd around a table. It was a busy Saturday in May 2022 at Virginia’s interscholastic mountain-biking series, known as VAHS.

The team, the Richmond Cycling Corps (RCC), consists of sixth-to-twelfth-graders who attend a variety of schools, but all have lived in or near public housing in the same part of Richmond, Virginia. I’m seated near the far end of the table. To my right, two eighth-grade boys talk excitedly: Chip, with his closely shorn hair and dimples, and Knowledge, a big, curious kid who’s somewhat new to mountain biking. Chip’s trying to persuade Knowledge to participate in a highly competitive racing series that’s part of the National Interscholastic
Cycling Association, or NICA.

Chip is serious about the idea. “Bro,” he says. “NICA?”

Knowledge enjoys mountain biking and loves being part of the team, but he’s on the fence about racing. “°Őłó±đ°ù±đ’s college recruiters at NICA races. And I’m not going to college,” he says. “I’m going to do four years of high school, then another four years of college?”

Chip’s giggling, twisting his soda straw. “Bro?”

Knowledge: “I’m. Not. Racing NICA!”

Chip: “Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro. Bro.”

They both crack up.

Kamari, also in eighth grade and Knowledge’s longtime bestie, looks up from her pizza crust with light hazel eyes and whispers to me, “Where all have you been?” She’s shy—her sibling, Tawante, an RCC alum, told me, “She’s even shy with me, and I’m her brother!”—but she’s eager to explore the world beyond her home. Kamari described a favorite trip she’d been on with the RCC. “We went up to Bryce”—a skiing and mountain-biking resort about two and a half hours northwest of Richmond—“and we made a campfire. We played this game centipede. It’s kind of like hide and seek. The next day, we rode the bike park.” They did downhill runs with big jumps and took the ski lift back to the top.

The older boys are squeezed in together on the opposite side of the table. One of the team’s three coaches, 36-year-old Brad Kaplan, is across from me. He used to be a scout for the Oakland Raiders, but after 12 years he left pro football and decided to raise a family. In 2020, he and his wife and their new baby moved from the Bay Area to Richmond, closer to his wife’s family, where their money would go further. Brad took graduate classes in nonprofit studies. Before working for the RCC, he knew nothing about mountain biking. But he’s comfortable working with young athletes.

Between greasy bites, Brad turns to Wop, a slender freshman with tightly twisted locks that fall just below his ears. “I heard you lost someone this week,” Brad says.

“Yeah,” Wop replies. It was his older brother’s friend, Keshon.

“How old was he?”

“Twenty. He’d just gotten out of jail.” Keshon was shot in Creighton Court, the projects where Wop used to live, near a convenience store where a lot of kids get shot or shot at.

Wop doesn’t know if he’ll go to the funeral. It’s May, and he’s already been to four this year.

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The nine-day trial of Kaitlin Armstrong culminated on Thursday in Austin, Texas, with a guilty verdict for charge of first-degree murder in the shooting death of professional cyclist Moriah Wilson. Prosecutors argued that Armstrong, 35, gunned down Wilson, 25, at an apartment in east Austin on May 11, 2022. Armstrong was subsequently sentenced to 90 years in prison by a 12-member jury on November 17.

• Read about the Moriah Wilson Foundation

As judge Brenda Kennedy read the verdict, emotions inside the courtroom ranged widely. I sat near the back,Ìęalongside a group of local cyclistsÌęwith personal connections to the tragedy, and watched people react. Wilson’s family and friends hugged and thanked prosecutors, while Armstrong’s younger sister, Christine, left the courtroom in tears.

I’m an active participant in the Austin cycling scene—the same community where Armstrong, and her ex-boyfriend Colin Strickland, 36, were members. I’ve also since the first days of the murder. I was compelled to watch the trial in person, to see how prosecutors presented their evidence and how the defense tried to poke holes in the case. I was also there to support the friends of mine who had been impacted by the ordeal.

In a trial overshadowed by grief, moments of intense drama, and even levity, I felt that the mountain of evidence against Armstrong simply proved overwhelming. These were the factors that, in my opinion, ultimately led to her conviction.

Damning Testimony from Friends

Two of Armstrong’s friends proved to be the strongest witnesses for the prosecution.

Before taking the stand on November 8, the trial’s fifth day, cyclist Jacqueline Chasteen told me she felt nervous and at times queasy. She hadn’t wanted to become involved in this murder case but acquiesced when called by the case’s lead detective, Richard Spitler. She said she was doing the right thing.

On the stand, Chasteen described a post-race party in Bentonville, Arkansas, in January 2022, where she and Armstrong shared a drink. At the party, Armstrong told Chasteen that she’d found out Strickland had pursued an intimate relationship with Wilson a few months prior—and that Armstrong and Strickland had been broken up when it occurred.

Chasteen also told the court that Armstrong said she’d wanted to “fucking kill” Wilson. That testimony prompted an immediate interjection from Armstrong’s defense attorney. There was a brief debate over whether Armstrong used the expletive or not. Chasteen maintained Armstrong had used the word. Judge Kennedy was visibly fighting back laughter.

Armstrong’s best friend, Nicole Mertz, provided similarly incriminating information on the stand. She testified that in the fall of 2021, as she was sharing a drink with Armstrong at the Meteor CafĂ© in South Austin, where they often hung out with other cycling friends, Armstrong confided in Mertz that she and Strickland had recently separated. And Armstrong relayed she knew he’d been hanging out with Wilson. Mertz replayed the conversation she and Armstrong had to the jury:

“What would you do if Colin started dating someone else?” Mertz asked.

“I would kill her,” Armstrong said.

More testimony came from Strickland himself, who took the stand on three separate days at the request of the prosecution and defense. He appeared anguished, mumbled his answers into the microphone, and—outside of the courtroom—wore a mask and sunglasses to obscure his face from the cameras. His testimony sometimes sounded begrudging.

Strickland provided eight hours of testimony on the trial’ fourth and fifth days. He closed his eyes as he answered, and told the court that his relationship with Armstrong was at times tumultuous. When asked to clarify by the defense, he described a personal turmoil—his inability to commit to Armstrong. Strickland said he began to hide his correspondence with Wilson, because he knew Armstrong felt disrespected and upset. But he felt he had a right to maintain a professional relationship with a female colleague at the top of their shared sport.

Prosecutors asked Strickland about specific incidents that exemplified Armstrong’s jealousy of Wilson. His testimony also connected Armstrong to the vehicle seen in surveillance footage at the crime scene. The State presented a slow-motion video message sent from Armstrong to Strickland that shows her practicing at a local range with the gun he bought her. To which Armstrong added via text: “The recoil is too intense.”

Under oath, Strickland said that at the time of Wilson’s murder, he loved Armstrong.

“And she loved you, too?” prosecutor Guillermo Gonzalez asked.

“I believed so,” Strickland responded.

After his full day of testimony, Strickland appeared to become angry with the news media. At one point, he went out of his way to nudge a cameraman, and in another instance stepped on the man’s foot.

GPS Data That Proved Crucial

Ultimately, the State’s GPS data and DNA evidence irrefutably proved that Armstrong was at the murder scene. On the trial’s sixth day, Austin Police Department detective Daniel Portnoy presented an animation of tracking data from the Uconnect navigation system in Armstrong’s vehicle; the video showed her SUV circling the East Austin apartment where Wilson was staying for over an hour, then parking nearby moments before Wilson returned from a dinner outing with Strickland.

A surveillance camera later captured audio of Wilson screaming, then two gunshots, and then a third, seconds later. Two minutes after Wilson was killed, the animation of Armstrong’s vehicle showed the SUV driving back to Strickland’s home.

Armstrong’s defense, meanwhile, never provided an explanation of her whereabouts at the time of Wilson’s murder.

