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.”