Is Ted King the Next Big American Cyclist?

By Jon Brand ’05
Photographs by York Wilson

Each day of the Giro, Armstrong has had a teammate or friend from another team join him in recording a video blog, where he has asked questions, critiqued the race organizers, and generally goofed around. It’s part of a new, more relaxed persona the Texan is cultivating in his first season back on the bike after a three-and-a-half-year retirement.

“I was looking at the starting list and was like, who’s this American dude?” Armstrong says, opening the video segment. “And then I went up to him and joked, where’s New Hampshire? I’m from Texas, the center of it all—New Hampshire is like Greenland.”

Five weeks after competing in Italy, King is in the Austrian Alps, relaxing in a booth at a hotel restaurant in the Tyrolean ski town of Kitzbühel. He’s just finished stage two of the Tour of Austria, which ended with one of cycling’s most challenging climbs—Kitzbüheler Horn, where the winding two-lane road to the summit reaches a 22 percent gradient, an angle so steep that most spectators take a gondola up to the finish.

Once a warm-up for the Tour de France, this weeklong tour is now held at the same time, attracting the best cyclists on the pro circuit not riding in the sport’s marquee event.

For King, Austria is a more valuable experience than riding in France, where he would be working as a domestique (the French term for “servant”) for Cervélo’s top contenders. Though cycling is, at its core, an individual sport, a solid support crew is vital to success in most races. The domestiques help by sheltering the strongest teammates from the wind (a cyclist who is drafting another rider uses about 30 percent less energy than he would alone). They also chase down attacks from rival teams and fetch water bottles or food from the team car that follows the peloton (the main bunch of cyclists in each race).

Here in the land of Freud, schnitzel, and beer, King is momentarily freed from that duty and has an opportunity to stretch his legs. After ordering a mineral water from the waiter, he tells me that most pros, like any elite athletes, start training early in life.

From the junior ranks, the strongest cyclists are placed onto their respective national youth programs or plucked by pro squads looking to fill out their second-team rosters. For instance, the rider who will eventually win the Tour of Austria, 29-year-old Swiss native Michael Albasini, first competed at age 11. By 17, he had won Switzerland’s junior national road championship and before his 20th birthday had a professional contract.

For King, however, the process started much later. A good athlete growing up, he played hockey, soccer, and tennis at Exeter High School in New Hampshire.

And though his older brother Robbie had started a mountain biking team at Holderness and spurred him to buy his own bike, King was more satisfied to cruise wooded trails than compete. In fact, he’d ridden in just one race growing up: the 1993 Tour of Brentwood. It was in fourth grade—a short five-mile road course through his hometown—and he finished second to his best friend in their age category.

So when he stepped on campus at Middlebury as a Feb in early 2002, he had little inkling that a career in cycling was in his future.

A few months into King’s first semester, Robbie—by then an avid road racer at Colorado College—came to town for the 2002 National Collegiate Road Championships, hosted by the University of Vermont. The championship course ended at Middlebury Gap, so King hopped on his mountain bike in the morning and rode from the College up Route 125 to the finish. A few hours later, he watched his brother win a national title.

The summer work paid off—King persevered through four fall weekends of mountain bike racing (in the world of collegiate cycling, fall is for mountain biking, and spring for road races) and ultimately was invited to the national championships in Angel Fire, New Mexico.

In late October, he traveled to Colorado Springs, where Robbie was finishing his senior year, borrowed his brother’s car, and drove 225 miles south to the race.

He finished sixth.

“It was like a light switch went off,” says his mom, Margie. “Once he decided to ride bikes, he was determined to get to the top quickly.”

Back at school, he set up a rigorous winter training program. He bought a stationary trainer and, unable to find a spot for it in the basement of his dorm, rode for hours every day in Nelson Gym.

“He and I were duking it out to the finish line,” says

Robbie, who ended up winning his second collegiate title that day. “I don’t know if he let me have the win or if he was tired, but he had definitely developed as a rider.”

The next year, King became more serious about making cycling a top priority. He took a leave of absence from Middlebury, joining his brother in Arizona, where the older King was training for a spot on the professional circuit.  

Living out of a small apartment complex, King took classes at the University of Arizona and trained with his brother in the desert sun. The two rose quickly, riding together for the amateur Louis Garneau team in 2004. By the spring of 2005, King was back at Middlebury, and after a great series of races in California, he had started to distinguish himself on the American cycling scene. He was one of a dozen selected for the U.S. U-23 national team and throughout the summer he raced in the U.S. and Europe against top competition.

“Cycling is a lot like any other job; you have a race résumé,” he says. “Racing for the U.S. National Team, that looks really good.” The U.S. pro team Priority Health agreed, signing the King brothers as part of a package deal to the fledgling squad.

