João Correia first raced as a professional when he was 21 years old. After taking some time off for a career in the media industry, after dropping 60 pounds, he returned to pro cycling in 2008. This year will be his first on the Pro Tour team with Cervelo  test team—at age 34. We talk to João about his return to continental racing. You can follow him this season on his blog.

Transcribed and edited by Peter McCormick

Photos courtesy of Jason Gould

schmalz We’re here with João Correia from Cervelo Test Team: the new signing this year; the rookie, the thirty-four year-old rookie.

Correia I signed back in frigging September…but because of the New York Times piece it wasn’t announced until December 30th.

schmalz Well, that’s about the time everyone signs, right? You were the last transfer of the season? You were the holdout! Let’s call it that.

Correia The holdout. Exactly.

schmalz OK. The question that I have is, what the hell were you thinking?

Correia Well, you know, you have to keep life interesting. It was a good opportunity, and at the end of the day, sometimes you just have to do crazy stuff like that. It’s one of those things that I thought, when I’m fifty and I look back, I’m going to think: should I have done that? Or am I going to regret doing it? I don’t think I’m going to look back and say: “I wish I had done that.” It was one of those things in which the opportunity was almost too good to pass up. 

It’s one of those things that I thought, when I’m fifty and I look back, I’m going to think: should I have done that?

schmalz I think the greatest accomplishment that you’ve made throughout this entire thing was talking your wife into it, because you had a job and a career before that. You thought: “Well, I’ve got this job and career and I’m just not going to go any more.”

Correia It’s interesting because you want to do it but you don’t want to end up divorced either. Part two of that fifty-year-old question was: I didn’t want to regret not doing it but I also didn’t want it to be something that would say: This led to a divorce. Family for me is very important, and to Tiiu, obviously. For for the last three years my wife has been extremely supportive as I’ve been dealing with a busy job with lots of travel, training at night, racing, family—and she has been there. But I wasn’t going to be able to do it again…but then the opportunity came up and I was like, it’s turning into a job.

schmalz Were you married to your wife when you were a bike racer before?

Correia Nope.  When she met me I was about 200 pounds.  Good times.

schmalz So this re-manifested itself.

Correia Yup. One day she bumped into this newspaper book I have when I used to race, and she said, “What the hell is this?” And I was, “Yeah, I used to race bikes.” There were about a hundred articles in it and I was about two hundred pounds. 

schmalz She said: “You used to look like that?” 

Correia I said: “Yeah, I was skinny.”

schmalz So I guess it goes to show that racing in the parks of New York City is the perfect way to train for the Pro Tour, right?

Correia Absolutely.

schmalz There’s no other way to get from there to there?

Pro Tour: The Perfect Way to Train for Central Park

Correia Really, the reason why I’m going back to this whole thing is that I hope it gets me fit enough that I can win a Central Park race.

Really, the reason why I’m going back to this whole thing is that I hope it gets me fit enough that I can win a Central Park race.

schmalz One day?

Correia Yeah. I’ve never won a Central Park race.

schmalz You’re kidding.

Correia No. I’ve won plenty of Prospect Park races. I’ve won a bunch of Bear Mountain races, a bunch of classics and things like that but Central Park has always eluded me and: I need to win a Central Park race before I can say, “I was a bike racer.”

schmalz So you’re using the Pro Tour as a stepping stone…

Correia For Central Park, yes.

schmalz Well played. That’s the perfect way to do it.

Correia And I’m bringing the train back. I’m bringing Thor … I’m bringing the whole team to Central Park one of these days.

schmalz I think you can get a special exemption to race a CRCA race for the Cervelo guys. See if Heinrich (Haussler) will go to the front.

Correia I’m not sure Thor will actually be able to win that sprint. It might freak him out a little bit. It might be a little too hairy for him. [Scandalized laughter].

Then and Now

schmalz Now, you were a professional before, about 15 years ago, but it was at a lower level than what you’re at now. What’s the biggest difference that you’ve noticed between then and now. I have to assume it’s a World’s difference

Back then, you’d just ride for five hours, 20 miles an hour. And now, nobody does that, unless you’re French (laughter).