On the trial’s eighth day, two different experts testified that Armstrong’s DNA was found on the handlebars and seat of Wilson’s bicycle, which was discovered in the bushes outside of the apartment where the murder took place. Strickland’s DNA, meanwhile, was not present on Wilson’s bike, making the possibility of Armstrong’s DNA transfer via Strickland highly unlikely.

Emotional Moments

Throughout the trial, as well as during the closing statements and verdict, the jury witnessed multiple moments of intense emotion. One of the heaviest scenes happened on day one: Caitlin Cash, one of Moriah Wilson’s closest friends who Wilson was staying with in Austin, recounted how she’d come home on the evening of May 11 to find Wilson prone on the bathroom floor of her apartment. At first, Cash explained, she thought Wilson was just stretching on the tile floor because it was so hot.ÌęBut as she drew closer, she saw all the blood.

As the prosecution played her call to 911, Cash began to cry.

“One, two, three
” Cash counted over the phone as the operator coached her through chest compressions. Cash interjected, “Her brains are leaking.” But the operator urged her to keep going until the medics arrived.

In a second testimony, during the sentencing portion of the trial, Cash said she’d moved back into the apartment. When asked why, Cash said she wanted to face the darkness. She didn’t want the violence that occurred there to have control over her.

I’d never met Cash, but we share a friend in the bike racing community: Rheannon Cunningham, who is also a police detective. On the trial’s opening day I saw Cunningham at the court—she looked shaken as she waited in the courtroom’s lobby for the proceedings to begin. Throughout the trial, Armstrong’s defense, led by attorney Rick Cofer, challenged the investigative work of her colleagues.

Facing a record-high homicide rate in the capital and diminished staff, the Austin Police Department and lead detective Rick Spitler admitted to having made mistakes during the initial investigation of Armstrong. Notably, after being brought in on a valid misdemeanor warrant, Armstrong was allowed to leave the police station due to confusion over her correct birth date.

Moriah Wilson’s father, Eric, says integrity & honesty is so important in personal relationships. This comes after the woman convicted of killing his daughter, Kaitlin Armstrong, was sentenced to 90 years in prison.

— Mills Hayes (@MillsHayesTV)

On the stand, Spitler staunchly defended his work, which ultimately led to a warrant for Armstrong and her capture in Costa Rica, where Armstrong fled following Wilson’s murder. Spitler watched from the back of the courtroom as Armstrong was found guilty.

During the victim-impact portion of the sentencing, Wilson’s brother, Matt Wilson, detailed their tight sibling bond. “My sister had her life taken from her for no reason at all,” he said. After Armstrong was sentenced, Moriah’s father, Matt Wilson, read a to the reporters gathered outside the courthouse.

Armstrong’s younger sister, Christie, was the last witness to testify. She took the stand in an effort to humanize her sister to the jury ahead of their sentencing deliberation. She spoke directly to Kaitlin, who helped raise Christie in their single-parent home, and said, “I’ve always looked up to you.”

On cross-examination, prosecutor Rickey Jones asked Christie if she saw Matt Wilson’s best friend, Moriah Wilson, in the courtroom. Christie replied no. To which Jones said, “His best friend is not here because your sister killed her.”

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The trial for Kaitlin Armstrong, who stands accused of murdering professional gravel racer , began on Wednesday, November 1, at the Travis County courthouse in Austin, Texas.

șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű the court building, two movie crews jockeyed for camera position. Inside, friends and family of both the victim and the accused sat in the rows closest to the judge’s bench. National and local news outlets, true crime podcasters and a handful of curious members of the public occupied the benches toward the back of the room, seated shoulder-to-shoulder. Armstrong, 35, who faces a first-degree murder charge, was in attendance alongside her lawyer, Rick Cofer.

The jury of eight women and six men, which was selected on Monday, October 30, also sat in the room.

Wilson had arrived in Austin on May 11, 2022, in the days preceding Gravel Locos, a 155-mile off-road bike race, and was staying with a close friend. That night, Wilson had gone swimming and eaten dinner with fellow professional gravel bike racer, Colin Strickland, 36. The pair had been romantically linked in the fall of 2021.

At the time of Wilson’s death, Armstrong, a real estate agent and former yoga instructor, and Strickland were in a relationship, and they lived together in south Austin. The two also managed a business together—a firm that restored antique motorhomes called Wheelhouse Mobile. Strickland had lied to Armstrong about where he was and who he was with that evening. Shortly after Strickland drove Wilson back to the east Austin garage apartment where she was staying with a friend, authorities allege that Armstrong arrived and shot Wilson.

After Wilson’s death, Armstrong fled to Costa Rica where police claim she underwent plastic surgery to change her appearance. She was finally arrested on June 29, 2022, after spending 43 days on the run. In the weeks preceding her trial, Armstrong made another escape attempt during a medical transfer in Austin. She has entered a plea of not guilty to the murder charge.

On Wednesday, both the prosecution and defense presented their opening statements for the trial. The Travis County District Attorney’s office outlined the evidence the prosecution intends on presenting during trial, including evidence not yet made public. Prosecutor Ricky Jones told jurors that they would hear audio of Wilson’s last moments, which were picked up by a nearby surveillance camera, followed by two immediate gunshots and finally a third.

Armstrong’s defense, led by Cofer, outlined a plan to debunk the State’s DNA and ballistics evidence, and claimed the State’s case consisted entirely of circumstantial evidence. According to the defense, no eye witness or video footage can place Armstrong at the scene of the crime. In reminding the jury of the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, the prosecution elicited multiple objections for straying beyond the evidentiary outline of an opening statement.

If convicted, Armstrong could serve life in prison. The trial is expected to last two to three weeks, and here’s what the jury is expected to see.

Direct Evidence Against Armstrong

• During the initial investigation, Austin Police detectives obtained home security video of a vehicle closely resembling Armstrong’s Jeep Grand Cherokee at the scene of the crime, near the time Wilson was killed. The vehicle in the video evidence is a dark paint color, has chrome trim, and a hitch-mounted bicycle rack—just like the one owned by Armstrong.ÌęBut the license plate of the vehicle is not visible, nor is the driver. These factors may prevent prosecutors from proving the vehicle belonged to Armstrong, and she was the driver.
• Prior to Wilson’s death, Armstrong and Strickland purchased handguns from an Austin gun store. The bullets from the crime scene matched ammunition found at Armstrong’s home. A ballistics report issued by the Austin Police Department “positively identified” the handgun belonging to Armstrong as having shot the bullets that killed Wilson. While ballistics analysis—methods used to link bullet casings from a crime scene to the weapon that ostensibly fired them—is routinely used in court, the practice has . Critics contend the process lacks peer review and repeatable results. Armstrong’s attorney, Cofer, has called the methodology a “pseudo-science.”
• DNA evidence likely won’t play a role in the case. Because Armstrong and Strickland lived together, DNA belonging to Armstrong would have been present on Strickland when he was with Wilson. The presence of Armstrong’s DNA in the apartment where Wilson was staying is not evidence of her having entered the apartment. This is known as .

