JIM OCHOWICZ, THE GREAT SURVIVOR

Jim Ochowicz is known as the pioneer of US cycling for bringing the 7-Eleven team to Europe in the 1980s. He is also a controversial figure because of his past association with known dopers and allegations of financial chicanery in the sport’s corridors of power. Yet he remains at the very pinnacle of the sport and will manage the new-look Team CCC in 2019. Procycling profiles the charismatic team chief

WRITER: SAM DANSIE

PROCYCLING UK - issue 249, December 2018 

After the Tour’s Roubaix stage earlier this summer, Greg Van Avermaet was lobbed a question. “Can you tell us if you have a team for next year?” 

“Come to the press conference tomorrow,” the BMC rider replied with a knowing smile. The next day Jim Ochowicz, the team’s manager, sat in front of the sponsor screen and announced what had become common knowledge – that he had secured a sponsorship deal with Darius Miłek, the Polish billionaire retail magnate and owner of the CCC-Sprandi-Polkowice ProConti squad, that would see his team through 2019 and beyond.

Some turnaround. Through the spring and summer, the team’s closure looked certain. Late in 2017 BMC, which had sponsored the outfit since 2005, said it would pull out at the end of 2018. In the spring, Andy Rihs, who owned the bike brand outright and the squad jointly with Ochowicz, died after a long battle with leukaemia. And as the months passed, without a sponsor on the horizon, the team’s marquee racers left: Richie Porte, Rohan Dennis, Stefan Küng, Tejay van Garderen. The only chips Ochowicz seemed to have left were Van Avermaet, the rump of a Classics squad – and his World Tour licence.

Ochowicz is 66. He has spent almost 40 years chasing the money. His energy brought the first American team to Europe in the mid-80s. They won Tour stages and the Giro. He delivered Lance Armstrong to the pros. One of his riders, Cadel Evans, won the Tour. He was wealthy and happily married. Yet now his business partner had died and his talent for divining sponsorship dollars had failed him, so it seemed – until the CCC deal came through. From where had Ochowicz produced this latest rabbit? 

NO GIFTS 

James Lionel Ochowicz was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on 23 December, 1951. His father, Erv, was a construction manager. According to Geoff Drake, a journalist and author who co-wrote a history of Team 7-Eleven, life in the Ochowicz household could be hard. “His father was a tough character, sometimes an alcoholic. Och says when [his father] told you to sit down and shut up, you sat down and shut up. They were never rich.” His mother was a devout Catholic. In the mid-1970s, the household took in a skater called Sheila Young, so she could practice at the local rink. She was the sister of one of Ochowicz’s riding buddies and, as it happened, they fell into a romance which stoked his mother’s disapproval. “When I started getting romantically interested in ‘Oatch’ , it was really weird,” Sheila told an interviewer from People magazine in 1976. “She’d quote us Scripture that if we wanted to live together we ought to be married. But as far as I was concerned there was no sense in being married unless you wanted children, and we definitely didn’t until after the Olympics. And neither of us could see ourselves marrying someone we hadn’t lived with before, but his mother stuck by the Book.” Confidence in the messy Young/Ochowicz flat was clearly abundant – but then Young had just won a medal of every hue at the Innsbruck Olympics and Ochowicz was about to represent the USA in the team pursuit at his second Olympic Games.

By the late 1970s, Ochowicz was a fixture in three worlds: he was managing the USA skating team, training to be a cyclist and working in construction. “Right up until 1980 or so, Och was hanging off bridges with a tool belt on. He was not given anything as a gift, ” said Drake.

In 1978, Ochowicz raced the Red Zinger Classic, the forerunner to the Coors Classic… and was disqualified on stage 4. Les Earnest, a Stanford computer scientist and race commissaire who is now 87, told Procycling that Ochowicz was tailed out of the main group, only to turn up at the finish and claim third. “We nailed him and he was out of the race, ” said Earnest, with a hint of glee. Their paths would cross again, when they were on opposing sides of a fight for control of the US cycling federation in the early 2000s. 