Correia Yes. The equipment’s a huge difference, but it’s different for everybody. The access to the types of bikes, wheels, helmets etc is night and day and it makes people faster. Back then it was pretty much standardized. You might be on one brand of bike and your competitor on another but it was round Columbus SLX tubes or something like that. Today there are brands that are a definite advantage over other brands. Outside of that probably the two biggest changes are the training and a complete change in culture of the sport. People know how to train today. Back then, you’d just ride for five hours, 20 miles an hour. And now, nobody does that, unless you’re French (laughter). And just the culture of cycling is totally different. The stuff that was going on in the mid-Nineties isn’t going on today. You talk to young riders today and to them doping—you just wouldn’t do it. It’s like, why would anybody do that? I think back then, if you wanted to be a serious pro rider, at some point you’d have tremendous pressure to dope. That was sort of the thinking. It doesn’t mean everyone was doing it, but that was the culture. Today, that culture is reversed. There has been a huge shift.

schmalz I think that a lot of the teams have crushed that from the top down. In the past, there was the expectation from the top teams that this was the way you were going to do it. Especially in the early and mid-Nineties, it was everywhere.

Correia I don’t know: I was not on a top team back then, but my experience on a small pro team was one that it was crazy, some of the stuff I saw. I couldn’t believe it. I was raised in the States. I had an American education. I was pretty much an American kid, and seeing some of that stuff, I was like, you guys are nuts. And then, talking to some friends of mine who were racing in bigger teams over the years, the culture was definitely different. And I can tell you that none of the guys that I knew did it because it was what they wanted to do. They did it because they felt everybody else was doing it, and if they didn’t they wouldn’t have a job the next year.  

schmalz Well, that was a particularly dangerous time because things had just come out, and people didn’t know what they were doing.

I got out at the end of ’96 and went to college instead, and I can tell you, the speeds in races between ‘95 and ‘96 was out of control, especially on climbs. All of a sudden races that I had been winning stages in, fighting for jerseys in, I was getting dropped.

Correia I got out at the end of ’96 and went to college instead, and I can tell you, the speeds in races between ‘95 and ‘96 was out of control, especially on climbs. All of a sudden races that I had been winning stages in, fighting for jerseys in, I was getting dropped. On the climbs! I was going, “what the hell is going on?” It was a massive shift and I think that shift continued and then the pendulum swung to the other side. I think it truly is a different culture today. I’d go as far as to say that it’s the exact inverse. Today the exception is to dope and there are still cases as we see but they are the exception and that younger riders come into the sport and say "I would never do that". Credibility is coming back into the sport. It will take a while, but it’s coming back. 

schmalz Now that you’re older, I don’t know if you have a metric you can compare to when you were younger as far as how your speed goes or how your body reacts to certain things. But: how do you think you are compared to when you were younger? Are you faster? Are you slower?

Correia It’s interesting. Because I’ve been trying to figure that out. Obviously I don’t have power data from back then. I think I’m a better rider now than when I was younger. I just came off from the third camp, and this was an intensive, two-week camp, and I was pretty much good every day. I felt fine every day, I felt recovered every day. Today we have access to recovery products like zipvit. The products we have for recovery: we didn’t have that back then. The team was doing core work every morning at camp. We didn’t have that back then. I feel better now on the bike than I ever did back then.

schmalz I think there’s more of an emphasis on recovery than there was back 15 years ago. I don’t think anybody thought about that.

Correia People didn’t understand it. Everything was by feel; everything was by “this is how things are done.” They didn’t really understand a lot of this stuff. Being tired and not recovering the next day was just part of it: if you rode hard and raced hard, this was just how you were going to feel.

Showing Up to Training Camp

schmalz Were you anxious going into camp?

Correia Yeah. 

schmalz Are you the oldest guy on the team?

Correia No. I’m not the oldest guy on the team and Iñigo Cuesta, who has been a pro for 17 years, is 41 and he looks like he’s 30. Carlos also has me by a month or two but he’s won the Tour and I’ve won—well, I haven’t even won a Central Park race so really who cares about what I’ve won. I was definitely anxious, as anyone would be, as any neo-pro would be. I was hoping not to crash anybody. Can you imagine if I crashed Roger Hammond? I think he’d be pissed. Don’t want to piss Roger Hammond off. Love you Roger, how are you doing?

schmalz First day on the job.

Correia Yeah. I was definitely anxious but that quickly disappeared.  It’s amazing what lactic acid in the brain can do for the jitters.

schmalz Did you feel you had to prove yourself on the first training ride; go out in front and impress everybody?

Correia Not impress everybody but I obviously felt like I had to show up prepared. That camp for me was important, as it would be for anybody in my situation. I showed up sick, and I was going out on those rides, five-hour rides, and just getting hammered. The directors were like, you don’t have to prove anything; you shouldn’t be doing this; take it easy. I was kind of shocked by that. Back in the old days, you would never do that. You would never show that weakness. Here, it’s, “tell us how you feel,” and you’ve got to make sure you’re honest, so that you keep improving. I took a couple of days’ rest and in the second week I was feeling great; I was feeling strong, and I felt good.

schmalz So how odd is it to be a grown-up man and have a room-mate again?

