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There are few teams lucky enough to have a former Olympic Champion and Tour
de France alumnus as their doctor. For Eric Heiden, it certainly seems
nothing succeeds like success.

After winning five Olympic gold medals for speed skating in 1980, Heiden
moved on to try his hand at professional cycling. He and Jim Ochowicz
helped form the base of the very successful 7-Eleven cycling team. During
his time with 7-Eleven, Heiden raced the 1986 Tour de France though a bad
crash five days from the finish prevented him from riding into Paris.

From elite athlete to academic

Having accomplished many of his sporting goals, Heiden moved back into his
medical studies, earning his MD from Stanford in 1991. Since then he has
worked for the last several years as team doctor for the US National Cycling
team as well as the doctor for other teams in other sports. Now, along with
Drs. Massimo Testa and Scott Major, Dr. Heiden guides the medical and
training condition of the BMC Racing Team members. “I always planned on
being a physician so after I got all the competitive sporting out of my
system, I settled into school full time in 1987,” Dr. Heiden said. “I
spent a lot of time working with Max Testa during his time with 7-Eleven and
Motorola, which was so beneficial to me; it was almost like an internship.”

Conducting early season medical exams

The BMC medical team of Heiden, Testa and Major flew into Santa Rosa for the
first weekend of camp to conduct all the necessary medical tests on the
riders. “Being a ProContinental team means that there is a lot of medical
information which is required by the UCI,” Heiden explained. “So on
Saturday we took the riders to the Napa Valley Hospital and made cardiac
ultrasound, stress EKG, pulmonary function test for the necessary TUEs, as
well as basic physical and orthopaedic exams.” Following UCI protocol, the
tests are intended to confirm that all the athletes are indeed healthy and
fit to race. The blood parameter records are also augmented to reflect the
latest test. “Aside from the role the team doctor must play in educating
the riders in the fight against doping, the doctor can make the largest
contribution to success by imparting his or her knowledge of physiology and
the best training methods,” Dr. Heiden believes. “Over the last 20 years
people have begun to
understand better about how not to stress the metabolic system, how to keep
riders from over-training.”

Keeping an eye on the riders with big potential

Two years ago Dr. Heiden agreed to work with BMC along with Dr. Testa as
team doctors. “The cycling community is really small, so when Och (Jim
Ochowicz) asked me to work with the team it seemed like a really neat
opportunity to join a young organization with a lot of talent,” Heiden
said. “Its fun working with young guys and seeing them grow into their
potential.” Looking at the history of testing the team doctors have made
on many of the members of BMC, Dr. Heiden ventures to guess there are
several who have the physical capabilities to reach the very top of the
sport. “There are 4 or 5 guys on the team at the moment who have very good
potential,” Dr. Heiden said. “We can identify talent with the testing but
there are so many other components that contribute to winning races that we
can never be sure the talent will translate into results. But it will be
fun to see them develop.”

Heiden sees changes, improvements in the sport

Nearly 30 years after he first raced professionally, Dr. Heiden has seen a
lot of changes to the sport, but still feels very much at home in its
atmosphere. “The riders are a lot better taken care of these days than
they were when I first was racing,” Dr. Heiden believes. “The gear is
much better too and there is a lot more stress on the safety facets of the
sport with the mandatory use of helmets. But with the focus on targeted
races, the racing season gets necessarily shortened, which is much different
from how it was 30 years ago.” In any case, the BMC team members certainly
feel privileged to have a living sports legend as their affable doctor.