Circumstantial Evidence and a “Conscience of Guilt”

Prosecutors will attempt to show that Armstrong’s actions leading up to and following Wilson’s death further establish her as the individual responsible for the murder. In a pre-trial document introducing “evidence of extraneous conduct,” the Travis County District Attorney outlined ten incidents prosecutors believe support their case against Armstrong:

• Less than a day after Austin Police issued an arrest warrant for Armstrong, she allegedly boarded a flight using her sister Christine’s passport. A Federal felony, prosecutors may still charge Armstrong for fraudulent use of a passport. Prosecutors also allege, in her “attempt to avoid arrest and prosecution for murder,” that Armstrong assumed a false identity while living in Costa Rica and received cosmetic surgery under the alias Alison Paige. Since her capture in the Pacific-coast surf and yoga community of Santa Teresa, Costa Rica, Armstrong has been held in a jail outside of Austin. On October 11, Armstrong ran from guards in what authorities are calling a planned escape attempt. An affidavit for escape causing bodily injury, a second-degree felony, states that Armstrong worked out vigorously in the weeks leading up to a medical transfer to a south Austin orthopedic center. Because Armstrong claimed she’d sustained an ankle injury, she was not put in customary leg restraints, and allegedly ran about a mile as she tried to evade capture, including an effort to scale a roughly six foot high wall. Two guards suffered injuries to their arms and knees after falling during their pursuit of Armstrong. While jurors are reminded that a variety of reasons may lead a defendant to flee prosecution, such acts can be admissible at trial. The Travis County DA will aim to convince the jury that Armstrong suffered from a “conscious of guilt” after killing Wilson.
• It appears prosecutors will also introduce testimony from two cyclists who were friends with Armstrong prior to Wilson’s death. Armstrong allegedly told graphic designer and bike racer Nicole Mertz that if Strickland engaged in a serious romantic relationship with another woman, Armstrong would “kill” that person. Armstrong also allegedly told another cyclist, Jacqueline Chasteen, that she had a desire to kill Moriah Wilson. Armstrong had no history of violent conduct, and her friends were not initially compelled to report the statements. However, following Wilson’s death both Chasteen and Mertz contacted the police. Whether such statements constitute premeditation will be up to the jury to decide.

Potential Defense Strategies

A Travis County judge issued a gag ordered shortly after Armstrong retained Cofer as her legal counsel, and the defense has issued only a handful of witness subpoenas ahead of the trial.

However, in two pre-trial motions Armstrong’s defense challenged every facet of the affidavit to throw out the case, and argued an Austin Police detective’s questioning of Armstrong should be excluded as evidence, since Armstrong asked authorities if she needed an attorney present. While the presiding judge denied both motions, the efforts exemplified the aggressiveness with which Cofer and his team are pursuing a defense.

Strickland hasn’t been charged with any crimes in connection with the case, and is not considered a suspect by law enforcement. Additionally, Cofer has not indicated he will pursue an alternative narrative in the death of Wilson. His primary strategy is to create reasonable doubt in the minds of jurors.

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On July 30, 2021, the fastest female sprinters in the world bounced out their nerves and adjusted their blocks in preparation for the semifinals of the 100 meters at the Tokyo Olympics. Amid the prerace tension, in the center of the track, lane five sat conspicuously empty. Just hours before the event, Nigerian sprinter Blessing Okagbare had received a provisional suspension from the Athletics Integrity Unit (AIU), the anti-doping organization that oversees international track and field.

Leading into the Games, the then 32-year-old Okagbare had run the 100 faster than ever, clocking multiple sub-11-second times and equaling the world record at the Nigerian national championships. (The times were unofficial, as judges deemed them wind-assisted.) Without the last-minute sanction, says , CEO of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA), “she was going to be in the final. °Őłó±đ°ù±đ’s no doubt about that, if you look at her times and the drugs she was using to win.”

The investigation had begun months before, after a fellow athlete discovered performance-enhancing drugs—or PEDs—addressed to Okagbare and sent a tip to the USADA. While Okagbare was competing in Slovakia and Nigeria, USADA and the AIU administered two targeted drug tests—one came back positive for growth hormone, and the other showed traces of the banned blood booster EPO. Under the old rules governing American anti-doping, the investigation would likely have concluded with Okagbare’s suspension. But because of a federal law enacted in December 2020, the Rodchenkov Anti-Doping Act (RADA), the FBI and prosecutors from the Department of Justice began an investigation to see whether Okagbare could lead them to a bigger offender.

When Okagbare returned home from Tokyo, federal agents were waiting at the airport. As she stepped onto U.S. soil, an operative with the FBI asked to see her phone. Incriminating messages on Okagbare’s WhatsApp eventually led to doping sanctions for three additional Olympic-level track athletes and a jail sentence for the man who supplied them with PEDs—a Texan named Eric Lira.

In May 2023, Lira, a self-described kinesiologist and naturopath from El Paso, became the first person convicted under the Rodchenkov Act. He faces a maximum ten-year prison sentence and a fine of up to one million dollars.

International Politics and Anti-Doping

Using testimony from Rodchenkov, the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) issued a damning report on Russia’s flagrant cheating and recommended excluding the country’s track and field team from the 2016 Rio Olympics. But the International Olympic Committee, an organization riddled with conflicts of interest and frequently beset with corruption scandals, allowed Russian athletes to compete at subsequent Olympic Games—just not under Russia’s flag.

That lack of accountability on the international stage deeply concerned policy advisers in the U.S. who study the rise of authoritarian governments. Russia’s state-run doping has been viewed by Congress as a national-security issue. If a country can essentially steal Olympic medals, what else might it try to get away with?

“International sport is a lot more important for the rest of the world than it is for us,” says Paul Massaro, a senior policy adviser at the U.S. Helsinki Commission, which monitors human rights around the world and helped draft the Rodchenkov Act. “For Russia and China in particular, they’re massive. °Őłó±đ°ù±đ’s a reason these autocratic countries keep hosting the Games. They view them as a way to say, ‘Hey, look at all the medals we’re winning, look how big and powerful we are. Don’t fuck with us.’”

Don’t fuck with us indeed. Following the release of WADA’s Russia report, two top officials at the Russian anti-doping laboratory mysteriously died. When Rodchenkov, who lives in the U.S. under witness protection, testified in favor of the law bearing his name, he wore a ski mask to conceal his current appearance.

The Rodchenkov Act applies to any event attended by at least one U.S. athlete and three or more international athletes, and broadcast or sponsored by a U.S. business or organization. It specifically targets doping networks: doctors, trainers, and drug suppliers who work with multiple athletes. The law also offers certain protections—for example, an athlete who acted alone can’t be prosecuted under RADA. Nor can one who unintentionally ingested a banned substance.

For two-time U.S. Olympic runner Molly Huddle, the protections helped garner her support for the law. “Much of the criticism I heard was, ‘We don’t need to be throwing more people in jail,’” said Huddle. “Instead, the law focuses on the outer rings of doping conspiracies.”

Additionally, RADA has extraterritorial jurisdiction, meaning that citizens of other countries involved in doping networks can be arrested in the U.S. or charged under the law and then extradited back to their home country. This power could be applied to cases like that of Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva, who tested positive at the Beijing Olympics in 2022 when she was 15.

“If evidence is collected on Russian individuals who were involved in doping that athlete and defrauding those Olympics, and then those individuals come to the U.S., they can be arrested at the airport,” says Massaro. “We have the World Cup and the Olympics coming to the United States within the next five years. °Őłó±đ°ù±đ’s an expectation that these should be the cleanest Games ever.”

A Method for Exposing Drug Rings

Other messages showed that Okagbare sought Lira’s guidance as the authorities closed in on her. Ahead of the Tokyo Olympics, on June 13, 2021, a USADA agent arrived at Okagbare’s home to collect a sample for an unscheduled test. Anti-doping authorities suspected Okagbare was using EPO, among other substances. She didn’t answer the door.

Instead, she messaged Lira: “So I took 2000ui of the E yesterday, is it safe to take a test this morning?” Lira replied: “Good day, 2000 ui is a low dosage.”

“Remember I took it Wednesday and then yesterday again,” Okagbare wrote. “I wasn’t sure so I didn’t take a test. I just let them go so it will be a missed test.”

The close call didn’t faze Okagbare. Nine days later, she ran 10.63 seconds to match the wind-assisted world record in the 100. Okagbare messaged Lira: “Hola amigo. Eric my body feel so good. I am sooooo happy Ericccccccc. Whatever you did, is working so well.” Lira would later reply, “What you did is going to help you for the upcoming events. You are doing your part and you will be ready to dominate.”

