Jeff King Interview

Last week I caught up with Jeff King an ex-full time cyclist and now a carbon emissions investment banker at Credit Suisse. He rides for Banditcycling ( www.banditcycling.com), a wine company.

We spoke about cycling as an addiction, the environment, carbon emissions and racing in Belgium. King is a sprinter and managed to come 17th in the cat 1-2 in Bear Mountain last fall. Kudos are due!

O’M: What or who got you into racing bikes?

JK: I’m from Rochester, New York and basketball was my primary sport growing up. At seventeen I bought a bike for cross training and was racing within two weeks. In 1992 [King was 17] I did a criterium in Hamilton, Canada, just over the border and got hooked. I raced the next two years as a junior. I never did a cat 5 or cat 4 race because I upgraded to a 3 with junior results. I can already hear the people reading this and screaming for a recount. When I graduated from high school, I decided to stick with basketball and I played at division 3 Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. I quickly learned that I was better at cycling than basketball and decided that I needed to get out of the North East if I was going to make a serious go at cycling.

@##=#<2,L>@##=#CRCA March 3rd, 2007, King of Arms

O’M: And you moved colleges, right?

JK: Yes, I was so disappointed that I was the only guy at the school who rode bikes and I was reading in VeloNews about all the great cyclists at CU Boulder. I walked straight into the admissions office and dropped out. I didn’t really have a plan at that point but found a friend who lost grad school funding and we drove to Boulder to get away. I decided that I would fill out my college application on the way.

O’M: Did your folks think you were wasting your time?

JK: Yes, you know, I think cycling is a lot like a drug – it gives a high and people get addicted to it. And living as a full time cyclist is how I always imagine a drug addict would live. I say this in jest but I was like a drug addict, driving around the country looking for the next high of a bike race, throwing away everything in order to get it; school, job, social life, health, money, prospect of making money in the future. I didn’t care, I was so focused on getting to the next race and getting results. My parents wanted me to be a serious student and have a good life, cycling had no future. They were never fully on board with my bike racing. Cycling is very different at the lower categories and just racing locally, you can do it while keeping other aspects of your life moving. But doing it full time, you really need to give up everything else and live like a monk.

O’M: How did you meet your wife?

JK: I met her at a bike race in 1996. She was seventeen and I was twenty, I know. It was outside of Rochester at the Bristol Hills Road Race. I won the race so I was brimming with enough confidence to ask her to go out with me. I think I told her I would take her on a sprint workout or something lame like that. Anyway, they still run that race, I don’t think I could win it anymore, but I got the girl. After a summer romance, she decided to come with me to Colorado for school. With that decision, I doubled my parent problem. Now I had 4 parents and some grandparents that thought I was a loser and was throwing my life away for bike racing. We joke about it now but it wasn’t fun at the time. But we have been together ever since and we were on the same team that won the collegiate national championships in 1998.

O’M: How long were you in Colorado?

JK: I raced in Colorado from 1994 to 1998, racing and going to school. When I was 23 and was doing okay as a cat 1 and winning some races, I thought I would take a real shot at it and moved to Belgium. I thought that 23 was getting to the old side for a bike racer and was running out of time. I was in Belgium for a season but got so burnt out that I couldn’t even ride my bike for a few years after I got home.

O’M: What caused the burnout?

JK: The racing was just so painful, so much suffering to make the front group then the split, over and over again, race after race. I just couldn’t take it anymore. And I didn’t want to live like that anymore, having no money, sitting around a house brain dead waiting to race, nothing to worry about other than my form. It wasn’t a satisfying existence for me. You have to really love racing to be pro and I didn’t love it, I liked it, I like it a lot but I don’t love it, and liking it a lot is not enough for bike racing. At the end of the season, I moved back to Colorado and I stopped riding my bike. I was broken.

@##=#<4,L>@##=#King, CRCA, March 31st 2007

O’M: How do you train now that you’re back to being an amateur?

JK: I don’t really need to do mileage now. Miles don’t really leave your legs and I had 6-7 hard years of miles. I did 20-30 hours a week on the bike, 300-400 miles a week in my youth. That doesn’t just go away. Experienced racers don’t need to the mileage to race locally that people who are just coming into it [road racing] need to do. For training, I do a couple of spin classes with the best spin instructor in New York, Blake Longacre. He is an instructor at the Credit Suisse gym and I do some weights. I ride on the weekends but now I feel like I am a recovered drug addict, I like to dabble in cycling on the weekends but I won’t let myself get carried away and I don’t sacrifice anything for it. The funniest thing now is that my Mom is still nervous about it. Whenever, I tell her that I went for a ride, she asks me if I am okay and if things are going alright at work, if I still have a job. When I saw her last summer, she told me that she knows that I’m not really racing anymore because I don’t look like I have some strange disease, I look normal now. I guess this is why cyclists call me fat, because I look normal.

