Thomas Frischknecht rides like he’s in a rush. Tucked behind him, typically all I can see is the black and yellow blur of his Scott-SRAM package as he whips his street bike round a nook at full tilt, hops a curb, after which skillfully maneuvers a sandy part of street development with such ease that you just’d suppose the newly-minted 50-year-old was the most recent cyclocross wunderkind.
The phrase “rush” doesn’t appear to be in Frischknecht’s vocabulary, neither is it a way of thinking he sometimes inhabits. Possibly it’s as a result of he’s just lately returned from a four-day, 800-kilometer bikepacking journey in Tuscany, the place Frischi — as he’s universally recognized — owns a stake in a resort and a winery. We’re on the Swiss legend’s house roads in spite of everything, a tangle of suburban streets and one-lane shortcuts by way of farm nation that can finally lead us from his house in Feldbach, a village on the jap banks of Lake Zurich, to the foothills of the Alps. It’s a lumpy panorama of undulating roads that Frischi has been coaching on since he was lighting up the Grundig World Cup mountain bike circuit again within the sport’s heady heyday.
“I moved right here 30 years in the past,” he tells me over espresso shortly after my arrival. We’re sitting on a stone bench within the entrance yard of his house, a 300-year-old farmhouse with a steeply pitched roof and a stucco façade. Beneath us, the placid blue water of Lake Zurich stands in distinction to the gathering gray clouds overhead, and past the other shoreline the Alps of Schwyz and Glarus stand up, their peaks crooked throughout the skyline and capped right here and there by white slabs of glacier. “Once I first noticed this view I advised myself that I wished to climb each mountain throughout the horizon,” Firschi tells me between sips of espresso.
By Frischi’s estimates, he’s managed to scale about 85 % of the peaks in entrance of us — some by bike, most on foot. He factors to them together with his finger, tan forearm flexing and beaded bracelets dangling from his wrist, as he traces a line throughout the horizon, ticking off the title of every peak. He’s proudest of his most up-to-date accomplishment: the 8,000ft Mürtschenstock, a peak whose needle-like summit can solely be reached by scaling a category 4b rock wall.
“It’s the primary summer time in 30 years that I’ve actually been round,” he says, brushing again his shaggy brown hair and squinting a set of eyes which might be boyish of their blue-grey glow, webbed on the corners by the slightest of crow’s ft. Like everybody else, COVID-19 has grounded Frischi, forcing him to remain kind of native relatively than journey the world because the supervisor of Scott-SRAM, the place he mentors the likes of Nino Schurter, Kate Courtney, and even his son Andri. “After I retired in 2008, I went straight right into a administration position,” he says. “By that fall, I used to be already at coaching camp with the remainder of the group. The one distinction was that I now not had the stress of racing.”
Strain was by no means a difficulty for the remarkably constant rider whose 20-year profession noticed him take victories in mountain bike, cyclocross, and even street races. His is a spotlight reel that’s turn out to be lore amongst mountain bike followers: the shy, skinny Swiss child plucked from the cyclocross circuit by American bike builder Tom Ritchey, who hosted him at his NorCal home; the three general World Cup titles; the silver medal within the inaugural mountain bike race on the 1996 Atlanta Summer season Olympics; and eventually the late-career renaissance, capped by two world marathon mountain bike titles in 2003 and 2005. The previous is one thing he’s most happy with, as is evidenced by the small black and gold picket plaque memorializing the victory that hangs outdoors the Frischknecht household house.
“I beat Bart [Brentjens] in a dash,” Frischi remembers as we package up after which head for the shed to seize his bike. He selects his new Scott Addict street bike, relatively than the gravel bike he’s been using. I look across the place. It’s wallpapered with posters from his profession, most of them from his Crew Ritchey days, again when he dominated the circuit within the 90s. There are Oakley and No Worry commercials, and shiny pages from mountain bike magazines. I take all of them in, feeling the photographs transport me again to the times once I was a clumsy child drunk on mountain bike racing, touring the East Coast with my father to observe my heroes race at legendary World Cup programs at Mount Snow, Bromont, and Mont-Sainte-Anne. These are the relics that remodeled me right into a Frischknecht fan some 30 years in the past. I keep in mind first seeing Frischi within the mud of Mount Snow, Vermont.