Eventually Okagbare’s luck ran out, and one of the tests came back positive for human growth hormone. On the day of her provisional suspension ahead of the Olympic semifinals, on July 30, 2021, she sent Lira a copy of her positive HGH test result and wrote, “Call me urgently. I don’t understand.” Lira advised Okagbare to claim she’d consumed contaminated meat, a known cause of inadvertent positive tests.

Later, faced with potential jail time, Lira became less supportive. In May 2023, in a Manhattan courtroom, he pleaded guilty to the Rodchenkov Act charges. He also provided USADA with information that led to the sanctioning of Okagbare’s Nigerian teammate Divine Oduduru; triple jumper Sabina Allen, who competes for Jamaica; and Jamaican-born sprinter Alex Wilson, who competes for Switzerland. More sanctions may be forthcoming from Lira’s case.

In the past, similar criminal investigations that treated doping as fraud proved effective in exposing athletes. Using search warrants and subpoenas in the notorious BALCO scandal, which unveiled a doping ring operating out of a California laboratory, federal investigators discovered rampant PED use among baseball stars Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens and Olympic sprinter Marion Jones. In 2012, after federal agents forced teammates of seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong to testify under oath, they uncovered an extensive, deeply entrenched doping program.

But without an apparatus like the Rodchenkov Act in place, the case against Armstrong eventually stalled. Federal prosecutors lacked a strong legal framework to take it to trial, and the investigation didn’t yield meaningful potential criminal penalties. A fraud case involving Armstrong and those complicit in his team’s doping program was ultimately dropped by the U.S. Attorney’s office. USADA did eventually use the information obtained by federal agents to issue a lifetime ban on Armstrong.

Hopes For a Cleaner Future

I raced on the U.S. national cycling team and at the elite level during the Armstrong era, and later wrote about the sport’s culture of doping both at home and abroad. I saw how team doctors, owners, and racing officials fostered cheating yet often escaped accountability when busts occurred. Athletes who tested positive were punished, and the investigations stopped there. I knew that few cheaters acted alone; doping flourished in cycling because enablers existed at every level. After watching case after case fail to excise drug use from the sport, the message seemed to be that doping did in fact pay.

With the Rodchenkov Act, authorities now have the power to ascend the PED chain from athlete to coach to supplier and beyond. By sharing information with law enforcement and threatening criminal prosecution, anti-doping agencies can stymie entire doping conspiracies, not just individual athletes.

“Sport affects culture. And if sport tips toward the disempowering, ugly side of competition, then a lot of things are going to tip that way,” says Huddle. “It’s like letting a part of your body be sick and being like, ‘Whatever, it’s not going to affect the rest of me.’ But it will eventually.”

Not everybody likes the Rodchenkov Act as much as I do. The World Anti Doping Agency actually lobbied against it. In a statement, WADA president Witold Banka expressed concern over the law’s extraterritorial jurisdiction and noted the exclusion of U.S. professional and collegiate leagues like the NFL and NCAA. “These leagues were originally included in the act but were subsequently removed without explanation,” he said. “If it is not good enough for American sports, why is it being imposed on the rest of the world?”

When I asked Tygart what safeguards existed to prevent overreach, he pointed to the due-process protections already built into the U.S. criminal justice system. In the case against Lira, the Rodchenkov Act survived its first legal challenge. A pretrial motion filed by Lira’s lawyer claimed that the law violated the Constitution, in that Lira’s right to free speech protected his messages with Okagbare. A judge ultimately denied the motion, stating that “speech integral to criminal conduct” isn’t protected.

The Rodchenkov Act will face further challenges and additional scrutiny. If it’s used as intended, those who’ve accrued wealth and power by corrupting sport—in the U.S. and around the world—will be held to account. If successful, the law will bring about more ethical competition, and perhaps a more just society.

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One: Weapons Handling

Colin Strickland believed that every woman should own a gun. It was a feminist conviction of a sort. He would argue that, as a dude—a tall, tan, strapping dude—he enjoyed a freedom that many women don’t. He could go most places and do most things without feeling threatened. He rode his bike on desolate gravel roads, then parked his truck wherever he liked and slept inside a Spartan trailer he hauled behind him. As a professional bike racer, he lived a remarkably carefree life, close to the best he could have imagined for himself. But he was aware of his male privilege, too.

Strickland’s girlfriend, Kaitlin Armstrong, called him one night in the summer of 2020, sobbing and panicked. A belligerent man—maybe intoxicated, maybe suffering some kind of mental breakdown, maybe both—kept banging on the door of her Austin, Texas, apartment. The guy eventually went away, but the incident terrified her. Another time, she was accosted by an angry man in a grocery store parking lot. Now and then, creeps followed her while she rode on bike paths and made her feel unsafe. Strickland could only imagine how these incidents felt to Armstrong, a lithe yoga instructor with auburn hair that fell across her shoulders. He knew that men commit nearly 80 percent of violent crime in the U.S., and he wondered: Why should a woman spend her life living in fear? Maybe a gun would make Kaitlin feel empowered, more independent, free to live the way she chose.

It’s easy to buy a weapon in Texas. So one day around the beginning of 2022, Strickland and Armstrong rode their bikes to McBride’s, a family-owned gun shop near the University of Texas. Armstrong picked out a 9mm SIG Sauer P365 pistol and held it up to get a feel for its weight. Strickland picked out a handgun, too. As a kid, he’d lived in the rural Hill Country west of Austin, an area with a lot of firearms. But his family didn’t own guns, and he’d fired a shotgun maybe once in his life. The motivation to buy one now came from his fascination with machines; he was drawn to the engineering and construction.

In their relationship, Armstrong, who’d once worked in finance, managed the money, while Strickland often paid for things. After providing the background information required by federal law for licensed gun dealers, he asked the salesperson if they needed to have Armstrong’s information, too. “No,” he was told. “In the state of Texas, you can gift someone a gun.”

Strickland paid for the pistols and gave one to Armstrong. They had also acquired two boxes of ammunition, one for practice and another marked “9mm JAG,” a bullet designed to break apart on impact and cause additional harm inside the body—increasing the chances that it would kill its intended target.

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Attorneys for Kaitlin Armstrong suffered a setback on Wednesday as a Texas judge struck down their motion to toss evidence gathered by the Austin Police Department from the upcoming murder trial for cyclist Moriah Wilson.

Armstrong, 34, is accused of shooting and killing Wilson on May 11, 2022 at a rental home in Austin. Her trial is set to begin in June, 2023.

The motions filed by Armstrong’s attorney’s sought to omit an interview she gave to detective Katy Conner on May 12 because police had not read her Miranda rights. A second motion, a “Franks Challenge,” sought to omit the arrest affidavit for first-degree murder written by detective Richard Spitler. The motion claimed the document contained falsehoods and intentional omissions of facts from the case.Ìę

The motions put into jeopardy much of the evidence needed by the Travis County District Attorney to effectively prosecute the case against Armstrong. But ultimately, Travis County Judge Brenda Kennedy ruled that both pieces of evidence can be included in the trial.Ìę

“There was no evidence of any intentional disregard for the truth,” Kennedy said in court.

The ruling is the latest wrinkle in Armstrong’s battle against prosecutors. Police believe she shot Wilson shortly after Wilson went swimming and had dinner with Armstrong’s boyfriend, former professional cyclist Colin Strickland. Authorities issued an arrest warrant for Armstrong on May 20 kicking off a weeks-long search for her. Authorities apprehended her in Costa Rica 43 days later.

Appearing in court in jail-issue black and white striped pants and a maroon shirt, Armstrong appeared stoic during the pretrial hearings. The pre-trial hearing lasted nearly nine hours, and Armstrong’s attorneys Rick Cofer and Mark Pryor grilled detectives Conner and Spitler on the witness stand.Ìę

Police initially arrested Armstrong the day after Wilson’s murder, bringing her in for questioning on a misdemeanor warrant dating back to 2018. Prior to questioning Armstrong, detective Conner was wrongly informed that the misdemeanor warrant wasn’t valid, and thus she did not read Miranda rights to Armstrong. Instead, she told Armstrong that she was not under arrest and free to leave if she chose. Conner then proceeded to question Armstrong about Wilson’s death.

