Chad Gerlach: He raced like the wind – then came 5 years on the streets

He raced like the wind – then came 5 years on the streets
By Blair Anthony Robertson

http://www.sacbee.com/ourregion/story/1608330.html

Published: Sunday, Feb. 8, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 1A

To the regulars on the Saturday morning River Ride, Chad Gerlach must
have seemed like an apparition as he rode away from the pack, leaving
50 of Sacramento's best cyclists gasping for air.

At 35, he was powerful and beautiful and seemingly supernatural,
impossibly different from the man who had been eking out a life on the
streets of Sacramento, homeless and addicted to drugs.

This was the Chad Gerlach who had been a local cycling legend, who had
tussled at 17 with a young and brash Lance Armstrong when the two were
pegged as future stars of the sport, who once was supposed to be great
the way Armstrong became great.

Now Armstrong, 37, has come out of retirement and will race this
Saturday in Sacramento, the starting point for the nine-day Amgen Tour
of California.

And Gerlach? His improbable return finds him in Italy, signed to a pro
team and racing against some of the sport's toughest competition
before returning to the United States in late April for a full season
of stateside pro racing.

Few who witnessed Gerlach at his worst imagined this. Even Gerlach
himself proceeds cautiously into his sobriety. "I have to still
remember I'm an addict," he said.

During his years on the streets, his mother, Michelle Johnson, would
repeatedly plead with him to get help, only to return to her Fair Oaks
home in tears. His father, Peter Gerlach, says he dreaded that
inevitable phone call from a coroner, telling him his son's life had
ended the way many expected it would.

Those who have seen him recently on the River Ride, the ones who gave
chase to this ghost on a bike after he had turned the corner of his
recovery, are already believers in a reborn Chad Gerlach. But no one
can explain it.

"Good grief, this guy was in the depths of depravity and panhandling
and abusing his body, and he's come back in such a short period of
time," said Max Mack, an amateur racer. "That guy has talent like you
wouldn't believe. It's a shock. It's amazing."

Stellar talent, bad-boy rep

Part of the Gerlach legend went beyond his natural talent and scrapes
with authority. In his racing heyday, it was about how much physical
punishment and suffering he could endure in a race.

"He was given a set of tools that most of us don't understand," said
longtime Sacramento racer and River Ride stalwart Rich Maile. "I've
seen that guy turn himself absolutely inside out racing and go places
most of us absolutely cannot imagine."

Gerlach was a hyper, brilliant boy who grew up to be a wunderkind on a
bike, winning races but developing a bad-boy reputation. Never mind
that he couldn't be coached, he couldn't be tamed.

His peculiar intellect amused and baffled those around him. He could
remember minuscule details from races and the names of everyone he'd
ever raced against, yet he couldn't sit still in school.

Maile remembers when he worked at City Bicycle Works in midtown years
ago, Gerlach would walk into the shop, pick up a cycling magazine,
read every word on every page, put it down and walk out.

As the years passed, Armstrong claimed seven Tour de France victories
and became a worldwide inspiration after surviving cancer. Gerlach won
races, lit up cigarettes to celebrate, experimented with drugs, chased
women and was booted off teams.

He was kicked off the mighty U.S. Postal Service squad in 1996, the
year Armstrong learned he had cancer. A recovered Armstrong joined the
postal service squad two years later and went on to win his first Tour
de France in 1999.

"A lot of racers weren't in my corner, probably because of my
attitude," Gerlach said. "It wasn't as much cockiness as it was
intensity and how I wanted things with my racing."

He also wanted it his way when he wasn't racing.

On one team, he slept with the female team manager. "A lot of people
had problems with that," he said, shrugging.

"He couldn't resist anything," said his father, a highly regarded
soccer referee. "He had that free-spirit personality and did whatever
he wanted to do," Peter Gerlach said.

Panhandling for drink and drugs

By 2002, Chad Gerlach was out of the sport. By the spring of 2003, he
had fumbled and stumbled and fallen hard, addicted to crack and living
on the streets for what turned into five dismal years.

The one-time world-class athlete was reduced to asking strangers and
old cycling buddies alike for spare change. Stoned and disheveled, he
seemed to have lost his pride and dignity.

When he asked particularly attractive women for money outside the 19th
Street Safeway or Peet's Coffee and Tea, he would add flirtatiously,
"I'll make it worth your while." He tried for a time to make a joke of
the life he was leading, but no one was laughing anymore.