It was a muggy day in June, 1992, and that afternoon — simply earlier than the beginning of the boys’s race —a heavy rainstorm rolled by way of the Inexperienced Mountains, lowering Mount Snow’s infamously technical course to a soupy river of muck. I stood on the darkish sidelines of the singletrack with my mouth agape as I watched Frischi put his cyclocross pedigree to good use by deftly selecting by way of sloppy situations that have been nearly unrideable for the remainder of the sphere. It was a standard picture in these days: Frischi’s clean fashion as he got here into view by way of a thicket of timber, the blue general World Cup chief’s jersey hanging loosely from his wiry body, a pair of Oakley Mumbos shielding half of his in any other case dirt-speckled face, the inflexible crimson, white, and blue Ritchey undulating beneath him, a gold chain bobbing from round his neck, an earring catching the flash of digicam bulbs, after which — poof! — like one thing magically conjured from the mud, a mixture of Swiss precision and California cool, he was gone, disappearing into the timber, down the path, en route to a different seemingly easy victory.
It’s due to these reminiscences that I establish Frischi’s essential rivals as fellow legends and pioneers like John Tomac and Ned Overend, however he’s fast to right me.
“No, it was Bart,” he says, throwing one leg over his bike. “In case you have a look at the size of my profession, I raced Bart for the longest.”
It was additionally Brentjens who bought the higher of him on a number of huge events, most notably the Atlanta Olympics. Beating the adorned Dutchman on the 2003 marathon worlds stays maybe Frischi’s sweetest victory. Within the Nineteen Nineties, Frischi garnered the popularity of second greatest when it got here to the main one-day occasions. By 2003, he already had six silver medals throughout mountain bike and cyclocross world championships to his title (his second place on the 1996 world mountain bike championships could be upgraded to first after Jérôme Chiotti confessed to doping, although not in time to offer Frischi the pleasure of racing in rainbow stripes the next season); it was a string of second locations that triggered some to counsel that he — like his father, a three-time silver medalist on the world cyclocross championships — carried a curse.
“After I completed second in Munich [in the 1997 world cyclocross championships], they’d me on the SRF1 [Switzerland’s national broadcaster] sports activities present, which known as Sportpanorama, and the host, this man named Beni Thurheer, an actual legend right here in Switzerland, he requested me why I end second on a regular basis,” Frischi remembers with fun, his face touched with solely the faintest traces of resentment. “I nearly advised him why, the true reply, however I didn’t have any proof, and I didn’t wish to sound bitter or come off like a sore loser. I actually needed to chew my tongue.”
The proof that Frischi alludes to, or lack thereof, has to do with doping. EPO infiltrated the ranks {of professional} street biking within the Nineteen Nineties, and it’s broadly believed that the blood booster hit the mountain bike circuit quickly after, with a wave of beforehand unknown European riders surging to the highest of the game from one season to the subsequent.
Like most of his contemporaries, the Tomacs and Overends who have been quickly compelled out {of professional} mountain biking because of its sudden rocket-fueled tempo, Frischi suspected this new crop of rivals to be doped. But it surely’s one thing — blame it on his Swiss modesty, his zen-like lifestyle — that he’s remained silent on till now.
“Possibly that’s why you’re right here,” he says with a wry smile as we push off from his driveway and down the steep hill that results in his home. “Possibly that’s why you contacted me out of the blue. Possibly now’s the time to now not shield these different riders.”
Frischi finds our assembly fortuitous. Solely hours earlier than I’d gotten in contact, suggesting this trip and interview, an outdated good friend of Frischi’s from Oakley had forwarded him a weblog written by retired professional racer George Visser. Visser’s blog had already triggered a stir within the mountain-bike neighborhood. In his submit, Visser recounts the vibe of these halcyon days within the early Nineteen Nineties, replete together with his fanboy devotion to Overend and Tomac, his coaching rides with Steve Tilford, and the jarring thrill of descending singletrack on a hardtail outfitted with 26-inch wheels. Visser additionally discusses doping at size.
Like lots of his contemporaries, Visser was struck by how briskly the races had turn out to be within the early 90s, the tempo typically dictated by a brand new crop of nearly unknown European riders. Visser befriended certainly one of these riders, a distinguished racer from The Netherlands, and writes about his relationship with the gifted athlete. In Visser’s retelling, one night time he sees the rider in query in a resort room alongside medical devices and an unlimited array of prescription drugs.