“I remember walking out into the common room of my suite at school,” says King, “and the first thing one of my friends said is, ‘Teddy, you have a job.’”

Like anyone fresh out of college, King had a learning curve in the real world. The first two years he spent with the team (which changed its sponsor to Bissell in ’07) King made small progress, amassing some top-10 finishes here and there. But in 2008, he had a breakout year, finishing the season ranked second among all pro riders in the U.S.

“That year, Ted was one of the major players,” says Glen Mitchell, a former teammate and sport director, or team manager, at Bissell. “People were asking, ‘What’s Ted going to do in the race today?’”

The racing world took notice.

Every August, the free-agent market in professional cycling opens for business. Rumors fly as new teams court riders who have made big moves during the previous season, even if they’re still under contract, while those who have failed to achieve feel the pressure mounting.

Last year, King was pursued by Cervélo, a Canadian bike manufacturer that was assembling its first-ever men’s pro team. (Tom Fowler ’86, coincidentally the company’s director of sales and service, says that he didn’t even know King was a Middlebury graduate until the two went on a ride in California earlier this year.) The team management, based in Switzerland, flew him to Lucerne for a two-hour meeting and then promptly returned him home. “I knew when they were flying me over there that this was no chump team,” says King. “I was thinking, ‘I really hope this comes to fruition.’”

It did. In late August they offered him a contract. He accepted and immediately started to make arrangements for his move abroad.

Lake Neusiedl, a 20-mile-long shallow lake that straddles the Austro-Hungarian border, is a 45-minute drive southeast on the A4 highway from Vienna. It’s a popular summer destination for avid sailors and windsurfers; in fact, the breeze is so plentiful—and steady—that an Austrian energy company has installed vast rows of large, three-bladed white windmills near the vineyards and sunflower fields by the lake’s shores.

Today, the resort town of Podersdorf is hosting the seventh stage of the Tour of Austria, a 16-mile time trial that will pit the riders against the clock. It’s the shortest course of the entire race by far: over the six previous stages, the riders have averaged 108 miles and around four hours in the saddle each day.

Near the start line, King steps out of the team camper, clad in his white-and-black skintight Cervélo spandex. He looks like he’d be at home in a Woody Jackson ’70 painting. But though his jersey is fresh, he’s not. It’s been raining throughout the race, and on two separate stages, he’s crashed off the bike.

“One more day,” he says.

Though a short ride and postcard scenery await, they offer little respite for King and his teammates. To get through the day, the cyclists rely on a mantra they’ve carefully cultivated from day one of the Tour: ride, rest, and eat.  Aside from keeping an appropriate pace on the bike, eating right—and enough—is the most important thing a rider can do during a race.

On an average day, each racer burns between 6,000 to 9,000 calories. After each ride, they quickly take in a protein or electrolyte drink, get back to the hotel, eat a small snack, and have a deep-tissue sports massage. Then it’s time for a recovery dinner, an hour or two of downtime, and, finally, sleep. The next day, the routine starts all over again.

It’s a grind and many cyclists become commensurately obsessive. Lance Armstrong famously used to weigh his food before each meal in order to ensure optimal body mass for speed and strength on the bike.

King has his own quirks—“Why stand when you can sit? Why sit when you can lie down?” he recites to me, rapid-fire, on more than one occasion, emphasizing the need to rest his body—but what’s helped him progress at the European level is that he’s been at once focused and relaxed the whole way.

“He is a nice and easy person; he is never complaining,” says Cervélo’s Alex Sans Vega, one of his sport directors, or team managers. “He’s always in a good mood.”

He’s also got a lot of humility, especially for a 26-year-old who’s getting paid to race bikes in Europe.

“A lot of guys want you to think that it’s some sort of superhero thing that they’re doing,” says Simms, “but Ted’s just, ‘I’m like you, but 20 percent faster.’ And my stories on the bike are the same, they just involve Lance Armstrong.”

The day before, as if to prove both Vega’s and Simms’s points, King had invited me back to the team hotel after the stage finish. He emerged from his room freshly showered and wearing a black Cervélo polo shirt and blue jeans. A lanky six feet, two inches tall, King stands out a bit in professional cycling; with a few exceptions, most riders are shorter than he is. But at 175 pounds, he has the slender physique necessary for the sport. When told that he looks really slim, he chuckled, offered thanks, and said, half-jokingly, that the best compliment that you can pay to a cyclist is to tell him that he looks emaciated.

“There are many cyclists who are so strict about their training regimen, what they eat, and they get angry when it doesn’t go as planned,” he said. “I feel like I can roll with the punches a bit more than most.”

