At his lowest moment, Felipe Nystrom awoke from an overdose, sad to have survived. His story of recovery and resilience since has captivated one corner of the cycling world.
This article contains references to child abuse, drug addiction and suicidal thoughts. If you have been affected by any of the issues raised,As Felipe Nystrom approaches the hill, the cheers swell. His bike sliding and squelching through the mud, he reaches the bottom and jumps off, shouldering the frame.
"All I want is one person," Nystrom says. "One person to know that you can come out from under the grasp of addiction and alcoholism. It's going to be the hardest thing you ever did, but you can do it." "For the first eight years of my life, I think I lived in just panic, in terror, like every time the door opened, I didn't know what was going to happen," says Nystrom.As he grew older, the abuse stopped, but its effects lingered. Nystrom was awkward and withdrawn, frequently in conflict at home and bullied at school.
"People were messaging me. 'Hey, man, we're going to go drink, let's go!' or 'We're going to get ecstasy' or whatever." A reliable telecommunications network and a large bilingual workforce had made Costa Rica a go-to destination for the backroom operations of a booming online gaming industry that bypassed American laws."At first, a gram of cocaine would last me a week, maybe two weeks," says Nystrom. "Then only a week, then half a week, then I was taking breaks at work to go do bumps of cocaine.
"And all the way thinking 'No, don't do it. Don't do it. Don't do it.' But it was like I could not control myself. I had to get to the payphone." After more than a year of living on the streets, with seemingly no way out from his addiction and wracked with guilt about abandoning a young son whose mother he had separated from before the birth, Nystrom came to the desperate decision to end his life.
"I went into a used clothing store and stole a pair of jeans, and then I stole a polo shirt, because I didn't want them to find me in rags. I had just enough money left to check myself into a cheap motel, so I could take a shower, because when they found me, I wanted to be clean. Nystrom's life had been saved by a concerned motel receptionist who came to check on him and called the emergency services.
"It was like this weight that I had been carrying for who knows how long had been lifted," he says. "Like I finally knew what I needed to do, where I was going to go." Nystrom funds his own journey in cycling, with cyclo-cross essentially an unknown discipline in his native Costa RicaAfter six months of rehabilitation, Nystrom met a woman from Portland in the United States and decided to move back with her to Oregon.
"When my colleagues say 'we couldn't have done it without you.' That's a very different kind of acknowledgement than when the dealer was like 'hey, man thanks for coming to see me'."He had gone to see him for the first time in years just before he left for the States. I put it to Nystrom at this point that what he had achieved so far - a life turned around, a renewed connection with his son, continuing recovery, a job he was committed to and, with cycling, a satisfying social life - would be enough for most people.
Nystrom hated it at first: "It was cold, it was wet, it was muddy. They put things on the course to make you get off the bike. No!" There was no fairytale finish this time. Nystrom came last in the men's elite race. But there was at least a finish. Nystrom was classified. He completed the course and told his story.
"It's just been incredible. It is just so unbelievable the amount of support the fans give me," Nystrom says. That respect was shown when Nystrom was involved in an incident with multiple world champion Mathieu van der Poel at the end of last year.
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