SHIFTING GEARS : Veil of Drug Use Was No Place to Hide for Former Cyclist

If the truth hurt Cindy Olavarri, the lie almost killed her.

On July 12, 1984, in the heightened excitement over the impending Los Angeles Olympic Games, Michael Fraysse, manager of the U.S. cycling team, announced:

“Olavarri had been feeling poorly from time to time during the season, even though she performed well at other times. Last Tuesday, when the team was being motor-paced around the course in Mission Viejo, Cindy felt poorly again and the coaches recommended a blood test. The results indicated she had mono, so there was no choice but to replace her.”

Fraysse was at least partially right. U.S. Cycling Federation officials had no choice in kicking their No. 3 road racer off the team after she tested positive for anabolic steroids at the U.S. Olympic trials. They had a choice whether to publicize those results. They chose to circulate the mononucleosis story.

“There was a lot of mononucleosis going around then,” Fraysse said. So, when a reporter called asking him what was wrong with Olavarri, Fraysse said, “ ‘Well, it’s a common problem that a lot of athletes encounter . . . ‘ and he says, ‘Oh, mononucleosis?’ So I said to myself, ‘That sounds good to me.’ ”

It also sounded good to Olavarri: “Oh, I jumped at it,” she said one afternoon in Oakland. “I couldn’t imagine taking it all on at once, being kicked out of the Olympics and also having that made public. When it was suggested that I had mono, I said, ‘God, what a perfect thing.’ ”

Or so she thought.

“Had she had to admit at that time the disqualification was because of drugs, it might have been the thing she needed to stop her on a disastrous course,” said Dr. Robert Voy, formerly the chief medical officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee. “It enabled her to continue down a terrible course of drug abuse. The federation did her a disservice by not telling the truth.”

Neither did cycling help Olavarri when she became an elite rider pursuing the Olympic team. As a member of the U.S. national team in the early 1980s, she was given a number of substances--some legal and some not--to enhance her performances. Although she did not alter her steroid use, she did not test positive for almost three years despite being tested at numerous races.

Now, after almost five years of therapy, including a month in a drug rehabilitation hospital, Olavarri has come to terms with the lie and her wanton use of steroids and other drugs.

Since 1986, she has discussed steroids and their effects as a speaker for San Francisco-based Pros For Kids. She said she hopes to steer youngsters away from thinking that steroids, drugs that can promote muscle tissue, are a shortcut to athletic excellence.

“I was tired of lying about it,” she said of being kicked off the Olympic team. “I just gradually got to the point where if people asked me, I told them (the truth). At first the lie was real comfortable. Then it got to the point where it was totally uncomfortable. I couldn’t do it anymore.

“I don’t feel ashamed of myself anymore. I made a mistake and I think I understand myself a whole lot better now.”

The road to such realization took a circuitous route that led to therapist Laura Pilnick in the summer of 1984. Pilnick was the only person Olavarri confided in for most of two painful years.

“I think physically and emotionally if she had continued her path . . . she could have died,” Pilnick said of the emotional upheaval. “She was pretty close to giving up. When Cindy first came in, she was hitting a personal and professional bottom. It was a physical, emotional and spiritual decision to stay alive.”

That decision was not reached for more than a year after Olavarri first sought Pilnick’s counseling.

Olavarri was in the throes of depression in July, 1984, after Fraysse’s announcement.

It continued when she arrived home in the Bay Area to an outpouring of sympathy, which she thought was unwarranted because of the lie. It made her feel fraudulent.

But she was sick, which compounded her depression.

She was suffering side effects--severe tendinitis, a liver disorder and recurring flu and colds--from three years of steroid use. She also had a malignant skin tumor on her back, which was removed in two subsequent operations. She believes that cancer also was the result of steroids.

The problems were so difficult to endure, she said, that she again fell victim to a drug addiction that began when she was 14.

Cindy Olavarri, one of the world’s best bicycle road racers only a year earlier, was a speed freak. Not only did she pop pills, she was injecting speed intravenously.

In the summer of 1985, Olavarri qualified for the world track championships, although she had only recently recuperated from the cancer surgery.

But she finished eighth at the World Championships, and knew then that her career was over.