Part of his adaptability, he said, is due to his time at Middlebury. When he stepped up his game in the spring of 2005, the year he made it onto the U.S. National U-23 squad, he was racing almost every weekend from March to May. At the same time, he was taking five classes and trying to finish his economics major. He even took his finals early that year so he could get to Europe and train. His final semester was more of the same.

“He had a trainer [machine] set up in his Atwater suite, and he would ride while reading an econ book,” says Spencer Paxson ’07.

When training in Vermont, the unforgiving winter climate also provided a challenge, but King made it a weekly priority to get outside and onto the main roads, occasionally pulling on a full neoprene suit to brave the elements.

“Now I know what bad weather is, and I know I can get through it,” he says. It’s also the dues he’s paid as an up-and-comer in the U.S., from driving in the cramped Team Bissell vans throughout California with his brother to the accidents he’s suffered—the most harrowing as a U-23 National Team rider in the 2005 Tour of Georgia, when a race vehicle clipped his bike on a descent. He shattered his helmet but walked away and was on the bike again later that summer.

The experience of his father, Ted Sr., a surgeon and accomplished amateur sailor, who suffered a stroke six years ago, has given him perspective as well. “My dad’s stroke was very unexpected—he was fit, relatively young,” King says. “My attitude has changed a bit in terms of being less happy-go-lucky. In the back of my head I’m saying, ‘When is this opportunity ever going to come again?’”

King’s off-bike passions also set him apart from fellow pros. Before races, he’ll down a cup of coffee and focus on finishing a daily crossword puzzle. And he crafts blog entries for his own Web site (recent hot topics: the virtues of maple syrup peanut butter, hatred for his wretched BlackBerry Storm Smartphone) and has contributed in-race thoughts for the pro-cycling site VeloNews.com.

He’s prolific on Twitter, a favorite method of communication among cyclists. In fact, after that appearance on Armstrong’s back-of-the-bus videocast at the Giro—and a subsequent Tweet about it by Armstrong—King’s followers increased from 300 to over 3,000.

He’s also a budding foodie, taking camera-phone pictures of meals on the road and posting them to his blog or Twitter feed whenever possible. And on trips back to his parents’ house in New Hampshire, he’ll fire up the oven and experiment with different types of baked goods—biscotti, cookies, breads.

“Teddy has told us that he’s interested in getting into the food business one day,” says his father. “It’s smart to be forward thinking. For now, he’s laying the groundwork.”

However, in Vienna, on the last day of the tour, King is focused on padding his cycling résumé. The stage concludes with 10 laps around the inner ring road of the capital, with the finish underneath the Burgtheater, a magnificent state theater that was reconstructed in the early 1950s, after being leveled in World War II.

With about four laps to go, Ted turns to Canadian Svein Tuft, a rider on the American-based Garmin-Slipstream team.

“You want to make a move?” he asks.

Not much more needs to be said. Along with a rider from the French team, Milram, the three crank the pedals and start a mad dash away from the peloton. But with about half a lap to go, the field catches up and Ted is swallowed back into the pack. He ends up finishing the Tour 74th overall.

A few hours later, King emerges from the team bus, munching on a baguette wrapped in foil and greeting some U.S. fans, who have come to get his autograph. He seems satisfied with the overall result, despite the failed attempt at a stage win. “European racing is an entirely different sport from American,” he had told me earlier in the week. “The first year is all about learning the ropes and seeing if you can hack it.”

So far he’s done just that, adapting quickly to the harder, longer, and faster pace of Old World cycling. Since the Tour of Austria concluded in early July, he’s raced in two more stage races and two single-day events. His best result came in Spain in August’s Vuelta a Burgos, when he picked up the blue jersey for best sprinter (riders collect points for the jersey at intervals along the course) after the race’s second stage.

He’s adjusting to the European lifestyle, too. He lives in the Catalonian town of Girona, Spain, where many established American cyclists like George Hincapie, Christian Vande Velde, and Armstrong have homes. Living in Girona is improving his racing cred, his form (there are tough mountain rides a few miles away), and his Spanish, which his Cervélo teammates appreciate.

“He will speak Spanish like a real Spaniard very soon,” says Sans Vega, who also lives in Girona. “Our six Spanish riders only talk to him in [that language].”

But while King is pleased with his progress on and off the bike this year, don’t ask him now if he’s going to race in the 2010 Tour de France. “That’s the question that will drive you nuts,” he says. “Because that’s what people always think of. What I say is, ‘OK, you play soccer. When are you going to play in the World Cup?’ It’s a stepping-stone process.”

Still, if he continues to proceed at this rate, it wouldn’t be surprising to see him talking with Armstrong on the Champs-Elysées next year.

Jon Brand ’05 is a writer in Washington, DC. His interviews with Ted King are available as audio slideshows on www.middleburymagazine.org. Also on the Middlebury Magazine Web site—Ted King’s favorite rides in Addison County.