But while Earnest’s experience of Ochowicz is less than flattering – Earnest said the incident allowed him to “calibrate Jim’s integrity” - Michael Aisner, who ran the Coors Classics through its 1980s heyday, described Ochowicz as a man of “impeccable character and consistency.” He also saw Ochowicz blossom on the business side. “He has his finger on the key element, and that is how to find money. The other part of it is how to keep it. He understands sports marketing,” Aisner said.

THE HEIDEN EFFECT

At the beginning of his management career, Ochowicz’s prize asset was his relationship with the speed skater, Eric Heiden. When his fellow Wisconsinite won five golds at the 1980 Lake Placid Olympics, Ochowicz, who had managed Heiden’s US skate team, was in pole position to make hay. After the Olympics, the tall, handsome and well-educated Heiden was a megastar. He stared out from the covers of Sports Illustrated, Time magazine and Newsweek. He knew Mick Jagger. Despite the fame, which he didn’t really care for other than it allowed him to meet “nice girls,” he didn’t want to continue skating. At 21 he wanted to race bikes. Ochowicz was on hand to oblige. Ochowicz “turned the whole Eric Heiden thing into a bonanza, ” said Drake. 

The sponsor Ochowicz found for the team with Heiden at its heart was a first for American racing: the name on the jersey came from outside the cycling industry. Ochowicz convinced retail magnates the Thompson brothers, who had already committed to building the velodrome for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, that a racing team was the perfect extension for their chain of 7-Eleven convenience stores. Without a university education, Ochowicz ran business proposals and letters past Aisner for advice. They were “littered with misspellings and odd grammatical approaches, ” said Aisner. “He was a jock. He really did not have the business and English background to take him forward. But for me the biggest quality anyone can have is growth. What I saw was him getting better and better as time went on.”

After the 1984 Olympics, Ochowicz convinced the whole team to turn pro, recalled Drake. The ambition was nothing less than making it in Europe. “In 1984 and 1985 it became clear his passion was to go straight to the top of the sport. That meant the Tour de France and that meant asking the entire team to turn pro.” The riders called him Sergeant Rock. “He could be a strict disciplinarian. Some of the riders tell stories that when Och entered the room a hush would settle over the room, ” said Drake. The 7-Eleven team’s shambolic and challenging beginnings in Europe in their early days are notorious and make for colourful stories. Staying above a brothel in Ghent; pushing Bernard Hinault off wheels because they didn’t know who he was; turning up late to starts; getting lost; riding down the autostrada after abandoning Milan-San Remo; being blamed for crashes – the tales have become the origin myths of America’s arrival in Europe, and it was all led by Ochowicz. 

“They were literally laughed at, ” said Drake. “They were called cowboys, but Och didn’t care, he was going to push it as far as he could. He had to hold his nose and jump into that whole culture. One thing about Och is he’s fearless. He wouldn’t have been intimidated by that.” Then, as now, he only spoke English, but then being a larger-than-life American is good territory from a brand perspective, noted Bob Stapleton, the former manager of HTC-HighRoad who used to rely on Ochowicz for advice. Stapleton recalled Ochowicz’s straight-talking side. “I had a dispute with another team and I called him up and said, ‘Jim, how do you think I should handle this?’ I was really trying to do things the right way, figure out how this game’s played, and Jim just said, ‘Just tell him to f*ck off!’ It was kind of what I wanted to do, but it was refreshing to hear a guy who’s had all that experience just call it like it was.”

Time passed and success came in waves: Tour stage wins came, Alex Stieda wore the yellow jersey at the Tour, they won the Giro with Andy Hampsten in 1988… and then the Southland Corporation, the company behind 7-Eleven, experienced financial trouble. 

Drake said, “He was 24 hours from letting all his riders go, when John van der Velde [a rider] said he knew somebody at Motorola. They had a meeting, one thing led to another and they said, ‘Okay, we’ll step in.’” From sales pitch to contract signature took 19 days. The deal kept Ochowicz in a team car and the riders on the road until 1996.

