What's more, he later built the Team Raleigh mountain bike team into one of the best in Europe.
Stephen Castle, Essex County Council cabinet member for education and the 2012 Games, said: "Clearly mountain biking teams are going to be interested in coming to Essex.
A bike team is one of the most effective ways to market a company, and sponsors know that".
"He did monstrous workouts no one else could do," says Will Geoghegan, a former teammate on the Chevy Trucks mountain-bike team.
Then I started following the bike team, chasing (on motorbikes or in cars) after racers going fifty miles an hour around rain-slick mountain hairpin curves.
He stops by the roadside doubled up over his bike, team helpers massage his legs and feet but he barely has the strength to pedal each time they push him down the road.
"If you use common sense, there are no conflicts," said Keith Sanders, a 42-year-old sports shop owner and member of the King of the Rockies mountain bike team in Winter Park.
A few months before the 2004 Olympic Games, Hesjedal was able to ride some of the spring classics, one-day races in Belgium and the Netherlands, with Armstrong's U.S. Postal Service team — an arrangement brokered by his mountain bike team sponsor, Gary Fisher, which was owned by Trek, the longtime sponsor of Armstrong's teams.
In 2008, Adrien rode again in the Cape Epic, this time with a Rwandan teammate, and they finished twenty-sixth; then he came home and won the Tour of Rwanda; and soon afterward he was signed on to ride for Africa's top professional bike team, M.T.N.
His trophy was a radio, but his real prize was the discovery of an all-consuming passion for cycling, and five years ago, when the American cyclist Jock Boyer came to Rwanda to train a bike team, Adrien was in the first draft.
