Davis Phinney is a former professional cyclist and TV commentator. He was forty years old in 2000 when he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.
Davis’ extraordinary racing palmares include an Olympic bronze medal (1984 Team Time Trial) and two stage wins in the Tour de France (1986 and 1987) as part of the pioneering 7-Eleven pro team.. He is a multi-US National Champion and with over 300 wins to his credit, he is known as the winningest bike racer in US history. Off the bike, Davis’ expertise was a highly sought after TV commentator until his diagnosis with PD. He lives in Boulder with his wife, the 1984 Olympic Champion Connie Carpenter and together they have run Bike Camps since 1986. They have two children, Taylor and Kelsey.
The Davis Phinney Foundation (DPF) was created to improve the quality of life for people with Parkinson’s Disease. This book was born from the desire to illuminate his tribe – individuals with Parkinson’s Disease – about his life. Additionally, Davis is known as a gifted story-teller. PD takes – and rarely gives back to the afflicted. One of the things it has has taken from Davis is his ‘voice’ – the ability to embellish a story with sound effects and detail. That skill, once so natural, is now much more difficult. This book ensures that these stories and others will not be lost.
Sports Illustrated senior writer Austin Murphy has been at that magazine since 1984. While his main beat at SI is college football, he also serves as its cycling writer. An avid rider himself, Murphy has covered the Tour de France seven times.
In fact, it was on a rest day at the 2005 Tour that Austin and Davis first met. “Although I interviewed him in the context of Lance Armstrong’s seventh Tour victory,” Murphy recalls, “I was profoundly impressed with the courage Davis displayed to put himself out there in public, tremor and all.”
Murphy also met a reserved, gangly 15-year-old at that Tour. “Taylor didn’t say much,” he recalls, “but you could tell he was taking it all in. Little did I know that he was in the process of arriving at a fairly momentous decision.” That was the summer Taylor decided to give bike-racing a shot.
Later that year, Murphy approached Davis with the idea of collaborating on a memoir. While both agreed it was a good idea, it didn’t gain traction until the fall of 2007. With Taylor on the front end of his meteoric rise in the sport, Murphy pitched a story on the Phinneys to his editors at SI. The resulting feature piqued the interest of several editors, who contacted the Phinneys to inquire about a possible memoir. So strongly did Murphy feel about helping tell Davis’ story that he turned down an offer from Pete Carroll to ghost-write the then-USC football coach’s book.
Neither subject nor author were strangers to this process. Davis and Connie had written Training For Cyling (the Ultimate Guide to Improved Performance), in 1992. Murphy had written three books – The Sweet Season; How Tough Could it Be; and Saturday Rules – but all of them in his own voice. While he and Davis were exceptionally well paired – they share everything from a knack for storytelling to their similar senses of humor – the process was, at times, arduous. Many times, while reading chapter drafts, Davis would remark, “That’s well written, but I would never say that.”
Slowly, painstakingly, Murphy came to inhabit Phinney’s voice. During the two-year period over which the book was written, Davis traveled frequently to the Bay Area. For his part, Murphy attended several DPF functions, taking the opportunity to see Davis mingling and working with the members of his “Tribe.”
Murphy accompanied the Phinneys to Beijing for the Olympics, and flew to Colorado three times. He and his wife, Laura Hilgers, flew to Italy to spend time with the Phinneys in their adoptive hometown of Marostica. The final session of work in the summer of 2010 took place in a boot camp-like setting in Tiburon.
We hope you enjoy the book.