OCHOWICZ THE BROKER 

In the year after Motorola ended, 1997, Ochowicz was inducted into the US Bicycling Hall of Fame for having pioneered America’s arrival in Europe. And he moved into a new sphere: he became a stockbroker. In 1999, he picked up an eyebrow-raising client: Hein Verbruggen, the president of the UCI, who asked him to manage a “small amount” of his personal wealth. In 2001, Ochowicz moved to Thomas Weisel’s investment bank, and took Verbruggen’s account with him.

Ochowicz and Weisel were Midwestern peas in a pod: they both had successful endurance sports careers before going on to exploit their competitive streaks in business. In 2000, Weisel, who described himself as “chemically dependent” on exercise, engineered a takeover of the US Cycling federation. By 2002, most of the old guard who had opposed the changes had been forced out. Ochowicz was appointed as the board president. He held the post until 2006. 

But before Ochowicz left, Gerard Bisceglia, the USAC CEO, filed a lawsuit against the federation for the wrongful termination of his work contract. He had called out Ochowicz for conflicted interests – principally for acting as a paid consultant for Phonak, the Swiss professional team owned by Andy Rihs. In the suit papers, after Bisceglia told Ochowicz he was going to inform the board about the financial arrangement, Ochowicz reportedly replied: “After all I have given to this sport I am entitled to the money. You work for me, I don’t work for you. You’ll see who the boss is.” Ochowicz’s Phonak ties were reported but the board cleared him of wrongdoing. However, Besceglia claimed Ochowicz never forgave him and hounded him out of the post.

Meanwhile, Ochowicz also accepted an invitation from the UCI to sit on its inaugural Professional Cycling Council. The PCC, a committee set up by Verbruggen, was designed to create a roadmap for the development and globalisation of professional cycling. Ochowicz was ostensibly selected for his marketing expertise, his experience bringing the first US team to Europe and the fact he wasn’t representing a team. 

Aisner, acting as a consultant race promoter during Ochowicz’s USAC presidency, said: “I was not a fan of the fact that he was running that team before BMC [Phonak] while at the same time he was on that board. I cannot comment on whether that [power] was ever abused. I certainly heard from other people complaints about the fact this felt like a conflict of interest.”

LINKS TO ARMSTRONG

As he was widely seen as the godfather of American cycling, it was inevitable Ochowicz’s path would cross that of Lance Armstrong, and in fact they became entwined. Weisel’s path also headed in the same direction. Armstrong had ridden on Weisel’s amateur team, Subaru-Montgomery (which would morph into US Postal) and Ochowicz had subsequently given Armstrong his first pro contract with Motorola in 1992. A year later, with Armstrong’s star ascending fast, it has been alleged from multiple sources that Ochowicz fixed it for Armstrong to win the Philadelphia Classic and so win a $1m prize. Ochowicz denies the allegation. In Juliet Macur’s book, Cycle of Lies, she described how Ochowicz became a member of Armstrong’s inner circle. Ochowicz became godfather to Armstrong’s first son, Luke, and the Texan looked up to the high-rolling, fine-dining, wine-drinking Ochowicz. 

And yet a telling demonstration about Ochowicz’s Teflon-like properties is his near total absence from the frame in the USADA and the federal investigator Jeff Novitsky’s pursuit of Armstrong: Ochowicz’s name appears just three times in the 202-page Reasoned Decision – on pages 197 and 198. In the 2015 CIRC report, which looked into cycling’s rich recent history of doping and corruption, his name is entirely absent.

Aisner said Ochowicz “somehow… escaped being dragged through the mud. He got through all of the nasty and very dirty Armstrong years, where so many people were being drafted in to tell their tale and appear in front of grand juries. And yet, theoretically – and I don’t know this – but from my vantage point he must have been deeply engaged in that world. At the same time, he emerges with a smile on his face and people are happy to let him go and he goes about his business and his life. I found it a curiosity and somewhat not a surprise that he was able to emerge unscathed.” 

