Barry Bonds Is Shifting Gears – ESPN

BONDS IS RIGHT to duck out of the team photo in one sense. He didn’t build this team, and he doesn’t coach or train it. Cranmer, a 49-year-old British expatriate, former mountain bike competitor and longtime team manager, runs the business end of Twenty16. Holden, 44, directs the riders on the road. The team has a strong roster and an ambitious agenda this season, with athletes racing on the junior and senior levels in road cycling, and others competing in track, cyclocross and Paralympic events.

But Bonds is part of the big picture now, acknowledged with a simple uppercase B on the team’s apparel. Cranmer wanted to do something more — a baseball patch with his uniform number, maybe. He resisted. She slipped the initial onto the team’s jerseys and jackets without permission.

According to public documents and records provided by Twenty16, Bonds has donated $104,800 to the team — roughly half of that through the Bonds Family Foundation — and raised $96,500 from friends and associates, including Will Chang and Trina Dean, members of the San Francisco Giants’ ownership group. Cranmer’s management company, Tam Cycling Inc., has 501(c)(3) status, and the team’s entire 2015 budget is projected to be under half a million dollars.

Together, Bonds’ contributions and a commitment from Sho-Air International — a company that ships and transports trade show equipment — have restored the team to financial stability and elite status, two years after corporate sponsor Exergy backed out and left Cranmer scrambling. Bonds also has raised money for a riders’ college scholarship fund the team intends to roll out later this year, and his encouragement helped propel Holden into a full-time coaching role in the sport after years of drift and indecision.

But Bonds’ patronage, at whatever level, is problematic for many. Cycling is still figuring out what to do with its own past doping transgressors, much less converts from other fields of play. The World Anti-Doping Agency has adopted tougher rules regarding athletes’ contact with individuals who have doping-related convictions, although it isn’t clear whether those provisions would or could ever apply to Bonds.

In response to an ESPN query about Bonds’ financial role with the team, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency emails this statement: “The prohibited association rule was created in order to protect athletes and we take that responsibility very seriously. Given that there is no longer a conviction, on the face the rule may not apply, however we are fully examining the circumstances and facts surrounding this situation.”

Others say the notion makes them uneasy.

“There’s part of me that feels he can contribute,” says veteran pro rider Robin Farina, CEO and co-founder of the Women’s Cycling Association advocacy group. “On the other hand, it paints the wrong picture. We’re trying to keep an image of clean sport. The sport does need people of his stature and stardom, but we don’t need a mixed message for young athletes.” Farina says her view is personal and not a WCA position.

Cranmer is aware that opinions on Bonds run hot both ways, and it exasperates her. “For me, exposure is exposure,” she says, describing Bonds as a mentor who helped her strategize as she rebuilt the team’s finances. “And if people are talking about it, and it generates energy, and it generates passion, it generates anger, it generates whatever, it’s movement, that’s something. There’s plenty of diplomatic answers I could come up with, but I’m not going to.”

Bonds tells friends and strangers alike that cycling saved his life. Courtesy Barry Bonds

BONDS FIRST WANDERED into a bike shop in 2010. He felt flabby and aimless and cornered in his Beverly Hills mansion, three years removed from baseball, awaiting his federal trial on the way to a second divorce. His body was barking back at him after surgeries on his knees and elbow and back and hip — damage that could very well have been exacerbated by steroid use (a theory he won’t address). He was mindful of the death of his father, Bobby, at age 57 from a brain tumor and lung cancer.

“I figured if I could take care of my heart, I’d feel better, because some of the men in our family died early,” Bonds says over dinner in Santa Rosa in October, the night before he is to ride 61 miles in his friend Levi Leipheimer’s GranFondo charity event. “I looked at myself and I didn’t like what I saw. I wanted to be active, and I wasn’t active in the sport that I love. And I love to train.”

