Dewey Dickey Lives

They weren’t sure what to make of Dewey Dickey when he showed up for that first training ride two Aprils ago. His Bianchi/Grand Performance teammates had seen their star out-sprint adversity in the past, but he had never faced something as big as this.

In the past year, Duane Dickey had undergone an unsuccessful operation to remove a benign brain tumor. He had endured six weeks of intense radiation, then suffered chemical meningitis. Later that summer, he developed persistent diarrhea and nearly died. Doctors removed his colon. Six weeks later, his intestine twisted, and he barely made it to the hospital in time for a surgeon to save his life. His mother declared it a miracle that her then-thirty-six-year-old son was even alive.

Yet, here on a windy April Saturday astride his Bianchi and ready to ride was the two-time state road cycling champion with sixty career victories, an ileostomy bag strapped inside his bib shorts. That worried his teammates. Not everyone’s story could end as happily as Lance Armstrong’s miraculous comeback from cancer to win seven Tours de France. Dan Casebeer, who owns Grand Performance bike shop in St. Paul, which sponsors the team, told Dickey, “We don’t want you dying on us.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “Let’s go.” Dickey had something to prove. His last year of competitive cycling, 2001, had been his best. But he had wrecked that, testing positive for three banned substances at the Tour of Guatemala in November and served a two-year suspension. Then, health problems washed out the 2004 season. “I didn’t want to quit and always think ‘what if,’ so I had to try,” he says. “I wanted to prove that I could do it again.”

At stake was the force that held his life together. Could he prove to himself, his teammates, and the cycling world that he could still be Dewey Dickey?

Dewey Dickey doesn’t look like a legend. He’s rail-thin—six-feet, 140 pounds, with a thirty-inch waist, a sunken chest. Looks like you could knock him over with a sudden sneeze. His flop of dirty blond hair, narrow chin, and protruding Adam’s apple make him resemble a young Don Knotts. Yet, on the bike, he becomes a tenacious competitor, one a fellow elite cyclist describes as a “force of nature.” In the Twin Cities, Dickey, now thirty-seven, enjoys status as one of the area’s most seasoned and successful bike racers.

Growing up in Cokato and Hutchinson, the small-town kid had big-time ambitions. His head filled with visions of European races he had read about in cycling magazines, he rode his ten-speed on country roads. The youngest of five children—the only boy in a family of girls—he wanted to be a pro cyclist before he even competed in his first race.

By chance, Dickey met Mark Mlinar, a local who raced with the Minneapolis–based Flanders team. Mlinar became Dickey’s informal coach, making him do intense intervals that left his sides heaving. “He was the kind of guy,” Dickey says, “who would sit in his car with the windows closed on a hot summer day just to make himself sweat, to be tough. I owe a lot to him.”

Mlinar pushed the eighteen-year-old to enter his first race, Roseville’s Race for the Roses, in 1986. During the next two years, Dickey developed his aggressive style. He did not have the fast-twitch muscles required to win races that came down to sprint finishes. His specialty became climbing. He attacked opponents on the hills.

He soon established his reputation. By 1988, Paul Thoresen, himself a racer and now Dickey’s close friend, showed up at races and heard from other riders, “Oh, no, Dewey Dickey is here.” Thoresen asked, “Who’s that?” They replied, “You’ll find out. That guy’s built for the bike—he’s so skinny and light.”

Dickey constructed his life around cycling. He had lived frugally, getting by on prize money—as much as $7,000 his top year—and the $15.50 an hour he made driving a school bus part time. Sponsors provided bikes, parts, and clothing. They also paid part of his travel expenses and reimbursed race entry fees. He was willing to sacrifice creature comforts for the luxury of racing his bicycle.

Dickey racked up nearly $500,000 in medical bills during the past two years. The bus company doesn’t have a generous health insurance plan. Luckily for him, after a bad experience when he was treated for his first broken leg and wasn’t insured, he had taken out a private insurance policy, which covered his recent expenses.

He has never married. Never had kids. Never indulged other hobbies. “My life revolves around cycling,” he admits over dinner at Emily’s Lebanese Deli. “Today, I drove an hour and a half [from Cokato, where he lives with his sister, to Minneapolis] to ride ninety miles with friends.”

You can take the kid out of Cokato,  but even stints racing in Europe and Latin America haven’t taken Cokato out of the kid. When the waitress serves a bowl of tabbouleh with a basket of pita bread, he asks, “How do you eat this stuff?”

(Dickey didn’t want to be interviewed for this article. There’s much to rehash about his illnesses and suspension, but he’s a private person. He dodged e-mails and ignored phone messages. Finally, he relented. Then he declined repeated requests to be photographed.)

He consumes a grilled chicken sandwich with the tabbouleh, but skips the baklava—empty calories—ever faithful to his training. “He’s very disciplined, even fanatical,” Thoresen says. “He doesn’t go off the handle like a lot of others do in the winter.”