After that race, she had nothing to do but heal the physical and emotional scars. With Pilnick’s guidance, the recovery process began in earnest.

First, though, Olavarri had to understand how a well-tuned, elite bicycle racer could reach the depths of such distortion.

Though she grew up in a strong family unit in Pleasant Hill, Calif., Olavarri said she felt like an outsider because she liked to climb trees and play sports.

But her father, Martin, was encouraging, which was essential for a young girl who felt awkward. When he died of a heart attack in Olavarri’s freshman year of high school, a blanket of uneasiness covered the once-happy home.

“The loss of her father was the most devastating thing that could ever happen,” said her mother Beverly, an assistant principal at the all-girl Catholic high school Olavarri attended. “His loss was sudden, unexpected. We had trouble adjusting.”

Her father’s loss left a vacuum that she began filling with drugs and alcohol.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I remember if I took speed, I wouldn’t feel hungry.”

Olavarri was a spindly 5-foot-8, 115 pounds as a freshman, and at 34, she has maintained a slender, athletic build.

“I had this perception of getting fat easily,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, good, I’m not going to eat lunch. I can’t eat, I’m not hungry. I just took 10 whites.’ ”

And if she was not popping amphetamine tablets, she was getting drunk before class.

It was a testament to her willpower that Olavarri stopped daily drug consumption in her senior year. She decided that she wanted to join the school’s fledgling cross-country team, but could not compete if she were high every day.

Lying in bed, thin as a wheat stem because she was suffering from mononucleosis--really, she contracted it--she made the decision to quit. She flushed the pills she had hidden under her pillow down the toilet.

“What I was doing was such a contrast to my family upbringing, it didn’t make sense,” she said. “I was fighting it. I wanted to change that. I really didn’t think of myself as a drug addict but I was taking amphetamines every day.”

She was not instantly cured. She still smoked marijuana and drank occasionally during her senior year. And after attending the University of California in nearby Berkeley, the contradictions continued. She joined Cal’s rowing crew, and competed in cross-country and track and field. She also dropped acid and took speed.

While in the master’s program at Cal in 1978, Olavarri continued to run and party. But when she suffered a knee injury during a speed workout on the track one day, she turned to bicycling to stay in shape.

She was introduced to members of a Berkeley women’s cycling club and began training with them, still expecting to return to running.

But cycling clicked with Olavarri. She enjoyed the camaraderie of the women, some of whom were national-class riders. Not only did they accept her, they encouraged her to take up the sport. She seemed to find her niche riding with friends through the undulating Berkeley Hills.

“For the first time, someone saw potential in me as an athlete,” Olavarri said.

She never returned to running.

The cyclists taught Olavarri the myriad intricacies of competition and she quickly excelled. Olavarri started winning local races, then regional races and soon was competing nationally.

In 1981, she was asked to join one of the country’s best clubs, the forerunner to the 7-Eleven team.

But in the milieu of international competition, her upbringing haunted her.

“When I grew up, A’s were expected in school,” she said of her parents, who both were educators. “A-plus was something to be commented on. Anything less was, ‘You didn’t do it right. You goofed.’ ”

In cycling, Olavarri was unsatisfied with a finish worse than first, second or third.

“And most often, two and three weren’t good enough,” she said. “It’s not the best. One is special. Two and down is all lumped together.”

Said Connie Carpenter Phinney, the 1984 gold-medal winner in road racing: “Cindy was not happy when she didn’t do well. She didn’t handle it well. She was racing at the hardest time for U.S. women’s cycling. It would have been difficult for anyone behind Rebecca (Twigg) and me. Her actions after a race didn’t jibe with her personality. She was a person obsessed.”

Carpenter Phinney, who barely defeated Olavarri for the 3,000-meter pursuit title at the 1983 World Championships, still cannot accept Olavarri’s steroid use.

“Everyone makes the choice,” said Carpenter Phinney, a member of the U.S. Olympic Committee’s Substance Abuse Research and Education Committee. “You make it out of weakness and an inability to believe in yourself. I don’t feel as sympathetic with her situation. What if she would have beaten me at the World Championships? It wasn’t Cindy. It was something else.”

