The Runner

On the morning of March 30, 1988, a police detective named Matt Jacobson arrived at the Secure Storage facility in St. George, Utah, with a warrant to search for high-end racing bicycles and tools that had been stolen from a bicycle- maker in California several months before. Raising the corrugated steel door of Locker No. 100, the detective flicked a switch to illuminate a sixty-square-foot space with aluminum walls, no windows, and a bare concrete floor. Inside, he saw bicycle frames, a row of athletic trophies, papers, letters, a sleeping bag, and other personal effects. The detective guessed that the thief had been living in the shed, perhaps for months.

Standing next to Jacobson in the locker, the bicycle-maker, Dave Tesch, stepped forward to identify his stolen goods. A short, stocky, olive-skinned man, he was expert at his craft. The Tesch Bicycle Company, in San Marcos, California, produced approximately five hundred bicycles a year for a growing community of avid cyclists who preferred American- made bikes to those produced by better-known European racing houses like Bottechia and Colnago.

The competitors that worried Tesch most were local. In towns such as San Marcos, the manufacture of high-end racing cycles had grown into a thriving cottage industry, boosted by the surprise gold-medal victory of the American cyclist Alexi Grewal at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. In La Verne, California, a company called Santana made tandem bikes, and had captured more than half of that specialized market. Yet, even in the best of times, manufacturing high- end bicycles was a difficult business. When Tesch opened the door of his shop one morning in October, 1987, to find that someone had kicked over a rooftop turbine vent, jumped down the hole, and made off with more than twenty thousand dollars' worth of frames, parts, and tools, his anger at the theft was compounded by the knowledge that he could ill afford the loss. A similar break-in had been reported at another bicycle firm in the area, Masi, and Tesch leaped with characteristic but misplaced certainty to the conclusion that a rival had burglarized his shop.

In fact, the thief was someone he knew quite well. For the previous few summers, Tesch had worked as an instructor at Jim Davis's Vail Cross-Training Camp, which offered people the chance to enjoy a week in Vail, Colorado, training with athletes like the distance runner Frank Shorter, and the champion triathlete Scott (the Terminator) Molina. The instructors also included a young man named James Hogue, a miler who, according to the camp's promotional literature, had earned a Ph.D. in bioengineering from Stanford University, where he was a professor. With his diffident manner and his youthful face, though, he looked less like a professor than like an undergraduate. His training methods were unorthodox. He drank a mixture of mustard and Perrier during races; he lit a cigarette after crossing the finish line, as the other runners looked on in horror. In the summer of '87, Hogue started showing up in San Marcos, sleeping in his truck, helping Tesch out around the shop, and otherwise leading a life that might have seemed atypical for a Stanford professor.

The theft remained unsolved until the following March, when a bicycle enthusiast from Utah named Bruce Stucky stopped by to visit Dave Tesch at his shop. One of his friends had recently been at a party in St. George, Utah, where an acquaintance named Jim Hogue had whipped out a Mitutoyo metric dial caliper engraved with Tesch's name.