Dickey tried to quit racing once, but couldn’t. After racing two seasons in Belgium and another two in France during the early 1990s, he got a break in ’94 when the Michigan-based pro team LDM Kinetic Systems offered a contract. That didn’t mean a fat paycheck. Basically, it paid his $50 monthly rent for a house he shared with teammates, provided bikes and gear, and covered travel expenses and entry fees. It was supposed to be a two-year deal, but the team lost its sponsor after the first season. Politics that polluted the team and the cycling scene in general disillusioned Dickey. He decided to take the ’95 season off.

For fun, he entered a motocross race, but crashed and broke his left tibia. It was a nasty break—the crack going down to his ankle—that required a couple of screws to repair. That November, he went for a night ride on his new snowmobile in the first snowfall. He crashed into a drainage ditch and broke his left leg again in nearly the same spot. This time, doctors secured his tibia with a titanium rod.

Dickey planned to take off the ’96 season as well, but then he watched the Stillwater Criterium race and “caught the bug again immediately.” He returned to his Bianchi/GP team. Things were going great by 2001. Seemed he was in the money in every race. He was the top amateur at Superweek in Wisconsin, with two second-place finishes, and would have finished in the top five in the Tour de Toona in Altoona, Pennsylvania, but the lead group he was in mistakenly strayed off course.

Dickey had always liked racing in South and Central America. The courses were hard and mountainous, which suited his strengths. He had done the Tour of Venezuela, a fourteen-stage race, four times, wearing the leader’s jersey for eight days in 1993. He had raced the Tour of Guadeloupe twice and the Tour of Central America, where he won the toughest mountain stage and finished third overall. He’d also won a stage in the Tour of Quintana Roo (Mexico) and finished second overall. 

Those countries take their races seriously. To win, the cyclists often took a little extra something. Steroids can be bought over the counter in Latin America. The American cyclists heard the Latino riders talking in hotel hallways about doping, then the next day watched them go up the mountains as if they were flat terrain.

World cycling, for that matter, had become synonymous with doping. Tour de France climbing champion Richard Virenque faced French criminal charges for doping, and Italian police had found doping evidence in hotel raids during the Giro d’Italia. Everybody knew how the cyclists had ridden like superhumans. “That’s free advertising for doping,” Dickey says. “I thought, ‘This stuff must be great.’ ”

At the time, Dickey wouldn’t even take aspirin. Yet during the Tour of Venezuela, he bought a steroid shot at the pharmacy. Six weeks later in the Tour of Guatemala, where he won the King of the Mountains jersey, the drugs were still in his system when he was randomly selected for testing. He tested positive for three banned substances: the stimulant phentermine, along with boldenone and nandrolone, both anabolic steroids.

“I guarantee you if they had tested everybody in the field in Guatemala, 90 percent would have been positive,” Dickey says. “If you admit use, they punish you worse than if you deny it. I was forced to deny it.”

Today, he says he had also used diet pills with phentermine more than once that season, especially for training. He says the stimulant definitely affected his performance, but claims it was not a factor in race outcomes. “It’s not going to turn a mule into a racehorse.”

In December 2001, the United States Anti-Doping Agency slapped Dickey with a two-year suspension, now standard for first-time offenders, but considered harsh then. Worse, he faced the scorn of the cycling community. When he showed up at citizen races in Wisconsin, for which he was still eligible, organizers ran him off. He read nasty comments on the Minnesota Cycling Federation chat room pages and received spiteful e-mail.

One dirty urine test had tainted everything he had accomplished in his cycling career. Guys he had beaten in races a decade earlier told him they knew how he had done it. “It was an ugly time.” he says. Dickey looks out the restaurant window at the fading sunlight. “That was harder than the illnesses.”

By the time his suspension cleared in October of 2003, Dickey was burning to redeem his reputation. In January, he left the Minnesota winter to train in Tucson. That’s when he started having blurred spots in his vision. He eventually lost all sight in his right eye. In April, he finally went to a doctor, who ordered an MRI. It revealed a craniopharyngioma, a tumor pressing against his pituitary gland and disturbing his optic nerve.

Dickey headed to the Mayo Clinic, where he underwent an unsuccessful attempt to biopsy the tumor through the nose. Three days later, he submitted to a craniotomy. The surgeon was able to get a biopsy, but not able to remove the tumor. “He said there was a lot of expensive real estate there and he wasn’t going to chance it,” Dickey recalls.

Instead, the doctor prescribed a grueling regimen of radiation treatments five days a week for six weeks. The treatments caused sudden, violent headaches that blurred his vision, blocked his hearing, and caused loss of mobility in his right leg. The radiation also caused swelling in his brain, resulting in what he calls “melon head.” The rays marked his scalp with burn spots, and his hair fell out in those places. The high dose also weakened his bones, resulting in osteoporosis. He was in bad shape, but continued to ride.

The treatments knocked out the tumor, but shortly after Dickey finished the series, he became violently ill. He was vomiting, had a wicked headache, and couldn’t get out of bed. His sister rushed him to the hospital. Dickey begged for a spinal tap just to relieve the pressure. He was diagnosed with chemical meningitis, for which there was no treatment other than pain pills. After several days, the pressure subsided.

