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Outside Magazine, July 2005

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Tour de France
Coming Attraction
Is there a "next Lance" in the American ranks? Meet Craig Lewis, a 20-year-old who still has a long way to go but is already turning heads with his physiological gifts and grit.

By Andrew Vontz


	Craig Lewis (Photograph by Jake Chessum)

LINING UP at the start of April's six-day, 650-mile Tour de Georgia was an all-star cast of American cyclists: Lance, Bobby Julich, Levi Leipheimer, and Floyd Landis, among others. Buried in the pack somewhere behind them was America's next generation of Tour contenders, one of whom was Craig Lewis, a shy, soft-spoken 20-year-old South Carolinian riding for the TIAA-CREF squad. Looking at Lewis's whippetlike five-foot-ten, 143-pound frame, few would peg him as the next Lance Armstrong. But Jonathan Vaughters, the team's director and himself a four-time Tour rider, calls him just that, and he isn't kidding.

"He's the only kid," as TIAA-CREF team director Jonathan Vaughters puts it, "who has Lance's kind of motor."

"Of all the 20-year-olds in America," Vaughters says, "Craig has the best chance to win the Tour de France."

What's caught his eye is Lewis's phenomenal power-to-weight ratio and the singular fact that, in the Spartanburg native's first two years of bike racing, he progressed from a rookie in the Junior class, battling other 16-year-olds, to a pro racer taking on the top cyclists in the world. As Vaughters puts it, "He's the only kid who has Lance's kind of motor."

That motor has brought

Tour de France 2005

Check in with Outside Online daily to read coach Chris Carmichael's behind-the-scenes Tour journal, get the latest stage results, and view exclusive photos of the race. [click here]

Lewis recognition, but it's also put him in the way of catastrophe. During the 18-mile time trial in the 2004 Tour de Georgia, Lewis was cranking downhill at 40 miles per hour when a 65-year-old retiree gunned an SUV directly into his path. Lewis never had a chance to put on the brakes. At the time of the crash, his pace had him finishing in the top ten. But instead of sprinting for the last mile and a half, he was being rushed to the hospital with both of his lungs punctured, a fractured scapula, collarbone, tibia, wrist, and skull, 14 cracked ribs, a broken nose and vertebra, plus a busted jaw. When Lewis regained consciousness several hours later, he motioned for a pen and paper and wrote, WHEN RIDE?

Eight weeks later was his answer. And in an uncanny parallel to Armstrong's assertion that, compared with the pain of chemo, riding a bike is nothing, Lewis returned with a new tolerance for suffering. "My pain threshold is now ten times higher than it was before the accident," he says. "Attacking a big climb, I can go all out forever. I've broken beyond all my limits."

Nowhere was this new grit more evident than in his off-season training rides in South Carolina with Armstrong's longtime teammate George Hincapie, who has made Lewis his protégé. "He looked like a really talented rider, loved to ride his bike," says Hincapie, "and he didn't mind doing hard work, so we got along right away."

This past winter saw a big jump in Lewis's power, when for the first time he beat Hincapie, one of the U.S.'s premier speedsters, in a couple of training sprints. Says Hincapie, "Lewis is definitely capable of racing in Europe as a pro."

Four years ago, nobody would've predicted this. Lewis was a straight-A high school junior from the rural South with a predilection for the music of Linkin Park and 50 Cent—and no interest in sports. "He'd become a couch potato," says his mother, Judy Lewis, a supervisor for Spartanburg's Department of Social Services. But then Lewis caught a mountain-bike race on OLN early in the summer of 2000. "I knew right away that I wanted to do that professionally," says Lewis.

Within a month, he'd bought a bike and was charging around the trails surrounding his home in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Two months after his inaugural turn of the pedals, he entered and won his first mountain-bike race, finishing five minutes ahead of the pack. Then, to train for off-road racing, Lewis bought a Giant TCR 2 aluminum road bike and later notched a top-20 finish in his very first road race.

Lewis's big break, which shifted his focus to road racing, came in September 2001. While competing against elite locals in Greenville, South Carolina, he caught the eye of Hincapie's brother, Rich, president of Hincapie Sportswear, a local race promoter, and team director of the amateur Fairway-Subaru racing team. Rich brought Lewis onto the Fairway-Subaru squad—then mostly made up of top veteran riders in their thirties—and quickly upgraded his racing license so he could face off against pros. "He weighed 115 pounds soaking wet," says Rich, "yet he kept up with the best pros in the region."

Lewis also brought a level of sophistication and maturity that shocked both Hincapie brothers. "He was very meticulous with his training and preparation and nutrition," says Rich. "That's expected of an experienced vet, but when you're a 16-year-old kid going to high school—it was something we'd never seen before."

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ANDREW VONTZ writes for Bicycling and the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

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