Visser advised me the reminiscence is “stamped in my mind” once I phoned him to debate the weblog. Within the months following the weblog’s publishing, Visser was contacted by an legal professional representing the rider, who advised him the rider meant to file go well with if he didn’t take away the accusation. Visser advised me he weighed his choices and determined to take away the weblog, relatively than enter right into a expensive authorized battle. The weblog submit has been changed by an evidence by Visser for its removing. “I don’t have the time, the vitality, nor the motivation to go down that bumpy street,” Visser writes after citing the authorized risk.
Visser’s weblog, and its aftermath, thus, are relics of Frischi’s heyday, a reminder of the period’s maddening unknowns that riders confronted at each race. Tales swirled and hypothesis ran rampant about dishonest, however the lack of admissions or of a dependable check for EPO and different doping strategies led these racers who competed clear — riders like Frischi — to reside inside a cloud of uncertainty. Some riders stop out of frustration, whereas others pushed on. Even right now, Visser’s account is unresolvable, simply one other anecdote in a bigger story that solely riders of that period will actually perceive.
Forging a legacy in unsure occasions
Visser’s weblog submit is a window into Frischi’s period of uncertainty, but Frischi shrugs off my questions on it as we roll out onto the graceful tarmac. Our tempo turns into much less frenetic. We settle right into a rhythm and a dialog. Frischi is as pure a storyteller as he’s a bike owner, and because the miles tick by and the gradient gently slopes upward by way of farm fields and tall pine timber, he regales me with tales from his racing days — how good friend and former teammate Henrik Djernis peaked for his hat trick of world championship titles by nearly solely coaching indoors on the rollers; the frustration his personal father expressed when Frischi opted for a profession in mountain biking — “freaks” as they have been considered in Switzerland on the time — relatively than settle for a professional street contract with Paul Köchli’s Helvetia group.
After all Frischi proved his father improper, and the person lastly got here round on his son’s choice to race fats tires when the boy took silver in Atlanta.
And but, regardless of all of the success, it isn’t a mountain bike and even cyclocross race that Frischi ranks because the spotlight of his profession.
“The Olympic street race,” he tells me, his voice immediately giddy over the wind, his face breaking into an enormous grin as he stands on the pedals and the bike sways backward and forward beneath him. “That was my biggest second.”
It’s a unusual anecdote that few American followers know. Whereas in Atlanta as a mountain biker for the ’96 Video games, Frischi bought wind {that a} knee damage had knocked Tony Rominger from the Swiss group’s street race roster, and that Laurent Dufaux — nonetheless recovering on the seashores of the Côte d’Azur after ending fourth in that yr’s Tour de France, in addition to smarting from being left off the Olympic group within the first place — refused to fly over and fill in. To Frischi, he was the one different logical choice.
“The Swiss coach stated no,” he remembers. “He advised me I used to be there for the mountain bike race; that that was my focus.”
Frischi let it go, till just a few days later, when he rolled throughout the end line at Georgia Worldwide Horse Park as males’s mountain biking’s first Olympic silver medalist.
“I seemed on the Swiss coach and shouted, ‘How about now?!’” Frischi laughs, shaking his head at his youthful exuberance. “It was the very first thing I stated to anybody after profitable the silver medal.”
The following morning, wide-eyed and sleep disadvantaged, Frischi stood astride an outdated Ritchey cyclocross bike as a member of the five-man Swiss street group. In response to plan, he spent the primary 100 kilometers within the break, earlier than getting swallowed up by the sphere. After he’d put within the preliminary work, the thought was for him to drop out, however he was having an excessive amount of enjoyable. The adrenaline coursed by way of him, the cyclocross bike — because of its excessive backside bracket — made it simple to pedal by way of the circuit’s numerous corners, and each couple of minutes certainly one of his heroes pulled up alongside to supply congratulations on his latest Olympic medal.
The Olympic street race. That was my biggest second.
“Felicidades,” Frischi says to me, furrowing his forehead and imitating the deep baritone of none aside from Miguel Indurain, who — regardless of being denied his sixth Tour de France win just one month prior — remained the peloton’s undisputed patron.
By the tip of the day, Frischi got here throughout the road and excessive fived teammate Pascal Richard, unaware that solely 4 minutes earlier Richard had sprinted to Olympic gold. A photographer captured the picture of the 2 teammates — one a veteran roadie, the opposite a 26-year-old mountain biker — and by the next morning it graced the entrance web page of nearly each Swiss newspaper.