Macur found Ochowicz bafflingly ignorant on pertinent issues concerning  operations in his team. She reports  she “would walk away time and again  thinking Ochowicz was either a practiced  liar or the most oblivious man ever to  walk in cycling’s clink-clink world”.

RUN BMC

Ochowicz re-entered titular team management with BMC ahead of the 2007 season. Floyd Landis’s epitestosterone positive less than a week after he’d won the Tour in 2006 was the biggest and final nail in the Phonak team coffin. Ochowicz had been working as a consultant. “Six years, 11 doping scandals,” proclaimed a Cyclingnews article shortly after Landis’s positive. When the Wall Street Journal asked Ochowicz if he knew if riders were doping while he consulted to Phonak, he said: “I have no clue what went on. I wasn’t a part of it.”

Landis, visiting the Tour in 2016, told Cyclingnews: “There’s management and I respect those guys, and then there’s Ochowicz. The fact that he’s still in cycling should give you no hope that it will ever change… That’s all I have to say about that guy.”

Nevertheless Rihs, with Ochowicz now at his right hand, immediately brought into the small American outfit, BMC, and proceeded to turn it into a fabulously wealthy squad with an embarrassment of cycling talent.

However, controversy was never totally eradicated. Two riders failed antidoping tests on the team. The squad was also criticised for allowing Alessandro Ballan and Mauro Santambrogio to continue riding while they were under investigation about their part in the so-called "Mantova Affair" while they rode for Lampre. In 2011, Sven Schoutteten, a part-time BMC soigneur, was arrested in connection with a historic doping case that preceded his time with the squad. Ochowicz initially claimed he hadn’t heard of Schoutteten or that he hadn’t worked for BMC, despite the fact he had worked at multiple races for the squad that year. In the 09/10 transfer period, the Rihs and Ochowicz tandem brought in the two most recent world champions, Ballan and Cadel Evans, and a string of high profile WorldTour riders. 

Ochowicz’s career-long ambition was to win the Tour with one of his riders. That was realised when 30 years after the 7-Eleven team had been born, Evans stood on the high dais in the yellow jersey with the Parisian skyline behind him. The success provoked Rihs and Ochowicz into another massive spending spree. Yet despite the presence of Philippe Gilbert and Thor Hushovd, it took the team until 2017 to win its first monument, with a rider it had nurtured since 2011 – Greg Van Avermaet. 

Rihs and Ochowicz’s relationship was extremely tight – sometimes to the exasperation of other parties. When BMC won the Worlds TTT in 2014, marketing executives at the Swiss bike company couldn’t use the race photos because the riders had not been using sponsor-correct wheels. “Jim was doing whatever he wanted with the team and didn’t care about bringing good visibility to the brand. In the end Andy was paying all the bills and he had a good relationship with Andy, ” a source told Procycling. 

In professional cycling’s unstable world of sponsorship, such tight and free-spending financial relationships are a rarity – especially ones that last more than a decade. But then according to Stapleton, one of Ochowicz’s great strengths is making people who love the sport respond to him. “He was supereffective with Andy Rihs and people who are really passionate about the sport. He was able to sit around the table and recite stories from the sport that he had been a part of. That’s really effective with people. Sitting across the table from Jim was probably a ton of fun.” 

And so Miłek, who has just rescued BMC and turned it into Team CCC for 2019 and beyond is the perfect Ochowicz partner. Miłek was once a promising cyclist himself until a bad injury derailed his career. He’s been described, by people who know him, as a cycling fan. It just happens that he’s fabulously rich as well. It’s not hard to picture the scene on a hot July night in some chateau restaurant. And as the old storyteller Ochowicz regales Miłek with mad tales of 7-Eleven’s first adventures in Europe – and perhaps shares a confidence or two about some of the sport’s great scandals – garrulous laughter will rise into the rooms where riders are sleeping and outside into the courtyard, where a CCC bus is being polished until it gleams.