Correia It’s kind of funny, because I had a 21-year-old kid I was rooming with. It’s definitely, um…

schmalz It’s like going back to camp!

Correia It’s like going back to college.

schmalz You were roommates with Thor for a while.

Correia I was roommates with Thor at the first camp for a week.

schmalz He strikes me as gassy.

Correia My nickname’s the Cannon, so I’ll let you figure out who the gassy one is. And then at the second camp I was roommates with Joaquin Novoa, he’s a Spanish rider and at this camp I was roommates with Stefan Denifl, from Austria. Stefan and I are working on a skit for the Bruno version of cycling, "Fietsen" mit Stefan.  I’m starting to work on my career after cycling which will be comedy.  

schmalz Finally!

Correia We actually have a first video of it, which is pretty bad but when we first talked about it we thought it was pretty funny."Fietsen" Mit Stefan.

schmalz Do you come back from riding and this guy’s got music on and you’re like, “Turn that crap off!”?

Correia It’s funny: Stefan’s got some European stuff, he’s got the whole Diesel thing going (hat, man purse, cologne), and I was putting on Biggie. I’m from Brooklyn, that’s what we do, I mean that’s how we roll. OK it’s Brooklyn Heights, but it’s still Brooklyn. I was pumpin’ the Explicit Biggie and these guys were really confused. Teddy King and I were doing private jokes about hip-hop and all that good stuff. Rhyming "It was all a dream I use to read Winning magazine…" and then you’d have Stefan with the Euro Techno stuff toooottts, toooottts. All that was missing was the disco ball. Crazy kids.

schmalz Meanwhile they have their 400-beats-per-minute techno thing going on. So, you’ve been around for a lot of equipment evolving going on. Obviously, this is probably the best bike you’ve ever raced.

The Newfound Joy of Oblong Cranks

Correia Yeah, it’s definitely the fastest bike I’ve ever raced. I’ve been on the S2 and S3, and there’s something to the aero tubing—there’s definitely something there. That bike at high speeds, especially with a set of aero wheels, is crazy. And then, the first time I rode a P3 and a P4, immediately, doing team time trial formations with Thor and a couple of other guys… you’re going 52, 53 k an hour, and you’re going, damn, this thing is fast. The TT bike is scary fast. Having access to the equipment that’s on this team, it’s definitely exciting. To me, the cranks were a huge surprise. I had never ridden those types of cranks and chainrings.

Having access to the equipment that’s on this team, it’s definitely exciting. To me, the cranks were a huge surprise. I had never ridden those types of cranks and chainrings.

schmalz You have the rotor cranks, which are oblong.

Correia The first time I rode them, people were like, after five minutes you won’t notice the difference. I was really skeptical because I’m really picky about that stuff. Ten minutes in, I was like, oh shit, I love those things I didn’t even realize I was using a different crank.

schmalz They didn’t ruin your spin or anything like that?

Correia No. I was back on a different crank while I was here in the US, until I got my team bike, and once I was at camp, they put it on. After an hour, one of the rotor guys asked, “what do you think of the crank?” “Oh, it’s on the bike!” I just didn’t realize it. It didn’t ruin the spin and I found in climbing that I was climbing with one gear heavier.

schmalz It’s the different amount of gear teeth but is there an equivalent? Usually you have 53-39, that sort of thing. But with those, there is going to be a different amount of teeth.

Correia No, it’s 53-39.

schmalz OK, so it’s the same amount of teeth, evened out to match pedal-stroke.

Correia On the strong point of your pedal-stroke is when you feel you have a little bit more. I really like ‘em.

schmalz Your schedule is probably going to match that of a stage racer. You’re going to do some one-days?

Correia Yup. I’m going to do some, but not any of the big ones. Whereas on the stage-race side, my schedule is pretty good. In terns of good races.

schmalz What strengths are you going to bring to the stage race schedule?

Correia I’m kind of an all-arounder. I’m not particularly good at anything. My kid beat me in a sprint the other day and he’s only 4.

schmalz But that’s not bad for stage races.

The Eternal Specter of Floyd Bennett Field

Correia I don’t know. The racing thing is … I don’t know what it’s going to be like. After the first race, I’ll get a little bit of a taste. Cataluña, Dauphiné, Castilla y León, Romandie—I’m going into a black box there. I’m imagining it’s going to be a lot like Floyd Bennett.

schmalz I imagine all races are like Floyd Bennett in the last few laps.

