EX-OLYMPIAN OPENS UP
U.S. Cycling Hall of Famer Juliana Furtado opens up about her traumatic childhood
Earlier this month, fashion designer Kate Spade, 55, and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, 61, took their own lives.
Juliana Furtado, against all odds, is still here. One of the most celebrated mountain bike racers in the sport’s history is sipping on an Americano at a downtown coffee shop and finally ready to speak about her understanding of the profound torment that can lurk below the surface.
“Just to have gotten to this point alive,” she said, “is just really kind of a miracle.”
Furtado, 51, is a three-time World Cup champion and member of the 1996 U.S. Olympic team. She is the founder and namesake of the Juliana Bicycles brand and was such a charismatic and pioneering champion in the 1990s that she still gets recognized when she tools around her home territory of the Santa Cruz
Mountains.
Quietly, she’s spent most of her life grappling with suicide in its various terrifying forms. Furtado is speaking out now, for the first time in detail, because the recent high-profile deaths put the epidemic in the news again.
She hopes that sharing her own harrowing story — and how she finally sought the help she needed — can offer others a path to help.
After years of taking great pains to keep her suffering a secret, this week she called the athletic department of her alma mater, the University of Colorado, to offer to come speak to students.
Her message is personal. And Furtado is careful to avoid blanket statements, noting that the causes of suicide are wide-ranging and complex. The main thing she wants people to know is that a run-of-themill pep talk isn’t helping.
“People will say, ‘You’re a fighter! You’re a winner! You’ll get through this!’ ” the U.S. Cycling Hall of Famer said. “And of course they mean no harm. But all of those cliches are so deflating because things don’t always get better. Things don’t always happen for a reason.
“The depth of pain, of emotional pain, has nothing to do with athletic success. I don’t think anyone who has suicide in their family would say any of those things.”
When Furtado was a child, her divorced mother bluntly and routinely told her three children that she was going to take her own life someday. And Mom made it clear to the kids that she would do so specifically because of how miserable they made her.
“We’d ruined her life,” Furtado says now.
Furtado was about 7 years old when her mother first aimed a suicide threat at her from the kitchen of their ramshackle home in rural Vermont. Furtado alerted no one at the time, not even her musician father, who was living in New York.
“Because I would be blamed,” she says. “In my kid head, it was my fault. If I told someone, they would say, ‘Yeah, you are a horrible daughter. No wonder she wants to kill herself.’ ”
Thom Furtado, the cyclist’s brother, echoed this disturbing account in a phone interview. He recalled that right around Christmas one year, their mother “sat us down and stone cold just said, ‘OK, since you guys don’t really seem to care about me, don’t care if I’m around, I’m just going to kill myself as soon as Thom turns 18. He’s the youngest, and once I’m not legally responsible for him anymore, I’m just going to sell the house and move into the woods and end my life.’ ”
Their mother, Nina Armagh, followed through on her threat in 1995. In her suicide note, she told the children that she loved them and absolved them of blame.
Juliana Furtado’s older sister, Gia, was essentially collateral damage. She lived a troubled life from the start and never recovered from the pain of their childhood. She committed suicide at age 50 after a life of addiction and violence.
Thom Furtado had some rough years, but he and his wife now have a thriving bakery, Fonuts, in Los Angeles.
Juliana Furtado made it through, too, but barely. She found refuge as a youngster by becoming a spectacular athlete, first as a teen phenom at the Stratton Mountain School ski academy. She made the U.S. team at age 15 and seemed destined for international fame. The New York Post, stealing from a famous line about Bruce Springsteen, once wrote, “I have seen the future of U.S. skiing, and its name is Juli Furtado.”
Knee injuries derailed her Olympic skiing dreams, so she found a new path to stardom as a mountain bike racer while attending Colorado. She proved as ferocious and dominant going up hills as she’d been going down them.
In 1993, she launched “The Streak” — 17 consecutive first-place finishes in international World Cup or domestic national series races. During that stretch, a broadcaster from EuroSport asked Furtado what she would say to all the women who were discouraged knowing that the best they could hope for was second place.
“I just started laughing,” Furtado recalled. “I said, ‘I don’t know! I’d be discouraged, too!’ ”
Though she cut off ties with her mother during this time, she was exuberant on the course and could enjoy a little goofy fun even in the midst of a major competition. She’d crack wise at the starting line, then interact with fans again after she’d built insurmountable leads. One of her top competitors in those days, Susan DeMattei, once joked that Furtado was more likely to make funny comments than she was “because I was more out of breath at the time.”
Furtado traces her showman’s flair to her father, Tommy Furtado, a singer and musician. For many years, he was the house piano singer at Jimmy Weston’s supper club in New York City, where his pals over the years included Frank Sinatra and Joe Torre. To this day, she keeps a framed photo in her house of her father singing “America the Beautiful” at Yankee Stadium. He signed it, “Juli, All my love — Dad.”
“He was very funny, very charismatic. Unbelievable musician,” she said of her dad. “And he had this personality that people love. And because I didn’t do music, I didn’t think I was like my dad at all. But I realized that racing was my form of artistic expression, at a deep level.”
