On the eve of his attempt to break the hour record, Tom Zirbel sat in his hotel outside of Aguascalientes, Mexico, unable to sleep. He flicked the TV on and off. He raided the mini fridge.
Zirbel was miffed by his restless anxiety. Pre-race jitters are for novice riders, not a veteran with hundreds of professional race starts like him. In true veteran form, Zirbel had even vacated his previous hotel in downtown Aguascalientes in favor of one in the countryside, fearing the city’s raucous Independence Day celebration that night would ruin his sleep.
While downtown Aguascalientes was echoing with firecrackers and music, Zirbel’s hotel room was silent. Still, no sleep.
“I remember laughing to myself, thinking what is the big deal? The whole pre-race nerves thing is something I hadn’t felt in years,” Zirbel says, recounting the scene. “I told myself I had to relax, it was just another race.”
Of course it was not just another race. Zirbel hoped to break Norm Alvis’s American hour record of 51.505km, which had stood since 1997. He knew that the hourlong race would dish out a sizable helping of pain to his lower back, neck, and legs, and that the effort would require intense focus.
Zirbel had plenty of pressure riding on his ride. The hour attempt was the final event of his decade-long professional career, which included a time trial national title, plenty of top results, and a devastating doping suspension that Zirbel still argues was unjust. And the trip to Aguascalientes was also the culmination of nearly two years of planning by Zirbel and his Rally Pro Cycling team.
“I had never been in a situation where so much time and resources and money had been put into me,” Zirbel says. “I either succeed or I screw up, that’s how I looked at it.”
At some point, around 3 a.m., Tom Zirbel finally fell asleep.
Standing 6-foot-4 and weighing nearly 200 pounds, Tom Zirbel’s body looks better fit to sack a quarterback than to pedal a bicycle. Throughout his career, size-related nicknames like “Thor” and “Gentle Giant” followed him to the races. During his stint in the amateur ranks, other riders told him he was too big to have a career in cycling.
From his first year racing, Zirbel knew he had physiological gifts. A competitive cross-country runner for more than a decade, Zirbel could maintain a high aerobic effort for long stretches of time. He picked up cycling at age 23 and immediately excelled. At his third ever bicycle race, the 2003 edition of the Mount Evans Hill Climb, he won the Category 3 event, beating talented youngsters Tejay van Garderen and Peter Stetina.
“I got used to just riding off the front, to just use my strength to compensate for everything else,” Zirbel says. “My first year as a pro I still had trouble riding in a pack.”
Zirbel lived in Boulder, Colorado, and worked as a pizza deliveryman as he rose through the ranks. In the 2005 national time trial championship, Zirbel finished fourth in the professional division despite still holding a Category 2 license. The next year, he entered the pro ranks.
Zirbel’s physiology was perfect for time trialing. He could push 450 watts for an hour at sea level races and maintain 520 watts for 10-minute efforts. He became a regular top-10 finisher in time trials at the Tour of California and Tour of Missouri, and was a podium contender at the U.S. time trial championship.
Still, Zirbel never considered attempting the hour record, even after the UCI standardized its new rules in 2014. Instead, it was his Rally Cycling team manager Jonas Carney who hatched the plan. Carney approached Zirbel at the squad’s 2015 training camp with the idea.
“Tom’s a crazy physical specimen — there are times that we’ve literally asked him to control the entire race by himself,” Carney said. “If the right conditions were there, I thought he could do a great [hour] effort.”
At first, Zirbel was hesitant to fully commit to Carney’s idea. He had briefly raced on the track in 2006 for USA Cycling and was familiar with the specialized training and equipment that went into velodrome racing. By his estimate, pursuing the hour record would require similar amounts of focused training, which could distract him from his road racing goals.
“Jonas dreams big. I was the guy who had to bring him back down to Earth,” Zirbel says. “I told him I can’t just jump on a track and do this.”
Zirbel says he never contemplated the hour record due to the event’s historical ties to doping. Before the UCI set its new standards, the record was held by Czech rider Ondrej Sosenka, who was suspended twice for doping violations.
Doping is a subject that has followed Zirbel through the second half of his professional career. In 2009, Zirbel hit his zenith by winning USA Cycling’s National Racing Calendar and finishing fourth in the time trial at the UCI Road World Championships. At 31, he appeared destined for the WorldTour and indeed had a contract with Garmin for the following season.
In December of that year, Zirbel learned that a urine sample of his taken at the U.S. Pro national time trial championships had recorded a positive test for the steroid DHEA. Zirbel went public with the positive test and vehemently denied taking a banned substance. When his B sample came back positive, he accepted a two-year ban but denied knowingly taking the drug.
Zirbel says he was both confused and embarrassed. He decided to quit cycling entirely, announcing his retirement via a blog post.
“I relate it to a bad relationship — any relationship that would treat me this way, where I felt there was no fault of my own, was not worth it,” Zirbel says. “The way I got screwed, it was like the good times aren’t worth what I’m going through right now.”