During the roughly ten-minute interview, Armstrong asked if she needed an attorney three times and requested permission to leave five times.Ìę

In her ruling, Judge Kennedy said that, prior to conducting a voluntary interview, law enforcement is under no obligation to read Miranda rights to a suspect who’s not officially in custody. Further, the Judge stated that Armstrong’s repeated questions, regarding the need for an attorney, did not amount to a definitive request for counsel.

Questioning Conner, Pryor said, “The only way she’s leaving that interview room is if you facilitate it.” Conner stated that had Armstrong walked toward the door, she would have let Armstrong leave. Since police had driven Armstrong to the interview, Pryor wondered how she would have gotten home had Conner not arranged a ride. “She could Uber,” Conner said.

An investigative expert provided by the defense, Douglas Deaton, said during the hearing that a suspect doesn’t need to state a “magical formula” of words in order to invoke a right to counsel.Ìę

As Cofer questioned Spitler, he walked back and forth across the courtroom, claiming the affidavit written by Spitler made Armstrong appear to be a “crazy, jealous person.” Waving toward reporters in the courtroom, Cofer said, “All these people in the media believe there was a love triangle, it’s all made up.”Ìę

Cofer said recent text exchanges between Strickland and Wilson were not those of romantic partners, but rather pertained to mundane topics like what tire size was most applicable for a specific terrain. Cofer did not appear to sway Judge Kennedy, who ultimately reminded him to conduct his questioning from the defense counsel’s table.

Prosecutors asked detective Spitler if he believed the information in the arrest affidavit to be accurate at the time it was produced. They argued that even if the document contained some inaccuracies, those errors would not invalidate it.Ìę

In siding with the Travis County DA, Judge Kennedy stated the defense’s Franks Challenge did not meet the standard set by case precedent. In spite of any possible errors, Judge Kennedy said, the affidavit’s remaining content was sufficient to establish probable cause.Ìę

Judge Kennedy’s ruling allowed for the state’s case against Kaitlin Armstrong to move forward to trial. The trial had previously been set to start on October 24.

The post Kaitlin Armstrong’s Legal Defense Suffers Setback in Moriah Wilson Murder Case appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

The not-so-small acts of kindness stuck out to Luke Konson and Daniel Balserak. Local anglers shared priceless intel about how to catch their state’s official fish and, Konson says, “Got us onto spots we had no business being.”

In Hawaii, a family let the two borrow their minivan to get around the island, and a sailor offered the teenage boys a place to stay. Trying to catch channel catfish in Iowa, they pulled into a Raising Cane’s restaurant for directions and met a man who recognized them from a story in a local paper. He’d read about their mission to catch the state fish in every U.S. state. He wished them luck, then handed them $200.

A fishing guide in Alaska donated time and resources. A governor honored them at the state capitol. Once, they were stuck on a snowy pass in New Mexico, without cell service and 20 miles from the nearest town, when a guy in a four-wheel-drive Jeep reversed back up the mountain and towed them to safety. And during one of their lowest moments, stranded at an auto repair shop in North Carolina with a wrecked van, a stranger booked them a hotel room. All this because they’d set out to catch some fish.

Luke Konson grew up fishing with his dad, Mickey, at a neighborhood pond in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, D.C. As a teenager, he began migrating to more unique and adventurous fishing locations.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit during the spring of Luke’s senior year in high school. He was heading to Clemson University in the fall of 2020, but the college delayed the semester five weeks and then moved classes online. So Luke and his dad got to thinking: what else might he do? To their knowledge, no one had ever tried to catch the state fish in every U.S. state—sort of like birding’s Big Year challenge but for fish.

Nearly every state government has officially named at least one state fish—save Iowa and Ohio, where the state fish designation remains unofficial. Many coastal states claim two state fish, one for saltwater and one for freshwater. In conceptualizing his quest, Konson decided he would try to catch either the saltwater or freshwater fish within every state’s borders.

He dubbed the quest Fish All Fifty and ran the idea by his buddy Daniel Balserak, who’d also enrolled at Clemson. Balserak, who had similarly been taught to fish by his father at age four, managed to convince his own parents to let him go. In August 2020, the two 18-year-olds loaded up the Konson family minivan and prepared to set out.

They divided the project into four different trips. The first leg covered the Northeast—a circular route up to Maine, over to western Pennsylvania, down to West Virginia, and then back home. On their second outing, they fished 20 states in the Midwest and Southeast, venturing up to Minnesota, down to Texas, and over to Florida. But they caught the wrong fish in Alabama—the Alabama bass, not the largemouth—so in January 2021 they headed back through the South and toward the Rockies. Historic winter lows made the fishing harder, so they retreated before making it to the Southwest. In April, they set out again, starting in New Mexico and the Four Corners, making their way to California, up the West Coast, and back over to the Dakotas.

Each outing taught them something new. In their first state, Maryland, Konson and Balserak spent three days fishing for striped bass before finally catching two thumb-sized specimens. “Wow, this is going to be really tough if every state takes this long,” Konson recalls saying. Seven different states along the East Coast have recognized the striped bass as the official saltwater fish.

Turns out, Konson says, “Every state took way longer.”

Early in the project, Konson and Balserak discovered that each state’s fish also told a story about its people, past and present. Following their struggles in Maryland, they headed to Rhode Island, where a tackle shop employee clued them in on the trick to catching stripers: fish the high tide at night from a bridge. They set their alarms for 3 A.M. When they climbed out of the van, where they usually slept in the front seats, the duo found the spot packed with anglers. “Seeing what each fish meant to the people in that state, it made each one a little bit special,” Konson says.

In the West, especially, the naming of the state fish often serves a conservation purpose. “Those states were learning processes for us,” Balserak says. In New Mexico, they hiked more than 80 miles, desperately searching for the Rio Grande cutthroat. Finally, a kindly fly shop in Taos mapped out a can’t-miss spot. “When you put in the work and catch a fish that colorful, there’s no better feeling,” Konson says. Fishing in the West, they came to understand how generations of Indigenous peoples had subsisted predominantly on fish like trout and salmon. And how our modern meddling—through the stocking of non-native species, land development, and climate change—has hurt native fish populations. According to Trout Unlimited, of the 28 native trout species and subspecies in the United States, three are extinct and six are listed as threatened or endangered. Ninety two percent of all native trout face some level of risk.

Less revered fish face challenges, too. In Arkansas, Konson and Balserak spent more than three weeks trying to catch an alligator gar in the Arkansas River. They even fished with Mark Spitzer, the expert angler and author who helped River Monsters TV series host Jeremy Wade catch one—but no luck. Spitzer eventually told them, “Honestly, your chances of catching two alligator gar in Arkansas are very low.” The prehistoric fish, which can weigh up to 300 pounds, has been decimated by bowfishing (and other causes) in its recognized state of Arkansas.

Finally, Konson and Balserak conceded and headed to the Trinity River in Texas, where they each caught an alligator gar. “There was something that felt almost wrong about taking those out of the water,” Balserak says. With its hardened scales and protruding teeth, Konson says, the fish “don’t even look like animals.” But
did they fudge that fish? Technically, Konson says, the alligator gar is Arkansas’s primitive state fish, not the official state fish. “It was a bit of loophole,” he admits.

Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson still honored their efforts. He invited the two to the capitol and gave them a signed document acknowledging them as official state travelers. Hutchinson had previously bestowed a similar honor on a ten-year-old boy named Henry Foster. In 2018, Foster wrote the Arkansas state legislature and started a Change.org petition requesting lawmakers help protect alligator gar with recognition from the state government. In 2019, Hutchinson signed the designation into law, with Foster in attendance.