Furtado remained irreverent even when lupus, an autoimmune diagnosis, forced her into early retirement at age 30. Because of her “Seinfeld” obsession, she adopted a Kramer persona and committed to the part. For a few years, she even rented an office in Santa Cruz — complete with desks and filing cabinets — hired a friend as an assistant and opened a business that did nothing. “We’d sit around drinking wine and thinking of funny things to do,’’ she said.
When she went through a rough patch after retirement, she tried life as “Opposite George” — living as if in the episode in which George Costanza finds success by going against his every natural instinct.
“It made me laugh. And I honestly didn’t know what else to do,” she said. “It was my way of accepting what was going on in my life in a lighthearted way.”
But she could not outrun her childhood trauma forever. Unlike mountain bike racing, there was no insurmountable lead, and it caught her from behind three years ago. Furtado visited therapists as early as her 20s, but none of that prepared her for the delayed emotional blow that landed as she approached 50.
When her son, Wyatt, turned 7, Furtado suddenly saw firsthand what a sweet and impressionable 7-year-old actually looks like. And she was aghast all over again at what her mother had done to her at that age, threatening suicide and blaming her as the cause.
“I would look at him and be like, ‘How do you say that to your kid?’ ” she said.
Furtado’s unraveling as she approached 50 included debilitating fits of anger, anxiety and insomnia. Having previously mastered the art of concealing her emotions, everything she’d been pushing down came bursting forth all at once.
Most troubling to her — then and now — is that her robust sense of humor vanished. The impulsive wisecracker and “Seinfeld” super fan had gone silent. Nothing was funny.
“I couldn’t stop crying,” Furtado said. “My body wasted away. I wasn’t sleeping, which is its own kind of hell. And I was crying and crying and crying. I didn’t want to live, but I knew I couldn’t die.”
Determined to give her son what she never had, Furtado invented an acronym when Wyatt was born. LOSH stood for Love, Opportunity, Stability and Humor, and her goal was to give him those things on a daily basis. But she realized a few years ago she was falling short.
At the risk of how it might affect an ongoing custody battle, Furtado decided to check into an outof-state residential treatment center that specialized in behavioral health.
“I got myself to help,” she said. “Which is probably the thing I’m most proud of in my life.”
She emerged, after just three weeks, with what she calls better tools for coping with life. Furtado came to recognize the “emotional triggers” she needed to avoid, and therapists made a change to her medication that allowed her to finally get some sleep.
“I reset my internal system, and I came out with such a better understanding of my childhood and the effect it had on me,” she said. “I could breathe a little bit.”
As Furtado speaks during a follow-up interview at her home, her Warriors obsessed son is launching shots with his friends in the driveway. Wyatt recently told her: “I want to be just like you when I grow up.” Furtado had her comeback ready: “‘I want you to be a better version of me.”
For most of her early life, Furtado never said a word about her mother’s battle with suicidal thoughts. One of the few scraps of evidence is in her diary, a frilly notebook that she has incongruously named “Clarence.” In her first entry, on April 12, 1982 — eight days after her 15th birthday — she writes about her mounting English homework, the Billy Joel cassette she’d borrowed from her brother, and a tennis match against her friend, Tini.
And then she shifts the topic, briefly, to her mother’s bad mood.
“Oh, well. I guess I’ll have to bear it until she commits suicide. Wow, that’s two scary words. I hope she doesn’t do it because it would screw me up royally. But I know that she really hates life. I would, too, if I were in her shoes because I treat her like s—.”
What she didn’t know then, and what she didn’t learn until she was in her 20s, is that her mother had a long history of mental illness (Thom Furtado says she was bipolar) and had attempted suicide several times before she was born.
Furtado wishes now that people will be able to find better resources than a diary. She cites statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that suicide claimed the lives of 45,000 people in 2016. There were more than twice as many suicides (44,965) in the United States as there were homicides (19,362).
“Whatever we’re doing to address the situation is clearly not working,” she said.
She wants an avenue for more dialogue long before issues reach their crisis point. And she wants an emphasis put on stopping teenage suicide. A study of pediatric hospitals released last May found admissions of patients ages 5 to 17 for suicidal thoughts and actions more than doubled from 2008 to 2015.
Speaking out publicly and sharing her lifelong secret will be a challenge for Furtado. But she’s launched a fledgling blog in which she tries to speak directly to people about her background.
Those who have watched Furtado flip the switch are amazed and relieved.
Danny Alvarez and his wife, Marie, have been friends with Furtado for 20 years, and she’s stayed at their house during some dark moments.
“The constant darkness that was there, I don’t see anymore. It’s dissipated,” he said. “We all have demons. We all have bad times. But something was troubling her and you didn’t want to get too close. That’s changed. That tumultuous part of her is gone.”
So why does Furtado want to do this? Why now?
“Because I still need something to keep me going,” she said.
“Things don’t always happen for a reason. The depth of pain, of emotional pain, has nothing to do with athletic success. I don’t think anyone who has suicide in their family would say any of those things.” — Juliana Furtado