Bonds sketches a caricature of himself back then: an oversized load of bravado and ignorance, walking into Helen’s Cycles in Santa Monica to look at road bikes and hearing “carbon fiber” for the first time. He purchased a black Pinarello Dogma, and took his first rides on the paved path that runs from Malibu to Redondo Beach, paralleling some of the most famous shoreline in California. “I got out there and this man about 70 years old went past me like I was not even moving,” he says. “I knew nothing about shifting gears, nothing about the philosophy of riding or how to ride, I just went as hard as I could. I lasted about 10 seconds and I fell in the sand exhausted. I was embarrassed.

“Me, the type of athlete I am, I’m gonna study this to the T.”

Something intrigued him about starting from scratch and having immense room to improve. There were numbers to chase and pricey gadgets to acquire. Initially, Bonds rode with friends and his cousin David, who was already an avid cyclist. He found training companions from local clubs, choosing his company carefully so as not to overextend himself.

Bonds and two buddies signed up for a 50-mile ride in the tourist hamlet of Solvang the following March. He guffaws at the memory. “This is how dumb we looked on a bike,” he says, pointing to a photo of friends flanking him with bib numbers stuck on their helmets. “We had no idea what to do. But we did it, we made it.”

His federal trial opened nine days later. Testimony from his ex-mistress Kimberly Bell portrayed him as a misogynist prone to fits of rage. Former teammates took the witness stand and described obtaining PEDs and advice on how to use them from Bonds’ personal trainer Greg Anderson, who was imprisoned for contempt of court at the time for refusing to testify. It was not a banner time for No. 25, yet Bonds has kept one photograph taken during the three-week trial. He scrolls through his phone to find the photo. “First time I rode across the Golden Gate Bridge,” he says. For that time, he felt stress-free.

“It was long,” Bonds says of the outing, which would be routine for him now. “Everything was hard for me back then. Plus you can see, I was bigger.”

Mari Holden, who won an Olympic silver medal in cycling, drives a pace car as Bonds, her significant other, takes a ride in Marin County, Calif. Brian Hodes/Velo Images

NOTHING IN MARI HOLDEN’S experience hinted that she would find common ground with Bonds. She grew up in Ventura, California, and went to private school in nearby Ojai. Her father was a surgeon, not an athlete, and her mother’s parents emigrated from Japan. Mari rode horses as a child, and, when the 1984 Summer Olympics took place a short drive away, she was most excited to see the equestrian events. She built little award podiums at home and stood on the top step.

Holden made the transition into cycling after early success as a competitive triathlete. “I remember going in to the national team coach and saying, ‘I want to be on the Olympic team; what do I need to do?’ and I had never even done a bike race,” she says. “I was so naive about what it takes to get there.”

She learned quickly. Holden survived a 13-day women’s version of the Tour de France in her first full professional season in 1993. She raced for German and Italian teams, earning a subsistence income, living a lonely hobo’s existence of suitcases and pay phones. But Holden was visibly driven. Twice, she received a U.S. time trial gold medal in absentia because she’d been taken straight from the finish line to the hospital with heat exhaustion.

“She’s really intense internally, but not outwardly,” says her ex-husband and longtime coach Dean Golich, with whom she remains cordial. “Anything she asks her riders to do, she’s done tenfold. She’s seen it all.”

Holden’s riding career peaked in the summer of 2000, when she won an Olympic time trial silver medal and a world championship. At USADA’s behest, she testified at a 2005 congressional hearing devoted to female steroid use, describing the frustration of competing clean against cheats. She and many other women cyclists tend to believe doping isn’t as common on their side of the sport because there is less money on the line, but riders are busted and suspicions percolate in their peloton too. “It broke me sometimes to do things the right way,” she says.

She retired in 2007 and spent the next few years feeling directionless, dabbling in marketing and real estate, running a cycling camp here and there. Nothing engaged her the way riding had, but she couldn’t see a way to make a living in the sport. “The transition was not easy,” Holden says. “Initially I thought I wanted to be away from it. I needed a goal. It’s common. It’s hard to retire in your 30s.”