Bearing witness to the negative human impact on fish species across the United States—and our ability to right some of those wrongs—affected both Konson and Balserak. When Konson enrolled at Clemson in the fall of 2021, he chose wildlife and fisheries biology as his major.

Of course, state governments vote on more than feel-good bills about state fish. Around the time the two visited with Governor Hutchinson, in the spring of 2021, the Arkansas legislature was drafting bills that limited transgender participation in youth sports and access to gender-affirming care. (Hutchinson signed the anti-trans youth sports bill but vetoed the gender-affirming care bill, calling it “too extreme.” The Arkansas legislature overrode his veto.)

The legislation, which became a national flashpoint on transgender rights, was just one of many politically and culturally fraught issues Konson and Balserak found themselves physically passing through as they traveled around the country trying to catch fish. In August 2020, in a New York City quieted by COVID-19 restrictions, they donned cloth masks and posed with their fishing rods in an eerily empty Times Square. “That was sobering,” Balserak says. Sure, they were on an adventure, but much of the country was just trying to survive.

Driving across the United States, subsisting on Slim Jims and bulk bags of cereal, the teenagers became accustomed to encounters with law enforcement. On the nights when they couldn’t find a Walmart parking lot to sleep in, they often got “the knock” well-known to #vanlifers—waking up to a cop peering through the window at their mess of tackle and telling them to move along. Once, at 3 A.M., two officers asked Konson and Balserak (who are both white) to get out of the van and spoke to them separately. Balserak says, “We didn’t have anything to hide. I was just scared Luke was going to say something that wasn’t compatible.”

“We had like eight fishing rods inside our van,” Konson says. “It was pretty clear we were telling the truth or just had a very elaborate cover-up.”

A couple officers ended up following them on social media @fishallfifty.

Everywhere they went, people seemed to connect with their story and often helped the duo get to their next state to catch their next fish. “Seeing all this conflict, but through all of it, there were so many people willing to help and do what they can,” Konson says.

Three states remained as Fish All Fifty came to its conclusion in late 2021. The app FishBrain (like Strava but for fishing) helped fund their travel to Hawaii. One of their online followers pointed them to a marina in downtown Honolulu, where they caught the reef triggerfish—in Hawaiian, the humuhumunukunukuapuaa. Then, with support from another app, Alaska FishTopia, Konson and Balserak flew from Hawaii to Anchorage. Their dads met them there. The fathers and sons traveled to the Kenai River, one of the country’s most revered fisheries. Using barbless hooks, they cast for the heavily protected king salmon, leaving the fish safely in the water while photographing their catch.

They saved their home state of Virginia for last. In the fall of 2021, days before heading off to school for their freshman semester at Clemson, Konson and Balserak drove up into the Shenandoah Mountains. There, they caught their final fish: two small but colorful brook trout. They put the young fish back into the churning water and let them swim away.

The post These Teens Spent Their Gap Year Hooking State Fish All Over America appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

When I moved back in with my parents after college, my dad’s hearing was waning. My folks, Don and Lynn, lived in Alexandria, Virginia, south of Washington, D.C., on the Potomac River. It was 2003, and I’d relocated to the area to race bikes for a local elite team and compete in the summerlong calendar of national-level events held up and down the East Coast.

At the time, it was hard to tell whether my dad was in denial about his hearing loss—he was only 60—or just figured it was your problem, not his. You’d say something in a completely normal tone of voice, and seemingly frustrated, he’d snap back with a variety of responses: “What?” “Speak up!“ “Stop mumbling!” or “Enunciate,” emphasizing nun, in case you didn’t get it.

“Dad!” I’d yell at him. “You’re literally a caricature of an old man losing his hearing.”

He seemed more proud of that fact than embarrassed by it, and besides, in the basement he’d devised a solution: a cutting-edge home-theater system, complete with a projector TV and a closet full of warm, humming electronics. He’d come back from a long day in D.C., where he worked as an assistant to the inspector general in the Department of Health and Human Services, take off his suit, enjoy dinner and a couple glasses of wine, then unwind on the sectional couch and crank whatever he was watching to eleven.

Be damned his twentysomething bike-bum son who was in the room down the hall, trying to get to bed so he could wake up and ride five hours before working a shift at the bike shop. I’d try to ignore the wall-vibrating bass, put on a pair of headphones, or squish a pillow over my head. But inevitably, the best option was just to go out and join him. In the summer, when the Tour de France was on, I was happy to.

This was near the height of Armstrong hysteria, after all. A small cable channel called Outdoor Life Network had bought the rights to broadcast the Tour in the U.S., and for the first time we could watch the race in its entirety, all 21 stages. Prior to that, my family, along with every other American bike-racing fan, had consumed video coverage of the Tour via a Sunday afternoon special or a daily 30-minute highlight reel on ESPN.

That year, Lance was chasing his fifth Tour win. Each stage went live with the sunrise every morning and was then repackaged into a two-hour prime-time show. My dad appreciated the commentary and analysis from °żłą±·â€™s polished British announcers, Paul Sherwen and Phil Liggett. But he would laugh out loud at the hijinks of Bob “Bobke” Roll, the quirky former pro with thinning hair and imperfect teeth who brought a distinctly American flair to the Tour coverage, in particular, an inability to correctly pronounce the event. His version: “Tour day čó°ùČčČÔłŠ±đ.”

For three generations, cycling had swirled around my family. My dad inherited a passion for the sport from his uncle, then passed it down to my brother and me. My parents fell in love on a bike ride across the Golden Gate Bridge. My brother competed in his first mountain-bike race in the eighth grade, and I followed not long after. We were exposed to classic road races like and via weather-beaten magazines and grainy VHS tapes. In college, when I became obsessed with road racing myself, I read rider diaries from the Tour on burgeoning cycling websites like . It seemed somewhat surreal to my dad and me that we could now watch the Tour live from thousands of miles away.

Bike racing is unlike any other sport I know of. It’s an endurance sport on vehicles. A vehicle sport on open roads. A team sport with an individual winner. Life’s metaphors, its various struggles and successes, seem to play out in a more dramatic fashion in a bike race. At least they did for me and my dad. Riders conquer mountains and succumb to crashes on the way back down. They surge ahead of the group with a violent effort called an attack, form temporary allegiances to share the draft and break the wind, and then try to dispatch each other in the closing kilometers. A rider will lead the race alone for a hundred-some-odd kilometers and then get gobbled up by the charging peloton just meters from the finish.

For my dad and me, watching the Tour became akin to an annual fishing trip or a multi-day hike. Growing up, I spent countless hours pedaling behind him on a shiny aluminum tandem, exploring rural North Texas roads, where we lived in the nineties, and tackling the rocky singletrack overlooking Lake Grapevine. When my dad moved to D.C. in the 2000s, he lost his tight-knit group of bike-club friends, and also his impetus to ride. I was too strong, or too cool, to get out with him then. We didn’t bond on our bikes anymore, but watching the Tour, we came to know each other as adults.

My dad gave me his hearty laugh and his boyish eyes, but he could also be stoic, gruff, and comically reserved with his emotions. He’d ask how my car was running, and I understood that he loved me. Watching the Tour together, I cherished that,Ìęthough my dad had never competed, he understood the sport, and through it, he seemed to understand me. Despite its impracticality, he supported my decision to pursue bike racing professionally. He was good at asking questions, and he didn’t fully fall for Lance’s fairy tale. Over the years, we watched heroic performances with a healthy amount of skepticism but also shared an appreciation for underdogs. An unlikely hero would emerge, and we’d root for him to beat the odds.

The post My Dad’s Last Tour de France appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

°Őłó±đ°ù±đ’s the Internet of a balance-bike race in Japan. A long row of pre-school-aged kids, aboard low-slung bikes with no brakes or pedals, takes off from a start ramp like a pack of greyhounds. The kids kick their bikes up to speeds that would make most adults uncomfortable, and carve through the course’s maze of sharp corners with tenacity and grace.