Perfectionism tempered by positivity
After refueling for water at a fountain in the midst of a small village, Frischi leads me up the Ghöch Go, a stair-stepper with prolonged pitches of eight %. That is the place Frischi carried out the majority of his intervals again within the day, when time between races allowed him to place in additional hours on the street bike.
“I’d let the street resolve,” he tells me, explaining that the length of his intervals have been erratic, and all the time decided by the size of the pitch in entrance of him relatively than any prescribed period of time. “Generally they have been two minutes, typically 5. I by no means did hill repeats the way in which Andri does now.”
At present’s coaching strategies aren’t overseas to a person who runs arguably probably the most profitable cross-country group on the present World Cup circuit, however they will actually really feel closely scientific, particularly when contemplating that Frischi by no means relied on an influence meter, nor has he signed up for Strava. Frischi tells me how his son not often deviates from a coaching plan, even when meaning logging a five-hour trip through the rain whereas taking a relaxation day when it’s beautiful out. Or, how his protégé Nino Schurter will typically do three exercises in a single day.
“He jogs, then he hits the health club, and after lunch he goes for a trip,” he says.
World Cup cross-country races are an entire completely different beast right now when in comparison with the races of the 90s and early 2000s. Up to date races are 90 minutes, in comparison with the three-hour slogs Frischi and his cohort endured. Somewhat than grind up infinite fireplace roads, right now’s racers dash up punchy ascents that require huge bursts of energy. Then, they velocity down technical and rocky sections that check arms, legs, and machines.
Frischi is the primary to confess that he typically overtrained throughout his profession, logging huge weeks on the bike, typically disappearing into the mountains to trip lengthy Alpine passes at excessive altitude. However he’s no luddite in terms of the game’s improvements, be it coaching methods or the technical features of the bike.
“We had [the Scott Spark] able to go for Tokyo,” he says, referring to the world-beating dual-suspension rig that Schurter and Kate Courtney might be using — barring additional COVID-19 problems — at subsequent summer time’s Olympics in Japan. “However now we have now much more time to get it dialed in.”
This perspective, I’ve come to be taught within the few hours we’ve been speaking, is typical Frischi: perfectionism tempered by positivity. Somewhat than dwell on the truth that the Olympics have been postponed, or that nearly the whole World Cup cross-country season has been scrapped, he views these setbacks as alternatives. It’s an perspective he instantly acknowledged in Kate Courtney when he signed her to Scott-SRAM only one month earlier than she gained the world championship title at Lenzerheide in 2018.
“She’s constructive,” he says, then rattles off the younger Californian’s attributes. “She’s a quick learner. She expects lots from the group however she additionally expects lots from herself.”
Over the 2 years they’ve been working collectively, Courtney has turn out to be one thing like a daughter. When she races in Europe she lives with him and his household, and final summer time he took her to Massa Vecchia, his resort in Tuscany, in order that she may work on her technical abilities on the encircling trails, in addition to acclimate to going laborious in the kind of warmth that’s positive to problem riders in Tokyo.
Final season, he was impressed by Courtney’s work ethic, which led to her taking the 2019 World Cup title, in addition to the feel-good vibe the Stanford grad brings to the group, one typified by all the time thanking her mechanics and main considerate, spirited discourse on the dinner desk.
“It’s good to have a lady on the group,” Frischi says with fun. “In any other case it’s only a bunch of men making silly jokes on a regular basis.”
As we climb larger, the street winding upwards, the steep farm fields falling away at both aspect, I ask what it’s prefer to work with Schurter, a man who’s knocked Frischi off the pedestal by now.
“Nino is the very best ever,” Frischi says, his voice severe and devoid of all ego. “It’s an honor for me.”
Titles gained and misplaced within the period of EPO
With the Ghöch Go in our legs we cease on the street’s summit, the place an Italian restaurant is perched above the hillside. Judging by the jovial greeting from the restaurant’s chef and workers, Frischi is a daily right here. We sit and an outside desk with a westward view that right now is obscured by the clouds.
“I don’t know what you need however I’m having a beer,” Frischi says, pulling off his helmet and his Oakleys — a pair of Kokoro Sutros with Jackson Pollock-worthy flicks of purple, pink, and white.