Olavarri ponders those questions and others in trying to piece together her past. She is afraid that some will view her short-lived success as an endorsement for steroids. But she insists that she reached a high plateau without drugs. Further, had it not been for the drugs, she might have won an Olympic medal instead of being left broken and burdened.

But in pursuit of being the best, she would try just about anything. Carpenter Phinney was right, Olavarri was obsessive. She would put in more mileage than teammates, even if that meant going alone for extra sprints or taking a distance ride on the team’s day off.

Such an attitude coincided with a prevailing philosophy among national team coaches that the cyclists needed extra help if they were to emerge as Olympic champions, some of the cyclists said.

For the men, as was admitted after the 1984 Games, that meant blood doping, a practice which has since been banned. For the women, that meant experimentation with a variety of substances, Olavarri said.

Olavarri and others said Eddie Borysewicz, then the national coach, encouraged his cyclists to try caffeine pills, ATP shots and capsules (adenosine triphosphate is a naturally produced substance that controls muscle contractions) and injectable vitamins such as B-12. They were within legal degrees under International Olympic Committee guidelines, Olavarri believes, but in some cases she does not know even today what she ingested.

Olavarri said she and others were given vials of unknown substances that had European labels. She said she assumed that the substances were legal because the riders did not test positive after races. Olavarri, however, was taking steroids by then and did not test positive, either.

Said Carpenter Phinney: “(Borysewicz) would always go to the edge of the line, if not over it.”

Borysewicz, now coaching in San Diego, denies giving athletes any substances unless they requested it. He said he told athletes interested in trying caffeine tablets and vitamin shots to talk to team doctors. He said no rules were broken with his consent.

“I searched all over Europe, looking for special cycling equipment,” Borysewicz said. “We would pump helium into tires instead of air because this was an advantage for our riders. There is nothing different between this and anything else we were doing.”

But Olavarri said that once before a race she was given an inhaler for asthma victims that contained the banned stimulant epinephrine, a drug that can give the body an adrenaline-like boost. For some reason, the coaches knew officials would not test that particular day, Olavarri recalled.

“So, right before the start, they said, ‘Come over here, duck down behind the van, breathe through this thing,’ ” Olavarri said.

“Years later, I had to check this out with my teammate, Peggy (Maas). I said, ‘Peggy, did we really do this? Did we shoot up in the back of the (team) van before races?’ She said, ‘Yes, indeed, we did.’ We had our syringes in the van . . . vitamins for the others and for me it was steroids, too.”

Borysewicz said he was aware of the inhaler but said he thought the cyclists had medical clearance to use it.

“These are personal things between the riders and the doctors,” he said. “They aren’t anyone’s business.”

When substances were offered by coaches, Olavarri did not refuse.

“For me, taking something wasn’t unusual at all,” she said. “I had that history . . . it made sense.”

Also, she was afraid that to rebuke a coach was to jeopardize her standing.

“They are telling you when to go to sleep, eat, how much to train, where to train and . . . what to take,” she said. “Some people were able to say no. For me, it felt like, ‘If he says I need to take that, then that means I won’t race well enough without it.’ ”

The step to steroids was a natural one, she said, though Olavarri took it without anyone’s consent or knowledge. She said her coaches never offered her the drugs. She trained beyond the coaches’ demands, so why not also try an extra aid?

For a while, Olavarri also experimented with the herb ginseng and royal jelly, which someone had suggested as an energy producer. But with ATP capsules, vitamin injections, vials of unknown European drugs and steroids, Olavarri subsequently quit the ginseng and royal jelly.

“I think I already was doing enough stuff,” she said.

It often took her half an hour to take all the chemicals before she was ready to compete. She said she had a list to keep straight, when to take what.

Olavarri also resorted to speed on occasions but decided that amphetamines made her too jittery to compete. She said that once when she took speed before a race, her heart pumped so hard that she became alarmed. From then on, she used speed only to train, and not often.

Anyway, the steroids were producing desired results. Anabolic steroids, synthetic derivatives of the male hormone testosterone, have a strengthening effect on the body, which she began to notice almost immediately.

