The Bike World's Most Interesting Man? It might well be João Correia

I ashamed to admit this but I only subscribe to Rouleur in print since they did a campaign asking cycling fans for help and I wanted to show support. At inGamba, we do our own yearly magazine that is only available to guests so in my own way I am keeping print alive.

I do read the Weekend Financial Times religiously, which includes a great magazine called How to Spend it and I’ll drive 20 miles to get it if I have to. When it's not available then I read it on my iPad but it took me a long time to adapt.

Digitally, I subscribe to the New York Times and the Financial Times. Print I subscribe to Rouleur and somehow get Peloton every month which is also a favorite of mine. But when I fly anywhere, I raid the newsstand for the flight and like to find interesting magazines around fashion, home design and travel. There are a lot of great publications out there and there is something about holding a magazine in your hand. And I can’t read a book on an iPad or Kindle. I have to have a physical book in my hands.

This Q&A might become a novel if I start babbling about that, but when I went from Esquire to Bicycling Magazine, I hadn’t touched my bike in 10 years and weighed a little over 200 pounds. I was part of the restructuring team in the magazine and came in to run ad sales. Although non-bike advertising was the core of our strategy, we knew we needed to get the bike brands back in the book for credibility and I started going out on sales calls to the different manufacturers. There was always a lunch ride wherever you went, and as you can imagine being 5’8 and over 200lbs, I didn’t exactly look like a bike rider and coming from Bicycling Magazine, I got a lot of eye rolls. Inevitably, somebody would say hey, “for a guy as big as you, you are actually pretty good.”

One day I was in Italy calling on Pinarello, and Fausto asks me to join him in a Granfondo that weekend. I think it was 160km and I was there with Bill Strickland and was practically crapping in my pants with fear. I started the thing with Bill and Fausto and managed to hang on for 30 or 40K until the first climbs and then got dropped. Anyways, I kept going and eventually rode the whole thing with Steve Smith from Castelli and remember crossing the line and almost crying from happiness and a sense of achievement. Later that night, Fausto asked me if I ever raced and I said yes I did and had been a pro for a few years and he said he could tell by the way I pedaled. That was the first time somebody recognized me as a rider again and he also said you should come back. I don’t think he meant come back to racing but to some sort of shape that wasn’t pear shaped.

I think that was mid 2005, and I basically decided to start riding four times per week and if I could do that I would try racing locally again next year. I managed to do that all summer and then decided to race. But like always, if I am going to do something I need to do it all in so I called my old coach Max Testa and told him I wanted to train. I ended up building a Bicycling Magazine Team with a bunch of employees and some friends, and I called Pinarello for bikes, Giordana for clothing and basically we were probably the best outfitted team, amateur or professional, in the entire US. I raced in 2006 and won a few local events, my weight dropped to 150 or so and eventually the story started getting around the cycling industry and somehow I ended up riding for Bissel the following year, which was a US pro team. I was still working full time and on the weekends would go to races when I could often commuting to California on Friday to race the weekend crits and back to NYC on the Sunday red-eye.

One day I was talking to Gerard Vroomen, the co-founder of Cervelo, and he just put it out there that it would be really cool if I was to make a comeback. One thing led to another, I did some testing for them in Switzerland, and all of a sudden I was signing a contract to head back to racing in Europe.

The dieting was definitely harder for me. The training, although it was challenging, it was just a matter of doing it, letting your body adapt and doing it again. The dieting though, always trying to be lighter, was really tough because it's one of those things that you can never get 100% right and it’s a super unhealthy thing to focus on the way cyclists do. I mean I used to weight my food for crying out loud. That’s not a good thing.

Yes, in the Tour of Switzerland when I was riding with Thor Hushovd and we were going up the Simplonpass. It was a really long climb and towards the top, I was struggling and starting to go backwards. He looked at me and said, “If you loose my wheel, I will smash you.” I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or if I should cry. Later that day, when I was trying to come back into a small group about 10-15km before the finish there was an ambulance in the apex of a downhill turn, and I went straight into the back of it as they were pulling out the stretcher for Laurens ten Dam who had crashed. It was one of those really strange long days that you look at later and laugh about.

There was a great book written by Phil White's wife, Anna Dopico, called “To Make Riders Faster” that talks a bit about that time and it’s a history of the brand.  In my opinion, both those guys were visionaries. I mean not just in how they started the company and what they did to establish the aero frame on the road, but also with the team. So much of what you see today in teams, they were the first to do it.

One great example is the video series “Beyond the Peloton.” Its still probably the best team-driven content you can find out there on pro cycling and everything was like that. I was only there the second year but if you look at how the team was built in the first year, outside of Thor and Carlos who were the cornerstones, everybody else was kind of an unknown or underrated rider. It’s as if Billy Beane put together a cycling team of these odd pieces that as individuals were overlooked but on that team when racing as a unit they were so dominant.

Launching a team in a recession, and then trying to look for a sponsor in a recession, didn’t help and I’m sure that it's one of those things that if they had been successful in finding a sponsor, we’d be talking about how incredible that was for the brand.

Although I don’t think the team is what ultimately killed the brand and forced its sale, it sure was the last nail on the coffin since it bled cash and a company that size couldn’t support that kind of marketing expenditure on its own. To this day though, when I am at a race to handle our athletes, every time I see either a staff member or a rider that was on that team it’s a huge smile and hug. It was a different team and the culture that came out of it was pretty amazing.