Our drinks arrive, glasses of native weissbier, adopted by a skinny crust pizza that’s extra bruschetta than conventional pie. Neighboring diners sneak glances, a married couple politely introduce themselves. The chef returns with two plates of seared ahi tuna garnished with basil foam and a fried egg — on the home, after all. All of it serves as a reminder that right here in Switzerland, mountain bikers will be celebrities, even nationwide heroes.
I do know what races I gained.
Between bites of meals, I steer our dialog again to the subject of doping, or extra particularly Visser’s weblog submit. How does he really feel in regards to the rider talked about within the weblog?
“I like him,” Frischi says. “He’s a pleasant man.” The comment is real, with out a whiff of sarcasm or bitterness. It’s the identical perspective he takes towards Jérôme Chiotti, whose firm on coaching rides Frischi all the time loved, and whose apology he accepted in 2000 when the Frenchman publicly got here clear to his good friend about dishonest him out of the world title in 1996.
Different names come up too, from convicted dopers like world champs Filip Meirhaeghe and Christophe Dupouey (the latter’s suicide a cautionary story), to the suspicion that clouded the careers of different stars of the period. Frischi isn’t eager to go on document about rumour, however lastly, when pushed, he offers me a realizing smile.
“Let’s simply say that I used to be robbed,” Frischi says, rattling off a protracted checklist of Olympic and world championship outcomes that he believes he may have gained, had the taking part in subject been even.
Isn’t he mad, I wish to know. Isn’t he bitter?
Frischi shakes his head. “I do know what races I gained,” he says, then reaches for one more slice of pizza, folding it in two earlier than taking a chew. As he typically does, he begins a narrative to make his level. It was the early 2000s and — by Frischi’s requirements — he was getting his “ass kicked” by this new breed of mountain bike racer. One August, whereas utilizing his household vacation as a excessive altitude coaching camp to organize for the worlds in Vail, Colorado, he severely contemplated retirement.
Very like they do each summer time, the Frischknechts had rented a cabin excessive up within the mountains above Switzerland’s Engadine Valley, and after dinner Frischi determined to go for a head-clearing trip earlier than making his choice. The vacationers who take the funicular up through the day to gawk on the alpine surroundings have been lengthy gone, leaving the paths empty.
After ripping his favourite part of singletrack alongside the ridge, Frischi stopped to absorb the view. Having spent a while there myself, it’s a scene I can image: the snow-capped peaks, the comfortable, late-summer gentle and the silvery lakes, the broad valley whose magnificence is so gorgeous it even triggered that curmudgeon Friedrich Nietzsche to proclaim that the world saved his life. It solid the same spell on Frischi, at the very least so far as his profession was involved.
“I sat there and stated to myself, ‘I’m a mountain biker,’” he tells me. “I made a decision I’d preserve using, preserve coaching, preserve racing, even when the outcomes didn’t come. I simply wished to take care of my ardour, my skilled standing so I may preserve doing what I like.”
As we all know by now, the outcomes did come. An EPO check was launched on the 2000 Olympics, and in subsequent years anti-doping strategies bought higher. The game wasn’t completely clear, but clear riders did win main mountain bike races.
Frischi was again among the many greatest till he retired in 2008 with 15 world championship medals and 18 World Cup wins. Since then, his life has been all about mentoring the game’s future stars at Scott-SRAM, and each manufacturers just lately signed two-year extensions as title sponsors of his mountain bike group.
“I’ve all the time had two-year contracts,” he says as we gather our issues and head out. “That’s how I reside my life: two years at a time.”
It’s philosophy judging by the person’s monitor document. And whereas these subsequent two years will definitely be busy for Frischi — fast targets embrace circumnavigating the U.S. journey ban with a view to get Kate Courtney over to Europe this fall for the season’s few World Cup rounds — stress appears the furthest factor from his thoughts.
Certainly, our trip house feels quick but one way or the other unhurried. The rain that has been threatening to fall all day will soak us earlier than we attain Frischi’s entrance door, however for now he rides as if he can outrun it, main me down the Ghöch Go, nailing the apex of every switchback and sprinting again on top of things. Quickly sufficient we’re out of the hills and again in suburbia. Left, proper, left, proper, farm street right here, bike path there, Frischi all the time within the lead, darting this fashion and that. I attempt to sustain with this sprightly 50-year-old, this low-key legend, and as I draft him, it’s as if I’m following Ferris Bueller throughout that film’s well-known climactic montage, the character chopping by way of folks’s backyards, leaping over hedges, the carefree king of his personal little world.
