Dewey Dickey Lives

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.