A few kids don’t make it. They splay out across the track in a pile of elbow and kneepads and full-face helmets. And then, there’s one kid, coming from behind, who executes a perfect pass on his recently potty-trained competitors and crosses the line first, his chest forward in an elated victory celebration.Ìę

When I first learned of the , and considered taking my own three-year-old son, August, to the event, this was the gulp-inducing scene I envisioned. A national series of four races, the Strider Cup is organized by the and culminates in September with the . Strider bills its race series as an all-inclusive event, a festival thatÌęexposes your child to the positive aspects of competition at an early age. Yet, the thought of my own son lining up against Strider prodigies from Japan (who swept Worlds in 2016) made my palms sweat.

I’ve been an avid bike racer for more than 20 years, but August has yet to inherit any of my competitive instinct or passion for unadulterated speed. It’s not that he doesn’t like lining up. At a Thursday-night criterium race where we live in Austin, August eagerly awaits the kids' race, then hurries to the start line ahead of everyone else. But when the announcer shouts, “Go!” he’s quickly left behind, more intent on stopping to push over all the orange cones than on beating his competitors. His record is impeccable: out of a half dozen or so kids races started, he hasÌęfinished last in every one.

Still, the siren song of such a high-caliber event was too good to pass up. “A World Cup!” I kept telling my wife. I recruited my parents as support staff, August’s Grandpa (photography) and his Nana (team snack dispenser), and on a sunny weekend in early May, we headed up to the big race.

I knew I’d need to shelve my desire to winÌęso that August could develop his own. But there were other elements that I worried about, too: that I was pushing August into something that was my thing, not his; that he might become overwhelmed by the immensity of the event, and permanently scarred by bike racing; that he might fail.

As we traveled to Fort Worth, I’d never been more nervous.

Modern balance bikes for kids, as we know them, were invented by a man named Ryan McFarland, the founder of Strider. The origin story goes like this: McFarland, who hales from , was an avid mountain biker who wanted to share his passion for riding with his then two-year-old son, Bode. But he found that cumbersome tricycles and training wheels limited the things he loved about riding—going off-road, adventuring, sending sweet jumps.Ìę

So, as a long time tinkerer with a couple of patents to his name already, McFarland hacked up a standard kids' bike and blow torched it back together without pedals or a chain. “Everything that was adding weight or complexity, I pulled off the bike,” McFarland says.Ìę

He got so many inquiries about the unique bike from people who saw Bode ripping around on it, that in 2007 he started Strider. The company boomed, and now itsÌęname is synonymous with balance bikes. To date, Strider has sold more than 1.6 million bikes, which are distributed in over 75 countries. (McFarland credits his Strider distributor in Japan for the popularity of balance bike racing in that country.)

Today, anyone who's serious about teaching a kid to ride at an early age will likely eschewÌętraining wheels in favor of a balance bike. Dozens of different companies now sell them, including every major bike brand. This transformation in kids' bike technology has led to an entire generation of toddlers who rip on two wheels.

Among my group of dad friends in Austin—roadies and mountain bikers who might pull up their Strava feed over a pint of beer—the kids who start out on balance bikes often master cycling at a mind-bogglingly early age. One buddy’s kid switched to a pedal bike at just two years old, and was churning out 20-mile rides by three. Another friend’s preschool-aged son started out riding his balance bike at , and only a year or so later, could drop in on a quarter pipe.

On the day of the race, we arrived at to a scene worthy ofÌęthe title “Cup.” The roughly 600-foot-long course had been laid out across an expansive brick-lined square, encircled by downtown skyscrapers. The course featured a faux tunnel and small ramps (on which kids who gained enough speed could catch air), as well as a water obstacle—built-in fountains that would intermittently bubble up from the bricks, causing some kids to splash in glee and others to swerve widely off-course.Ìę

August approached the venue with hesitation. Adding to my race-day anxiety, the 1 p.m. start-time for the three-year-old class coincided with his naptime. But after a series of practice laps during the noontime lunch break, he gradually warmed up.

“When you see someone in front of you, go faster and try to pass them,” I heard one dad explain to his son, a kid adorned with a full-face helmet and GoPro. Though we were all here to race (a relative term), among the 200-plus competitors, plus their parents and grandparents and friends, a communal spirit prevailed over a competitive rivalry. A grandmother wearing a Fox Racing shirt let me borrow some wet wipes.Ìę

The three-year-old race began with a parade lap for all the participants, a heart-melting horde of gleeful kids making, “Vroom, vroom” noises and pin balling off one another. Then, lane assignments for the opening heats appeared on a large monitor. August was in the sixth heat, next to a red-faced little boy named Lane. Lane’s dad, decked out in NASCAR gear, told me Lane had gotten his first ever trophy in a soccer game earlier that morning, “Maybe he’ll get another this afternoon?” He also conceded a complete meltdown was an equally likely possibility.

The Strider Cup staffers amazingly managed the chaos and got the kids lined up on the wooden start ramp. August rolled past a longhaired little boy fighting back tears, and took his place near a girl in a pink polka-dot skirt at the start gate. “When they say ‘Go!’ You go,” I reminded him. A kid with dinosaur spikes adorning his helmet began clacking his bike’s front wheel against the foot-high starting gate, and all the other kids followed suit, “CLACK, CLACK, CLACK, CLACK.”

I spotted the founder of Strider bikes, McFarland, leaning over the course railing amid the proud parents, holding his camera phone aloft in eager anticipation. The start gate dropped, and the kids took off at a pace just slightly above walking speed. This was not Japan.Ìę

August trotted around the course with a look of amused intent, over the ramps, across the gurgling fountain, and through the tunnel. An exuberant announcer gave a play-by-play and read off nearly every child’s name, booming, “Here come’s August
Dill!”Ìęas my son crossed the line. A monitor displayed his placing not long after the finish, eighth out of eleven in his heat—finally breaking his streak of last places.Ìę

Between heats, our team coalesced, August’s Nana doted over him, saying, “Here, boo,” as she helped him guzzle a few yogurt smoothie samples. “Sugar doping,” we joked.ÌęHis Grandpa contorted his body and his DSLR to capture August in action. As August lined up for his second and final race of the day (slated in the slowest group of the championship heats), I asked him, “Are you going to go fast?”Ìę

This time, he answered, “Yes! I’m going to go soooo fast!”Ìę

In the final championship race,Ìęa three-year-old from Topeka, Kansas, named Brayson Yingling took off like a bowling ball from the start ramp, establishing an early lead and ultimately defending a Strider Cup title he’d previously won as a two-year-old.Ìę

Pasha Ali, the son of a professional racecar driver who’d been promoted as a top contender preceding the race, recovered from a poor start, passed a boy who overcooked the final turn and finished on the podium. On the podium as the cameras flashed, PashaÌętook his sippy cup, shook it up, and sprayed water everywhere, just like he’d seen racecar drivers do with champagne bottles.Ìę

August, exuberant and exhausted, chased a roly poly across Sundance SquareÌęwhileÌęI chatted with McFarland. I told him I’d seen him recording the races, and asked if all these years later, this scene still excites him. He said he remained mesmerized by, “all the tiny dramas playing out across the racecourse. The little defeats, and victories.” He divulged the purpose in the exaggerated importance of the event—to give little kids a chance to do something big. Here, the only failure was not trying, he said.Ìę

As I stood there, watching August try to make shapes out of lines on the paper of a notebook he’d pilfered from me, I decided to stop worrying whether or not he would share my love of riding, or if the experiences I was exposing him to were the right ones. I decided that when it comes to be being a dad, I’d approach it the same as I do any bike race.Ìę

I’d line up and do the best I could.