A month later, in September, diarrhea struck. He had to rush to the bathroom twelve, fifteen times a day. He couldn’t get out of bed—other than to go to the bathroom—let alone train. He wouldn’t go to the hospital. He didn’t want something else to be wrong. But the diarrhea persisted a week. Two weeks. Three. Four. Finally, he saw the doctor.

Dickey’s father had died of colon cancer in 2000. He had been a builder and developer and took time off work to drive Dewey to races, hand him water bottles, and function as his biggest fan. His death was the biggest loss of Dickey’s life.

The doctor, who knew Dickey’s family history, diagnosed him with a diseased colon and sent him home with a low dose of medicine. He didn’t get better. The diarrhea continued, with blood. Two weeks later, Dickey, who has a high tolerance for pain, couldn’t get off the couch. He used his cell phone to call his sister upstairs. She rushed him to the hospital again.

His colon was close to perforating. The doctor told him, “We’re taking it out tomorrow.” It was not negotiable; the danger was too great. They replaced it with an ileostomy bag, a slim pouch attached to a slit in his lower abdomen. “I went in there to get well,” Dickey says, “but I went home missing a big part of my body.”

He felt better immediately. The pain was gone, and it was a relief not to have to go to the toilet every five minutes. But, six weeks later, a twisted bowel required another rushed trip to the hospital and another emergency surgery. All told, he’d endured two trips to the emergency room, six major surgeries, four hospitalizations, six weeks of radiation, and multiple complications, including the meningitis—in less than twelve months. That would have led an ordinary person to take up golf. Dickey wanted to race again.

“No way,” thought Jeremy Sartain, Dickey’s friend and teammate. “The guy’s done racing.” Yet, when Sartain would call Dickey at the cancer house in Rochester where he stayed during his radiation treatments, Dickey didn’t talk about his situation; he wanted to know how Jeremy was doing. “He wasn’t complaining,” Sartain says. “I thought, ‘Wow, this guy’s got a real positive attitude.’ ”

Sometimes, Dickey had to excuse himself from the phone. He would go to the bathroom, vomit, and resume the conversation. “Right then, I knew I was wrong about him,” Sartain says. “He was tough.”

So it was that Dickey showed up at Grand Performance for that first training ride back with his team in April 2005. He’d been riding on his own since February, but this was the test, his first ride with competitive cyclists. When the group started to hammer, he couldn’t drive the pace as he had in the past. He’d thought he was stronger. He’d been training hard and properly, but his body hadn’t responded as it used to. Frustration surged.

The team made a spot for him, because Dickey had announced at the winter meeting that he didn’t think he would be fit enough to win any races that season, but was willing to work for the others. He now wondered if he would be capable of doing that much.

One might think at such low moments that Lance Armstrong, who had battled back from brain surgery himself, might have been an inspiration. They had raced together when younger; but Dickey found strength in his faith.

He was accustomed to praying before races for safety and wisdom. When he almost went blind, radiation attacked him, and diarrhea drained him, his faith kept him positive. “Things change, like friends, health things not working out, and so on, but God never does,” he says. “It’s something you can always count on.”

With the desire to reassert himself on the cycling scene as his motivation, Dickey kept training. At the end of June, he felt like he was getting some form. It was his chance to prove that his success in 2001 wasn’t a fluke of steroid-induced fortune. That his body, wracked as it had been, had repaired itself and was capable of racing’s demands. That he could be himself again, a dominant force of nature. But if he couldn’t hold the pace, he would watch the pack pull away and with them his life. He had nothing to take cycling’s place.

Dickey strapped on his ileostomy bag, loaded up his Bianchi and went to Ohio for the Tour of Ohio, fully aware of the race’s stakes.

Amazingly, he won a stage. In July, he won the Northfield Criterium. In August, he led out teammate Pete Hanna to give Hanna the win at the thirty-and-over National Criterium Championship, and the next day, he powered the chase to catch a breakaway.

But it was not all a happy tailwind from there. After Labor Day, Dickey underwent two more surgeries to have a J-pouch implanted, a procedure that uses a section of the small intestine to replace the function of the colon. He was back on his bike four weeks later.

In January, he headed to Spain for two months of training. By mid-April, he was fit and hoping to build on last year’s success with a handful of stage races across the country this summer, possibly even the Tour of Panama in the fall. “He’s going to win races this year,” teammate Sartain says. “Quote me on that.”

When Dickey showed up at his first race of the 2006 season, in April in Iowa, a cycling blogger reported Dickey’s presence under the heading “Dewey Dickey Lives.”

To be able to take part in what he calls the “hardest and most beautiful sport in the world” indeed grants him life—the only life he knows. A life, you can trust, he values.  

John Rosengren is a Minneapolis writer. He is coauthor (with Esera Tuaolo) of Alone in the Trenches, published this year.