Athletes and their inner demons

"The Agony of Victory: When Winning Isn't Enough"

by Steve Friedman

Arcade, 271 pp., $26

Maybe it's the anguish that's the blessing: reading about it makes us feel whole, healthy, normal and not so messed up. It gives us perspective. Confers hope upon us. Jeez. This world-class athlete got out of that?! OK — Maybe I'm a lot stronger than I think.

It'd probably be an overstatement to say the writer Steve Friedman, a former senior editor at GQ and former contributing editor at Esquire, relishes suffering. But he clearly knows something about being tormented and picking himself up and out of the abyss. And that's imbued throughout his discerning and affecting collection of athlete profiles, "The Agony of Victory: When Winning Isn't Enough." Friedman's album of portraits grasps both the psyche and physical body of the vulnerable athlete — and shows us his strength. It hardly matters if you even like or know anything about sports — only that at some point you've known misery, chemically-induced or not. And that you subsequently staggered forth.

Friedman shows us how such staggering can, at times, be undeniably heroic. Take his first story, "Going Nowhere Fast," a profile of unorthodox, angst-ridden cycling champion Graeme Obree, which initially appeared in "Bicycling" magazine. (All 14 stories here are reprints of articles first published in assorted publications).

Obree lives in a "backwater" town in Scotland, grooming his body on a diet of sardines, chili con carne, vegetables and marmalade sandwiches. At age 28 he announces he's going to break the world hour record, "known among biking cognoscenti, simply and starkly, as The Race of Truth." The rarefied cycling world scoffs. Of course, he shocks them all, breaking a nine-year-old record on that July 1993 day in Hamar, Norway. Moreover, he does it on a bike he constructed himself from scrap tubing and washing-machine parts. (Obree was the subject of a biopic, "The Flying Scotsman," released in May.)

Only no one knows about "the blackness," "a horror show" of terror and fatigue that flattened him for long stretches of time. And how Obree had to emerge from all that to create his notion of adjusting the bike's handlebars, of riding in a new position, a formula that eventually led him to magical, astonishing success.

Obree, we're told, pushed his body so hard to ride more than 32 miles in that one hour, his skin burned close to 107 degrees. A normal temperature: 95 degrees.

Obree was in the grip of the obsession that allows top athletes to excel at their craft. This scrappy underdog, the man the reader comes to embrace because he is so scrappy, is tortured. And when Obree is punished by competitive cycling honchos — not for his uneven emotional state but for riding such an unconventional bike — the story becomes devastating.

It's a stunner of a profile, written in prose that's authoritative and familiar. And it makes you greatly anticipate all that lies in subsequent chapters. It's all a terrific, powerful read.

These are largely unknown sports figures: manic bowler Pete Weber, the Greatest and Most Troubled Bowler in the world; a hodgepodge of obsessives, competing in Silverton, Colo., in a footrace 100 miles long; John Moylan, a recreational runner running in the shadow of Sept. 11; Scott Williamson, a hiker, intent on traveling the huge Pacific Crest Trail (Canada to Mexico). Except that Williamson, haunted by his best friend Kenny's death, wants to make his a roundtrip trek. In Friedman's commanding storytelling, the result is hauntingly sublime.

In the tragic portrait of Italian cycling champ Marco Pantani, Friedman dribbles in one paragraph of his own past anguish: cocaine. "More than a normal amount. Sometimes the monster scrambled out," he writes. "Bad things happened, and things got worse."

His point in revealing this: to counter the reverence still afforded Pantani, found guilty of using performance-enhancing drugs, who later binged on cocaine and killed himself. Many Italians continue to consider him a hero. But Friedman says that's total B.S. It's hard not to feel the same way, reading about Pantani's disgrace while also absorbing Obree's fortitude or the grace that was Willie McCool, the astronaut killed in the Columbia space shuttle disaster who was also a Navy runner.

In a collection of unvarnished portraits there's bound to be some person, some activity, that leaves a bad taste. But coming upon this collection now, as big-name athletes (Marion Jones, Isiah Thomas, Barry Bonds) disappoint me left and right, I was grateful to have discovered a handful of champions truly worth admiring.

Florangela Davila is a newsfeatures reporter at The Seattle Times.