The details surrounding the test added weight to Zirbel’s defense in the court of public opinion. He underwent multiple doping tests during the week of the U.S. Pro time trial championships that year, and at least two of the other tests returned negative results. But both USADA tests, the A and B samples, came back positive. Under the governing body’s black-and-white rulebook, he had cheated.
Zirbel still denies knowingly taking a banned substance.
Within the insular world of domestic racing, doping denials are traditionally met with a healthy dose of skepticism. But with Zirbel, there were plenty of other riders and team directors who believed him. Carney said he never would have hired Zirbel if he did not believe him.
Frank Overton, who operates a coaching business in Boulder, even hired Zirbel to coach amateur cyclists as he served his suspension. Overton said he’s previously turned away riders with past histories of doping, but with Zirbel, it was different.
“When a man comes to your house and cries in front of you, tells you about his situation, it gives you a deeper understanding of what he’s going through,” Overton said. “I never hesitated to hire Tom because I believed him.”
Still, skepticism lingered around Zirbel and his results. When USADA eventually reduced his ban in 2011 to 18 months for helping them with two different doping investigations — an action he called “silly” at the time — Zirbel said he got some pushback when he reentered the pro peloton that summer. During his first race back, one rider came up and called him a doper.
“I was like yeah, that’s fair, but let me tell you my side of the story,” Zirbel says. “If people didn’t want me to be [racing] and really thought I was a cheater, I wouldn’t have stayed.”
In the summer of 2015, Zirbel carved out a two-month block to train for the hour record, and for three days a week he rode from his home to the wooden Boulder Valley Velodrome. The workouts included 12- and 20-minute threshold intervals, with short rest in between. Zirbel slowly built up to longer 40-50 minute intervals at the same pace to ready his body for the effort.
The biggest focus of the training was to get Zirbel accustomed to the fixed aerodynamic position required for the hour effort. Acclimating to the position was agonizing.
“Honestly, the most painful thing was my taint — my nether regions were not happy,” Zirbel says. “It’s amazing how much better you feel for even five seconds out of the saddle where you relieve the pressure and then come back down. I’d hit 20 minutes and that’s all I could think about. God, this is miserable.”
Just as Zirbel was nearing readiness for the hour, the demands of the domestic racing circuit sucked him away from the track. He competed in the USA Pro Challenge that year, as well as the Tour of Alberta and even the team time trial at the UCI worlds. Subsequently, Carney also lost sight of the hour goal, as the rigors of team management took over his attention.
Zirbel had chosen Mexico’s Aguascalientes velodrome because of its 6,000-foot elevation, but as the summer wore on, the team’s communication with the track drew to a halt. They needed to book a three-day block of time, hire commissaires, communicate with the Mexican cycling federation, find anti-doping officials, and travel to the site with the gear and athlete ready to go. By the final days of August 2015, the project ground to a halt.
“We just didn’t get it together,” Carney says. “We set our minds to 2016.”
As Zirbel headed into the offseason, he wasn’t sure if that was even going to happen. In October 2015, he turned 37. Having spent a decade racing, Zirbel decided that 2016 would be his final season, no matter if the hour record happened or not.
“I was really afraid it would be put on the back burner indefinitely,” he says. “That was definitely a fear.”
Having learned the lessons from 2015, Carney and Zirbel began arranging the details of the Aguascalientes trip earlier this year. Zirbel again carved out a block to train, and Carney made the connections with Aguascalientes and UCI officials. The two men planned to attempt the record over three days in September.
Despite his shortened sleep, Zirbel wasn’t groggy when he entered the Aguascalientes velodrome on September 17 with his six-man crew. A liaison from the velodrome had invited guests to watch the hour attempt and a handful of sleepy Mexican cycling fans sat in the seats. The scene was a stark contrast to the hour attempts by Jens Voigt and Bradley Wiggins, which featured live webcasts and grandstands full of fans.
“We had a small budget, and just putting this together was a great undertaking for the team,” Carney said. “It was low key, and I think it helped Tom out.”
Zirbel has a handful of memories from the ride. He spent the early minutes holding back his desire to stomp on the pedals. At minute 25, his back cramped but the pain subsided. At the 40-minute mark, he actually got out of the saddle for a few seconds, and the shift in position gave his legs a boost of energy.
At the 45-minute mark, an announcer on the PA began shouting in Spanish, and the small crowd began to cheer. With 10 minutes to go, Carney, who was barking out splits from the sidelines, began yelling at Zirbel to keep up the pace.
“You could see he was starting to really hurt,” Carney says. “He was starting to crack a bit.”
The last few laps are a blur in Zirbel’s memory. He told himself not to crash, not to mess it up. There was a sizable pain in his legs, but it was similar to what he would endure in a long road time trial. When the time finally hit, his distance was 53.037km. He had beaten Alvis’s record by nearly 2km. His distance was the second farthest ever — only Wiggins had traveled farther.
Carney congratulated Zirbel, who says he was happy to get off of his racing bicycle one last time. His back and his undercarriage hurt, but his legs somehow felt OK.
“It was an opportunity to go out on a high note,” Zirbel says. “When it finally came together I was in disbelief.”
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