@##=#<3,L>@##=#Sprinting CRCA, April 2007 V Rashad

O’M: When did you decide to get into investment banking?

JK: I had an economics degree and when I got back from Belgium, I wanted to get as far away from cycling as possible. Investment banking is as far away from cycling as I could think of at the time. I was so burned out, I just wanted to get away from it and never think about it again. Investment banking was a good way to get away from cycling and dedicate myself to something else.

O’M: What irritates you about other cyclists?

JK: People telling me I’m too big to race. It’s been like that my whole riding career. All people seem to care about is how much I weigh, you wouldn’t believe how many people ask me that. When I started as a junior, some cat 4 told me that I was way too big to ever upgrade to cat 3. Now, guys can’t believe that I can ride up Harlem hill! I used to do 5 day stages races with pros up real climbs and now people think Harlem hill well spit me out because I am just a sprinter. People have no idea what being a sprinter really means. It made me so annoyed that I did the 1-2 [category] Bear race just to shut people up. I hadn’t trained over 80 miles but I was desperate to show people that cycling is more about pushing on the pedals than it is a starve yourself contest. I finished, but it didn’t work. People still tell me I am too big to ride Harlem hill or ride a break away in a local amateur race. It’s hopeless. I’m being too honest, people are going to think I am a jerk.

@##=#<1,L>@##=#Newspaper in Colorado, 1998

O’M: Who do you believe are the best sprinters in CRCA?

JK: A lot of guys in the CRCA are good. Rashad [Guerra] and Ugly [Chris Uglietta] are getting better quickly. I notice their improvement by the week. Ricky has the best jump, Craig Cook has good days and [Kevin] Molloy can do it all when he decides to do the park races.

O’M: Why do so many people gravitate to cycling? Why such a diverse set of characters?

JK: This is going back to my cycling is a drug analogy. A lot of people use cycling to self-medicate themselves, myself included. I just do it socially now instead of go on all-summer benders. But US cycling is full of extreme personalities, determined characters that have a lot of motivation. I mean, think about it, not many people want to ride a bike up a hill, let alone against a bunch of people that are trying to beat them up that hill and have been training to do it. It just doesn’t make sense. I have a lot of respect for cyclists, I think cyclists are unique people but extremely interesting and I’ve never been able to get a complete handle on why we do it.

O’M: What do you think about when you’re sprinting?

JK: I sprint angry. I’ve always been like that, I think most sprinters are a bit overconfident, with some ego and have some rage. It’s a wait, wait, wait and GO mentality. And you have to believe you can win. And sprinting isn’t very safe. [Now] when I’m bumping handlebars with a 22 year old, I know what he’s thinking – “I would rather crash than lose, I have to win money.” I know that because I used to think that, I would take chances that I would never take now. Now, I would rather lose than crash and I would rather be slow than give up other aspects of my life to race.

@##=#<5,L>@##=# King of Beers, Turkey Race 2006

O’M: So you are involved in carbon emission trading for Credit Suisse?

JK: Yes. Earlier in my career I was working on damaging the earth, oil and gas. Now I am trying to fix the mess [joking]. It’s a new market but Credit Suisse has been expanding and I joined the group about 4 months ago. I’m having a lot of fun, it’s high risk but I think it is tremendously exciting and I truly believe that it has a real positive impact. It is as green as Wall Street gets. Unfortunately, 95% of carbon emission trading is European based. The U.S. is 5-10 years behind the rest of the world, largely due to Bush deciding not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

O’M: What about global warming? Is it as bad as we’re led to believe? How can carbon trading assist in lowering pollution etc.?

@##=#<6,L>@##=# King with Ryan Tie, Winter Break, Tucson AZ., 1997

JK: It’s a proven fact, the debate is over! The great challenge is that we need to reduce green house gas emissions and at the same time allow the developing world to develop. The only feasible way to do this other than shutting down the economy is with emissions trading and sustainable development. It is the only thing environmentalists and big industry can agree on as a solution to the problem of climate change.

O’M:: How does it exactly work?