The post Inside the Cut-Throat World of Toddler Bike Racing appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

On Monday, Tour de France champion Chris Froome toed the start line at Colorado’s USA Pro Cycling Challenge for a weeklong bike race through the Rockies. It's his first World Tour stage race since thrashing a field of international stars on the steep slopes of the Alps and Pyrenees.

Ìę

It's also Froome’s return to a pressroom full of hounding journalists, and an audience filled with passionate but cynical cycling fans. For as fast as Froome rides, he can’t seem to out pedal the persistent doping questions.

This was evident at a news conference on the first rest day of the Tour de France. The morning after Froome decimated the field on Mount Ventoux, reporter after reporter asked the eventual Yellow Jersey winner, How do we know for sure you’re clean? We’ve been burned before. Prove it to us.

Finally, exasperated with the inquisition, Froome’s director on Sky Pro Cycling, Dave Brailsford, the microphone.

Look, Brailsford said, “We’ve wracked our brains thinking about ways we can satisfy people and make these questions go away.”

Then, Brailsford waved his hand at the audience—at all of us, really.

“Why don’t you collectively get organized,” he said. “And you tell me what we could do, so you wouldn’t have to ask the question?”

Not longer after Brailsford posed his challenge, șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű accepted. In the weeks between the end of the Tour de France and the start of the Pro Cycling Challenge, I spoke with pro cyclists, anti-doping advocates, sports scientists, and psychologists. I asked these experts, if there was a verifiable way for Chris Froome to prove to all of us he’s clean? Then, I asked myself, why should he have to?

Before we explore the outer reaches of the anti-doping universe, lets first examine the current state of the grassroots effort to clean up pro cycling: The once vaunted summit resulted in little more than holding a panel in which a three time Tour de France winner sat next to a Twitter persona. sells a fair amount of rubber bracelets but doesn’t seem to do much else. The physiologists and sports doctors who hold up pVAM (a formula that predicts climbing speeds) and estimated wattage as a golden barometer of doping suspicion have been by the people who initially developed the use of power data in cycling, like Dr. Andy Coggan. The Kimmage Fund, set up to help fight corruption within cycling’s governing body, the UCI, ended up itself.

Even David Walsh, the Sunday Times reporter who crusaded against Armstrong, has been on social-media for claiming Froome is clean. Noting the infighting consuming the anti-doping movement without Armstrong as a focal point, Bicycling magazine editor-at-large, Bill Strickland, tweeted, “I guess when the gladiators slay the lion they end up fighting each other for sport.”

Into this fray, I introduce an Australian lawyer and bike racing fanatic named Teague Czislowski, who claims he can prove an athlete is clean beyond any doubt. (Who the heck is Teague Czislowski, you ask? Who cares, I answer. This anti-doping movement is anyone’s game. It’s the Wild West.)

Czislowski’s initiative is called the , and it contains nine steps for official authentication as a clean athlete. The first five steps focus on full transparency. An athlete must sign an anti-doping contract, divulge their associations with doctors, trainers, and coaches, and offer up anything else that might help prove they’re clean—blood data, training schedules, injury history, power files, etc.

The sixth and seventh steps of Clean Protocol certification introduce novel, but not unfounded, means of assessing an athlete’s integrity. In the sixth step, the athlete undergoes a psychological test called the Performance Enhancement Attitudes Scale (PEAS). The PEAS was developed by Andrea Petroczi as part of his doctoral dissertation in 2002 and published with a colleague in 2009, and utilizes a series of open-ended questions to assess an athlete’s moral stance toward performance enhancing drug use and cheating. For example, athletes who use supplements are more likely to resort to doping.

A by the World Anti-Doping Agency on athletes who took the PEAS stated that, “Participants with higher levels of moral functioning had more negative attitudes towards PEDs.”

The next and final Clean Protocol step is deception testing. But Czislowski doesn’t rely on polygraph machines. They’re proven inaccurate. Instead, the Protocol outlines five different, cutting edge methods of catching someone in a lie, from ferretting out subconscious associations, to eye ball tracking (think, shifty eyes).

If an athlete fails the deception testing, they can still get Clean Protocol certified by signing a legally binding statement—in the U.S., that means under oath, and threat of perjury—or they can take a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging test, which measures blood flow to the part of our brain that manages lying. The Protocol claims the FMRI test is 97 percent accurate, but can be prohibitively expensive.

Dr. Michael Puchowicz, who has gained an online following for his mathematically based anti-doping blog, , worked with Czislowski on the Clean Protocol as a scientific advisor. “At worst, it’sÌęa new way of looking at the question,” Puchowicz told me. “At best, it may actually work.”

Still, it seemed that psychological and deception testing was a lot to ask of Froome, who’d done nothing to incite suspicion other than winning the world’s biggest bike races. Then, I read that Marcel Kittel, the break-out German sprinter who won four stages at this year’s Tour de France, a lie detector test to assert his dope-free purity at the request of SportBild magazine. I recalled, as well, that NFL draft prospects take the Wonderlic, a psychometric cognitive ability test.

After realizing athletes are already subjecting themselves to lie detector and psychological tests to win over fans and potential employers, I reached out to Phil Gaimon, a 27-year-old domestic pro who recently signed with one of the world’s best teams, American outfit Garmin-Sharp. Gaimon is vocal about his disdain for cheaters. His right arm is with a green bar of soap and the word: CLEAN.

“Would you take a lie detector or psychological test to prove you’re not a doper?” I asked Gaimon. “Or does it put too much onus on the athlete?”

“It’s a lot to ask,” Gaimon said. “But yeah, if I was someone like Kittel, and it was a voluntary test, that’s exactly what I what I would do.”

“But this is a terrible time to be one of the world’s best cyclists,” he added. “Because the better you perform as a racer, the more suspicion you draw.”

Next, I called Kristen Deiffenbach, a sports psychologist and professor at West Virginia University who works with USA Cycling. I asked her, “Can psychological and deception testing accurately gauge an athlete’s proclivity for PED use?”

“Not really,” she told me.

“It’s less about the individual athlete, and more about the cultural perception surrounding them,” Deiffenbach explained. Even if an athlete posted glowing scores on a battery of psychological examinations and deception tests, Deiffenbach said, it doesn’t necessarily mean they would gain any credibility in the eyes of the public.

Furthermore, Deiffenbach said, “A number of studies have shown the best values and beliefs don’t always transfer to behavior. Economic research in the business world shows people will compromise their morals when put in specific situations.” (See: U.S. Postal team, .)

The problem then, I concluded, may actually be with us, the cycling fans and journalists, not the current crop of pros, who’ve done little to earn our scorn.

Maybe we should stop asking Chris Froome to prove he’s clean, and start asking ourselves why we can’t trust him? In our effort to weed every last cheater out of the sport, we’ve started crucifying our ostensibly clean champions. In our vigilance to protect the sport we love from doping, we’re actually hurting it.

“We’re like broken hearted lovers. Our sport cheated on us, and we’re afraid to get hurt again,” I told Deiffenbach. “How do we get over that pain?” I asked.

“It takes time,” she told me. “Remember, for many modern cycling fans, Lance was their first hero. We need to vent. We need to cry.” We’ll be a bit guarded about heralding our next champion, Deiffenbach said, but we will learn to love again.

Deiffenbach hung up, and I felt a lot better about myself, and the sport. I decided that if cyclists want to voluntarily submit themselves to the Clean Protocol, that’s great. But I won’t hold them to that standard. I’ll rely on the increasingly stringent anti-doping measures already in place, and my own ever-shaky faith.

I’ll retain my professional skepticism. I’ll enjoy the gossipy quality of doping innuendo for exactly what it is—gossip. But I’ll resist rolling my eyes when a racer shreds the peloton on a vaunted climb. When Froome takes off up Colorado’s iconic Vail Pass during Friday’s time trial, it may be one of the most compelling feats of cycling ever seen on U.S. soil. And I plan on enjoying every thrilling minute.

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