ON AN UP CYCLE : Can He Pedal to the Medal? : Pacific Beach’s Carpenter Rides Hard into Olympics

SAN DIEGO — In the match sprint finals of the U.S. Olympic cycling trials Aug. 19 in Houston, Ken Carpenter was seeking more than a trip to Seoul.

He was looking for relief.

“It had just been building up and built up,” Carpenter said, “and I put a lot of pressure on myself, and you know there’s only one spot on the Olympic team.”

After beating Bobby Livingston in the semifinals earlier in the day, Carpenter met one-time friend and principal rival Mark Gorski in the final, with the U.S. team’s match sprint berth at stake. Gorski was the 1984 Olympic gold medalist in the event. In their previous major race, the 1987 Pan Am Games final, Carpenter had won.

The format is best-of-three. But a third race wasn’t necessary.

“I said to myself, ‘All you have to do to beat him is be in front of him with one lap to go.’ That’s all I did,” said Carpenter, a 23-year-old Pacific Beach resident. “I beat him by more than a bike length each time.”

In the second race, Carpenter powered away from Gorski on the backstretch and held the lead coming out of the last turn to win.

“After I won the second line, it was just like I was overjoyed, but I was also . . . it was just an incredible weight off my shoulders.”

Carpenter had overcome a lot--dropping out of high school, a frightening cycling accident, a two-month suspension for refusing to take a drug test and Gorski, the former close friend who was now his biggest adversary.

“It was a must-win situation,” he said. “I realize I have another shot at the ’92 Games, but to win the Pan Am Games and not make the Olympic team the following year kind of puts a hitch in your program.”

And Ken Carpenter has had enough of those.

In 1983, he dropped out of Helix High School near the end of his senior year. For three years, he had failed to keep up with his studies; to graduate, he would have had to return the next fall.

“I just didn’t enjoy high school at all,” Carpenter said. “I just didn’t like somebody telling me what to do and the whole group thing and having to be there at a certain time and all that crap.”

So he quit.

“I just felt like I had a good enough head on my shoulders to make my own decisions,” he said. “At the time, that’s just the way I felt. I would have rather been someplace else.”

Where? He didn’t know. Anywhere.

His father, Roger, and mother, Connie, were divorced when Ken was 7. Ken, the youngest of two children, said the divorce “bugged the hell out of him.” He lived with his mother for two years before returning to live with his father.

“He’s always been very independent,” said Roger, a biology professor at San Diego State. “He was somewhat rebellious. He had unsettlements in his life.”

Ken eventually got a job . . . at a bicycle shop. His father has been cycling daily from his home to campus for the past 15 years. But bicycles suddenly became a larger part of Ken’s life, more than transportation. They also became a way to get away. He would go on long rides to be by himself.

One morning in 1984, while he was riding at Mission Beach, his bike malfunctioned and he crashed. He hit his head on a curb or the pavement--no one is sure--and was knocked unconscious; he wasn’t wearing a helmet. Passers-by spotted him by the side of the road, blood trickling from his ear, and called paramedics. He had suffered a concussion and a damaged eardrum. It was two weeks before he could stand without getting lightheaded and vomiting.

A month after the accident, he was back on his bike. About that time, he was back in school, too, having passed a proficiency exam for his high school diploma. He would ride from his father’s home in La Mesa to Grossmont College, where he took math and other courses he said “weren’t all gravy classes.” He says his grade-point average was 3.6.

“I excel in a situation where I’m in control of what I’m doing,” he said.

His recreational cycling evolved into competitive road racing, but the distance bored him. As he had at Helix, he became impatient, wanting something fast and fiercely competitive. He began riding kilo races at the San Diego Velodrome. The kilo is a sprint against the clock, three times around the oval, as hard as one can go. Carpenter, like many kilo riders, would push himself to extremes. At the end of a race, he would vomit.

Former national cycling team coach Eddie Borysewicz, the 1984 Olympic cycling coach, spotted Carpenter one day, churning his two wheels as fast as he could around the velodrome. Eddie B., as he is known, told Carpenter he could be very good.

“He just put the bug in me to train really hard,” Carpenter said. “He told me two years ago that I could be the best, and if I didn’t want to work hard and try to be the best, why bother?”

That was in 1986. Carpenter finished his third semester at Grossmont College and again left school, this time to train.

In August 1987, Carpenter went to Indianapolis to compete in the Pan Am Games. He stayed at the home of his friend, Gorski, who used to live in La Jolla. The two had trained together.

Carpenter had never beaten Gorski in a major competition, but Gorski was about to see the future of the U.S. match sprint, and he wasn’t going to like it. Carpenter won the gold after just two years of training seriously for the event.

That was the beginning of the end of their friendship. After the loss, Gorski decided he would train away from Carpenter. It was not an amicable separation.