JK: Let me give you a simple example. If a huge garbage dump in South America is just sitting there, the rotting material releases green house gases into the atmosphere. We can go down there and finance the construction of some gas capture technology, sometimes it’s as simple as installing huge covers that collect the gas and funnel it into a pipeline. The gas is then burned and used to run a power plant and the megawatts are sent into the local grid. So, you benefit not only because the gas is being collected but also because the power that is being sent into the grid will replace power from a dirty coal plant. The final step is that the project is allocated “credits” to reflect the amount of emissions it has offset. We can than take these credits and sell them to companies in Europe that are trying to offset their emissions.

The sale of credits acts as a mechanism to transfer money from the developed countries to the developing world. This allows for green growth and at the same time allows the developed world to invest in emissions reductions that are many times more efficient and cost effective. It can be down with more than landfill gas; also fixing pipelines, wind farms, hydro plants, bio-fuel, etc. At Credit Suisse, I help source the projects, finance them and trade the credits. It’s a great job. This is a fairly complicated topic for this interview but I would be happy to talk about it further with anyone if there are more questions.

O’M: Do you do much traveling?

JK: Yes, 95% of what I work on is international. I seem to do 3-4 trips a month. The last couple of months I’ve been to Denmark, London a couple times, Brazil (Copacabana beach) and this month, Mexico City, Ukraine and Russia are on my calendar.

O’M: Do you train when out of the US?

JK: Yes, it’s impossible to ride because I don’t have a bike. But sometimes I ride those lifecycle bikes in the gym for 45 minutes but mostly I do plyometrics in the hotel room. It’s funny, I’ve gotten complaints from people in the room below me. A hotel employee will come up to find me sweating in my boxers at 5 in the morning with all the furniture pushed in the corner. I don’t even try to explain what I am doing and they don’t ask, I just promise to keep it down. Plyos are the best for cycling and I think everybody should use them, but nobody seems to listen to me. They train explosive power and sustained strength. A sprint can be won in a first 5-10 seconds but it can also be lost in the last 50 meters. Even if you aren’t a sprinter, who couldn’t use more snap to attack the bunch or to get out of a corner? I picked them up because I used to speed skate and plyometrics are huge in speed skating.

@##=#<8,L>@##=#King of Track, Winter 1997

O’M: Do you drink?

JK: Wow, change of topic.

O’M: Drinking can become like cycling too, addictive!

JK: I don’t make sacrifices for cycling anymore. I’m not a bike racer, I’m a guy who rides a bike. Part of the promise that I made to myself when I started riding again is that I would not make sacrifices for cycling. I mostly drink beer. Duvel. But I drank twice, maybe three times when in Belgium because I was so focused on racing. Also, I grew up in a dry town near Rochester. I had my first beer at eighteen. And I didn’t drink much at all through college because of cycling. Let me just say that things have changed now. Bandit Wine is our sponsor. One of my best friends, a cross country skier, Charles Bieler started the company and it is our sponsor, Bandit Wine. I drink Bandit Wine! [Laughs]. We have a website, Banditcycling.com. People seem to like the site but tell me that my posts are the worst.

O’M: Who is you hero in cycling?

JK: Greg Lemond, I got into cycling pre-Lance so Greg was the big guy at the time. For him to go to a non-American team and be so successful was very impressive.

O’M: Who will win the Tour?

JK: Boonen. [Laughing] He’s just a great sprinter and he’s Belgian. If you ask me who will win any race, I will say Tom Boonen.

O’M: Why do you think Americans can be so obsessed with numbers when training?

JK: Good question, this is mostly new. It hit me like a tidal wave when I started riding again, power meters are everywhere now. We sometimes used heart rate monitors but people didn’t revolve around them like people do the power stuff. I will never use a power meter, never, actually I am pretty against them. I hate power meters. It takes the fun out of cycling. It makes new cyclists focus on the wrong things. But they are a symptom of the type of person that enters cycling. Most US cyclists I meet around New York tend to be very bright, motivated and like to analyze every aspect of their cycling. Cyclists are just the type of person that love to take things to the extreme. I respect that people use them and depend on them but I would rather not ride than be on some power meter program with zones and limits and all that. Maybe, I’m just too dimwitted to get it.

O’M: What was your most memorable win?

JK: Every time I beat my teammates in a race it is very special to me. No, winning the team overall at collegiate nationals in 1998 was the best, my wife was on the team with me. It was very important to me because it was a team goal and we worked so hard for it. Nothing will ever surpass the feeling of standing on the top step of the podium with all my friends. Cycling for me is all about success as a team. My Bandit Racing teammates are my best friends. We don’t over-think the races or make excuses if we lose; we just go out and have fun.

@##=#<7,L>@##=#US Nationals, 1998, King at back (wife Cathy in stars to right of long-haired team mate)