"He was the cockiest street guy you've ever met," said friend and
former teammate Chris Baumann. "It was all a game to him."

Gerlach slept under a freeway overpass on the edge of midtown. Twice
he was stabbed. For a time, he hobbled around on a broken ankle.

Even now, he insists that he suffered far worse on his bike.

"To be honest I didn't really suffer on the streets," he said. "Sure,
I lost contact with my family and friends, but I think people working
40 hours a week suffered a whole lot more than I did.

"My day to day was a pretty mellow existence. By noon I would be
sitting outside reading the New York Times. Then I would mosey on down
and buy a 40-ouncer after making 25 bucks in an hour."

By the spring of 2007, one friend, Joe "Vito" Accettura, contacted the
TV show "Intervention" on the A&E Channel. In no time, the cameras
were rolling in Sacramento.

Clean and sober: Now what?

After nearly walking out on the show, Gerlach agreed to treatment and
was flown to a rehab center in Florida.

"It's my life's greatest accomplishment, to help save the life of a
friend," said Accettura, a car salesman and cyclist.

The dramatic episode kicked off the season last year and was a hit
with viewers.

Back in Sacramento last June, Gerlach wondered what he would do next,
now that he was clean and sober. He had moved in with his on-again,
off-again girlfriend, but he couldn't find a job.

Friends lent him old bikes and encouraged him to ride, eager to see if
any of that once astonishing talent remained.

"I said, 'Dude, all you need is one month on the bike and you're
back,' " Accettura said.

After only a few weeks, Gerlach was riding ahead of the pack. Then,
just as Armstrong made international news by announcing his return to
the sport, one of Gerlach's 1990s teammates contacted him and asked if
he wanted to race again.

Gerlach soon signed a contract with Amore & Vita, Italian for "love
and life." Sponsored by the Vatican and McDonald's, the team tries to
include one recovering addict on the team as a gesture of goodwill and
a message of hope.

It doesn't always end well. The rider in that position on the team
last year, Valentino Fois, relapsed and died of a drug overdose last
March.

"How do you think that makes me feel?" Gerlach said before leaving for
Italy on Jan. 29.

Though he realizes the risks of making a drastic lifestyle change in
the midst of recovery, Gerlach insists he has no physical desire to do
drugs again.

Training hard for Italy

He also sees the return to cycling as a chance to reclaim much of what
he has squandered. Gerlach doesn't gloss over such heavy issues, a
hint to his often-hidden intellectual side.

His older brother, Chris, has a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University
of California, Berkeley, and his sister, Jennifer, has a master's in
education from the same school. Chad earned his GED and never went to
college.

"He's smarter than both of them combined," said Peter Gerlach. "But …
he could never sit down and concentrate."

His mother, Michelle Johnson, said Chad was diagnosed early on with
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and always had far more
energy than his playmates.

Further complicating matters was his parents' ugly divorce when he was
10.

Gerlach is aware of the various theories about his troubles, but he
refuses to make the pieces fit together so easily.

"I had a tough childhood if you want to call a middle-class family
with everything I ever wanted a tough childhood," he said
sarcastically. "I was just a punk kid, a crazy kid. I liked to go out
and party. For some reason I equated that with professional sports."

Gerlach said he has matured and is more disciplined about his cycling
pursuits. Before he left for Italy, he was riding six hours a day,
returning to the back roads and challenging climbs in the foothills he
knew so well.

Dreams of race with Armstrong

Even more astounding was his performance in a pro race four days
before leaving for Europe. In what is known as a pre-season "early
bird" event, Gerlach initiated a breakaway from a large pack and
finished second in a sprint to Jackson Stewart, one of the nation's
top 15 pros.

"He was riding on a really old bike," said Stewart, 28. "He would have
won that race if he had a better bike."

Gerlach says the race showed him he still has what it takes. Someday,
he hopes to find himself in a breakaway with his old rival Armstrong,
the one-time homeless cyclist riding shoulder to shoulder with a
champion whose 8,000-square-foot Texas home was featured in last
July's "Architectural Digest."

Already Gerlach is jotting down notes about his odyssey and hopes to
write a book.

Says his friend Accettura, who launched Gerlach's comeback and
continues to encourage him when the two train together, "I see him
going on 'Oprah.' It's like a Lance Armstrong story for drug addicts."