That was the headline of this article at Velonews. Man, what that guy has done for the love of the sport. I have to say, he’s not afraid to go to the limit of the very extreme. I doubt that is a conscious decision. I think that is just the way he functions. But, alas, he’s not going to be functioning anymore in the circles of bicycle racing. Ciao David.
This photo pretty much sums it up.
Huge potential in that guy. Bummer to see anybody just throw it away like he did. He showed up at a Rose Bowl crit in 2001, full Festina kit, and tried to get into the mens cat 1,2 race.
With those tatoos I’m sure he’s not going to morn long before he finds another way to compete, it’s in his blood.
Speaking of people that are a few fries short of a Happy Meal…whatever happened with Alexi Grewal’s comeback.
how can you say that a convicted doper had huge potential when it’s impossible to know when he started cheating?
Hi Timmer,
I think the same thing will be said about Lance Armstrong when he’s in Lompoc Fed. Pen.
Who couldn’t love a face like that…okay, anyone with eyeballs but other than that? Poster child of the expression, “it seemed like a good idea at the time”.
Who is that freak? Never heard of him!!!
reid, dude has a pocket full of kryptonite and a pretty(er) face. otherwise i agree.
Could Clinger race with the other Bonds in Belgium that allow racing without License or UCI sanctioning??? I know alot of ex-pros and super Beloften riders fron the past still race them.
Yes, to follow on Leatherman’s question, why won’t anybody talk about Grewal? We heard an awful lot about him and all of a sudden we can’t get anything. I guess he just figured out a comeback at 50 is tough, but I’d think he was coming back because he loved cycling. What happened?
There was a backstory to Grewal on Facebook penned by one of his on and off timber framing employers. It went away about the same time the AG website itself did.
AG had mentioned twice in mid-May that he was about to pull the plug on the whole comeback thing and I think that getting his unregistered car impounded coming back from Iron Horse was the last straw?
Then right after that he blogged that his bike got stolen at the library, but I wasn’t sure that was the old Trek 2300 or the new Leopard?
With all the issues he had, shining an internet spotlight into them three times a week probably got old in a real hurry? And his chances for a ride in the Quizinos race were about nil by then. I certainly hope that he finds peace whatever route that might involve.
I saw him do some really assholish things at races back in the day, like scream out passing the finish line that the announcers needed to do a better job describing the premes when he was already two minutes off the front in a hilly circuit race and collecting all of them regardless.
But if you ran into him out on the road training back then he was quite friendly and agreeable as long as you could just hold his wheel.
Hopefully Raul Alcala can perhaps prove that people can come back after years out of the sport and still make it back up close to Steve’s level. I’m thinking that as we all get up into our fifties it will need to be someone who is already financially secure for the rest of his life who accomplishes this.
My favorite author in the last 50 years Jim Harrison, (Legends of the Fall, Farmer, etc.) had an expression for a chain of unfortunate events like this. He called it the “$hit Monsoon” in the context that you had to just stand there in the driving “rain” and take it.
I was just one tiny bad break away from being absolutely destitute in middle age myself and I could relate.
All I can say about how I recovered is that I never completely gave up and finally the fates just must have gotten tired themselves and decided to stop screwing with me?
Nice comment, Old. Guys like Clinger, Grewal, Pantani and Frank Vandebroucke are cut from the same cloth. The bike is/was a refuge from sure self-destruction and a channel for excess energy.
Best to the still living.
PS I agree about Jim Harrison; he’s by far the writer with the biggest balls. I saw him once buying wine, one glass eye pointed skywards, limping with gout.
Major.
Clinger was an awesome kid as a junior
clean cut as they come, from a nice Mormon family. I would see him frequently out training solo, i would wave and sometimes he would make a u and come chat for awhile. Just a real boy scout type who quickly got eaten up by the world. He had some crazy south american girlfriend who he tried to impress with the face tat and she still dumped his ass. Really sad, I think the boy scout is still buried deep inside i wish him the best and hope he gets the help he needs
As far as Alexi, he was putting in monster miles before and after races. Old fashioned quantity, but when you get to be 50 you creak a little in the morning and i think all those miles made it tough to recover. He probably did some timed workouts and saw his performance getting worse not better and just chucked it all instead of asking for help
re the $hit monsoon. people usually only notice the bad things, many times we have one lucky break after another. For awhile i would right them down, the kind of things that afterwards you go
“wow, thank god that happened when it did or i might be dead” these ar ekind of the ying to the $hit monsoons yang.
For instance i was cutting a tree with a chainsaw, i am pretty experienced but i got the chain hung up and it fell off just after i shut the saw down.
that was lucky i thought. but i needed to finish the job so i grabbed a pole chain saw i had and when i started it the chain broke and flew off, luckily away from me. Whew. close one.
i thanked the man upstairs and grabbed my double bit axe and went to work. i worked up quite a sweat about 15 minutes of hard swinging i stopped for a break, when i put down the axe the head literally dropped off the handle. I think how hard i had been swinging and if it had come off on the backstroke it would have went right through my ribs into my lungs
about then i decided i had pushed my luck as far as it would go so i went inside and finished the tree another day…
french doctor jean pierre de Mondenard (who is a genius )says’ it’s possible to be positive with clenbuterol by eating meat. i dont know if that is the case of clinger, but clenbuterol is coming back. i love the site. ciao
Check out what Grewal did in the Tour de L’Avenir and who else was in the race. From what I can tell his team support was negligible too.
I think that if he could have controlled his racing schedule the way that modern GC riders can he would have gone a lot farther in the sport. But certainly his head was not always in the same place as the rest of the peleton.
I’ve got a winning magazine from early 85 where he says he hopes he doesn’t have to race in Italy because of the pollution. He mentions that in Belgium in his blog from this spring. And he had already been in Europe once doing it the hard way long before that.
The kind of money that Peter Post was paying him was not the kind that you could retire on after an 8 to 11 year career. On the other hand a Panasonic guy would have expected to share in a lot of prize money, I bet Henk Lubberdink is comfortable from professional cycling?
Re Grewal:
http://www.usacycling.org/results/?compid=45400&all=1