Correia Two years ago, outside of the Philly races, I didn’t have higher numbers in any other race than at Floyd Bennett. The highest numbers I saw on my SRM were at Floyd.

Two years ago, outside of the Philly races, I didn’t have higher numbers in any other race than at Floyd Bennett. The highest numbers I saw on my SRM were at Floyd.

schmalz It’s interesting: people go out to those races; they don’t play any games; they just murder each other.

Correia Yeah, it was out of control. A lot of them, I’d peel off with eight laps to go because I was so frustrated.

schmalz Is it just because you weren’t getting anything done?

Correia The way people race, you know, it’s weird. It’s a race where there’s nowhere to hide; you sit on guys, they’re not going anywhere; the break goes away and all of a sudden it’s not coming back and you can’t bring it back on your own.

schmalz It’s an interesting race because… things are taken out of it, it’s a distillation. It’s basically tactical. There are no hills; there’s some wind and that’s about the only hard part about it. Everything else is about just the way everyone plays off one another.

Correia I will say here, on the record, that although I’ve said I have absolutely no personal goals this year, I do have some important personal goals: Central Park. And a Floyd Bennett race. I gotta win one. I’m going to come back at some point, and I need to win one. And I’m willing to pay cold hard cash for a Floyd race—so let’s talk guys.

Living the Dream, with Good Hair and a Wife

schmalz The thing is, what you’re doing right now, is the fantasy of every sort of bike racer who knocks around in the Park has. In my own delusional mind, maybe one day somebody’s going to come out and say, “Why, you’ve got a lot of talent! Come out to the Pro Tour! See what happens." But that actually happened to you.

Correia Yeah, except that nobody said I had a lot of talent. They didn’t come up to me and say, “Hey, you’ve got a lot of talent! Come to the Pro Tour!” (Laughter)

schmalz But what you’re doing is a dream come true for a lot of people.

Correia Yeah. I’ve been really surprised by the reaction I’ve gotten from people and even the hardcore riders whose reaction I thought woulnd’t be that positive—it’s been great. The key thing is, people can relate to it—whether it’s somebody who isn’t riding a bike, he can relate to the fact that he has to balance family, a passion and work. I got emails from people who don’t even ride, they say: “I find your story inspirational.” That’s still a little mind boggling. I think that’s what they love about it—that I was sort of able to do that and stay married, and not lose my job. On the cycling side, I think the guys that ride connect with the fact that they wish they could do that. “Even though it’s not me, it’s somebody else doing it.” I was very surprised by that. It’s been great.

schmalz I can say for myself that I’m poisonously jealous of you. It’s a great thing. You get clothes…

Correia I’m good looking, I’ve got the hot wife the blond hair blue eyed kid (even though I’ve got dark hair and green eyes).

schmalz You’ve got everything going on. You get to race in the Pro Tour.

Correia I’ve got good hair, man.

schmalz You’ve got good hair. 

Correia I’m not going bald anytime soon. 

schmalz You get to room with Thor. You get to gas him out every once in a while. It’s great. I’m very jealous of you and I think people are going to follow you just because they want to know about someone from the area who they’ve raced with, and how they match up, what’s going to happen. I can’t imagine anyone not wanting you to succeed.

For me, representing New York is a big part of it. I’ve raced around here; I grew up here; this is a big part of my identity, and I love these races. 

Correia For me, representing New York is a big part of it. I’ve raced around here; I grew up here; this is a big part of my identity, and I love these races. I’m going to come back and do some of these races because if I’m home, I’m going to go do them, because I enjoy them. 

The clothes are awesome. When I got a suitcase full of clothes, I actually inventoried everything. The Italians got it right! Everything they said was in there was in there, and then I found out I was the only one who inventoried everything.

schmalz Old corporate habits die hard.

Correia Exactly. Oh, there’s a spreadsheet. I gotta make sure it’s all accounted for…The support on the team is incredible. You get back from training. You put the bike against the wall, somebody takes it, washes it. You get a massage every day; you go lie down, you don’t need to have your phone on. It’s like being a kid. If you have a problem, you say, “I need something,” and there are five people there to help you solve it. You just have to ride the bike and focus on that.

schmalz João, thank you. I hope you get into an early move in one of these races, where you’re just covering something; and then no one’s listening on the race radios—and you get away. But most of all, I wish you luck at Floyd Bennett Field.

Correia Thanks, I’m going to need it. I’m going to need it.