Olavarri learned about the drugs from her studies and acquaintances on Cal’s track and field team. While earning a master’s degree in exercise physiology, she also learned about the risks. Still, she was undaunted when it came time to try them.

She bought the drugs, first by mail order, and later from a Bay Area doctor and at the USOC training center in Colorado Springs, Colo., from a weightlifter. She started with dianabol, a popular drug among track and field athletes. The experimentation escalated to Winstrol, deca-durabolin and eventually shots of testosterone.

She never shared her steroid use with teammates because she wanted an advantage over the others. She liked the shroud of secrecy. It made her feel special.

Although she had mood alterations, a flattened chest, deepened voice and hardened body, those in her cycling family, including her roommates, were unsuspecting. Olavarri became an expert at hiding it.

“You have a little satchel for yourself with your toothpaste, steroids and syringe,” she said. “You go into the bathroom, you wash your face, you inject yourself and you come out of the bathroom.”

She found injecting herself stressful.

“It was horrible at first,” she said. “I was drenched with sweat because I was so scared the first time I ever injected myself. I can remember having little prick marks where I hadn’t got it all the way in and had started over. It’s not easy to do, to inject yourself like that. I had a much easier time doing IV with speed later.”

In a chemical-induced state, Olavarri’s perspective was warped, she said. In 1983, a coach gave Olavarri a vial of an unknown substance just before a Colorado road race. She broke open the glass container and swallowed the contents. But she also cut her thumb on the glass. Because it was moments before the 40-mile race, she quickly wrapped her finger tightly in tape and then placed in the top three.

After the event, she sought medical attention for her aching finger. It required stitches.

What was she thinking?

“I did feel invincible,” she said. “I also didn’t care where I’d be now. I didn’t care if I lived. It’s nice to live for the present, but that’s a little extreme.”

In retrospect, it was more than a little extreme.

“It just about killed me,” she said softly, letting the words dangle. “I just about let it kill me.

“I never compared myself with a drug addict, because I always thought of drug addicts as being in the street or really being messed up. I learned, since then, that’s not true.”

Even before Olavarri was sent home from the Olympic team, her body began to revolt. The extensive training for almost four years was draining enough without the influx of steroids.

“I was training so hard each day that all I could feel was exhaustion,” she said. “I would numb out any other kinds of feelings, and then with the drugs I was just on this level plane. I didn’t have the regular ups and downs that we feel naturally.”

Her menstrual cycle stopped and her hardened body lost its natural shape.

She knew something was drastically wrong when, after making the Olympic team, she could not keep up with her teammates in workouts three weeks before the Games. As the riders practiced on the course at Mission Viejo, Olavarri would hold onto the coach’s motorcycle during the uphill portion of the ride.

The coaches ordered her to rest, and gave her more B-12 injections. But Olavarri said that by then, the steroids were taking their toll.

Five years later, some of the effects linger. Her deepened voice has never returned to its natural softer tone and she experiences many problems with her joints and immune system.

In 1985, as she was being admitted into a drug clinic, doctors told her she had suffered liver damage that resembled the effects of hepatitis. She was continually combatting the flu and discovered that she was allergic to dairy products, wheat, corn and sugar.

She said she suffered from tendinitis constantly. Her body became pin-cushion painful. She could not lift weights and even walking often hurt.

In her compact wood-paneled East Bay bungalow, a sleek red racing bike dangles from the corner of the room, obscuring a pair of cross-country skis. A bicycle helmet is next to a potted cactus. Olavarri does not look at these accouterments of her favorite activity as she explains that riding even 25 miles is difficult now.

“I’d like to ride my bike farther and harder but I just can’t,” she said. “I come home and ice it as it is.”

Her body’s breakdown has resulted in an overhaul of her routine. She currently works only part-time as a personal trainer at an Oakland athletic club.

She uses acupuncture instead of taking anti-inflammatory drugs for her tendinitis. But she will take aspirin if the pain becomes too great.

“It’s like a last resort,” she said.

Olavarri understands last resorts.

She still cannot fathom going public with her experiences because she is seeking neither publicity nor pity. Piercing her private world has been her most challenging--and rewarding--endeavor.

And facing the truth has been easier than taking it to the grave.