“I wouldn’t say we’re friends,” Gorski said recently during an event at Cal State Dominguez Hills. “I would say we’re adversaries and competitors. I really don’t like his attitude. He’s just rather cocky and he hasn’t paid his dues. I think a lot of the cycling community resents that.”

Said Carpenter: “I used to kind of idolize the guy. We had a pretty good friendship, and I thought we were good training partners.”

The pure competitive nature of the match sprint does not allow much room for friendship. Gorski, it seemed, could not enjoy Carpenter’s friendship and still lose to him. Carpenter could not enjoy the friendship and beat him.

“When you train with somebody you become friends with them and it’s harder to be aggressive with them and real physical with them,” Carpenter said. “In a match sprint, you have to do everything in your power to make it difficult for the other rider, and that can include a lot of physical, hard aggressive riding.

“Match sprinting is so intense, it’s so aggressive, that if you are eating lunch and dinner with the guy, it makes it really difficult to go out there and get on the line and say, ‘I’m going to kick this guy’s butt. I’m going to run him all over the track and I’m going to beat him.’ ”

With Gorski no longer an influence in his development, Carpenter was relying on U.S. Olympic Coach Andrzej Bek.

“I credit him with all my success,” Carpenter said. “He knows how to push me like no one else can. There is a natural chemistry there.”

After the Pan-Am Games, Carpenter’s next big competition was a pre-Olympic meet in Seoul. He finished fifth behind two East Germans and two from the Soviet Union, consistently the top riders in the world. (Gorski’s gold in 1984 was won with both countries boycotting the Games.) The finish immediately put Carpenter in Olympic medal contention. At the Olympics, only one rider per country is allowed.

Carpenter had another opportunity last October to get a gauge on how he stood against the Soviets in a U.S.-Soviet meet in Los Angeles. Carpenter twice went against top Soviet rider Nikolai Kovche in exhibitions the first day, losing twice. But on the second day, when the races counted toward team points, Kovche was beaten by American Scott Berryman in the semifinals after Carpenter already had advanced.

Carpenter, who beat Berryman in the finals, says Kovche was dodging him.

“I felt that Kovche didn’t ride that well against Berryman,” Carpenter said. “In fact, I felt that he just gave him the race. I would have much rather beaten Kovche in the finals than Berryman.”

After a week off, Carpenter began serious training for the Olympic trials. He would spend five hours on the track, rest and then ride 30 miles. This routine was supplemented with three days of weight training.

Six months ago, he moved from his father’s house to an apartment in Pacific Beach with his fiancee, Renee Duprel, also a sprint cyclist.

With everything seemingly going well and the Olympic trials approaching, Carpenter ran into another problem.

At a national training camp in Houston in April, Carpenter was selected for a random drug test. But before the test could be administered, he left, saying he had to attend to family problems. The United States Cycling Federation suspended him for two months.

He regrets the way he handled the situation, but said he refused the test because Gorski and other national team members didn’t have to take it.

Carpenter denies using steroids. He had passed a test at a similar training camp in Carlsbad in February, but rumors of a positive test led to the April test. He said he has since passed drug tests. (Before the trials, he and Gorski were tested.)

At 6-feet 4-inches and 225 pounds, Carpenter can be intimidating, particularly with a newly developed killer instinct.

“Last year I was a real easy-going guy,” Carpenter said. “I would ride hard in the front, and if someone got around me it would be like, ‘Good job.’ I used to ride a real straight line and be Mr. Nice Guy. I lost some races because of that.

“You have to be mentally tough. Quite frankly, you don’t have to hate someone, and you don’t have to dislike someone, but it helps. That’s what I’ve come to realize the past two years.”

As the Olympics have gotten closer, the pressure has again increased. But Carpenter knows his limitations. He said East Germany’s Lutz Hesslich should win the gold medal.

“For the past two years, he’s been head and shoulders above the rest of the field,” Carpenter said. “Even his East German compatriots, he just walks over them. A gold medal is not impossible (for me), but it is highly improbable. The way he’s riding, he’s going even better than I’ve ever seen him before.”

Carpenter said Australia’s Gary Niewand also is a medal contender. But Carpenter figures he has a good shot at a silver or bronze. If it comes down to a gold medal race against Hesslich, Carpenter’s strategy is prepared. He said he has to slow down the powerful East German and keep the sprint as short as possible.

“The best way to ride him is from second position,” Carpenter said. “I’d like to dive underneath him, take him up the track, pin him against the wall a little bit and keep it slow as possible. Then come into turn 3 or 4 and attack with a maximum effort . . .”

And then the gold?

“Everybody’s beatable,” Carpenter said. “If I’m having an outstanding day and maybe he’s not having such an outstanding day, that opens up a lot of possibilities.”