The below really stuck out in the article.
But he never anticipated the freakshow that would meet him back in Idaho. Strangers began to appear at Gold's to meet Duke. A flood of business proposals and letters began rolling in. "Some people around him inevitably became jealous," says Duke's longtime friend and now personal assistant, Rachel Aldous, "and accused him of being greedy or arrogant." When Duke found himself hiring security to keep people from camping on his relatively modest lawn, he realized that being "out" as a lottery winner was going to be a lot tougher than he'd expected. One example of how the jackpot changed Duke's metric of who to trust came in the heady days right after the lottery win, when he decided to become a mountain bike racing promoter. He donated a significant amount of money to support Wild Rockies, an Idaho-based race series, only to have it "questionably spent," as Duke puts it. He backed off for several years, reducing his contribution to an annual sponsorship donation (though he has since gotten back on board with new organizers and promoters). That first debacle caused him to step back and reassess everything, from his goals to his relationships.
"I knew something was up when he called me over to his house because he was having a hard time explaining to his accountant how he had spent so much on bikes," says Parrish. "Brad was holding this stack of invoices and he had no idea what a lot of it was for." Parrish had to painstakingly walk Duke through every purchase "down to the last chainring," he says. "It was definitely a test of our friendship." But Parrish knew some acquaintances had taken advantage of Duke, and that Duke had a big heart and had been struggling with how to differentiate the worthy causes from the lost ones. "Brad needed to know who he could trust," says Parrish.
As the sea of zeros wiped out life as Duke knew it and replaced it with a jagged new landscape of chaos and possibility, he stayed grounded on his bike. He assembled a core group of people around him, and required everyone—accountants, lawyers, assistants, publicists—to attend his 6 a.m. Spin class. (Even though he quit his job at Gold's three months after winning the jackpot, he continued to at least attempt to keep teaching there. He held on for a year, until that part of his old life also faded away.)
"He really tried to keep living a normal life for as long as he could," says Edward Moore, Duke's publicist. "I think he thought he would be able to do it for much longer, but eventually the enormity of the task of managing the money took over."
One time, an obese woman claiming to be on her death bed told Duke she needed money to fix things. He met with her and bought her a gym membership, workout clothes, even food for a new diet. "In the end," he says, "she just wasn't willing to go through the work of changing her life. It helped me realize that a lot of people are in desperate situations because of their choices. Even giving them money, there's no guarantee they won't be right back where they were in two years. So I had to learn to make some tough calls."
In order to determine who to help and how, Brad established the nonprofit Duke Family Foundation and put his family members on the board so they could approve funding for causes such as the Livestrong Foundation, Ride for the Cure and the YMCA. The mission was simple: Promote healthy lifestyles and positive, success-oriented attitudes toward personal growth.
"People want to believe that after you win the lottery life is easy, and the reality is that life actually gets a lot more complicated, because suddenly you have all these important decisions to make," says Duke. "I accepted that challenge, but one thing I didn't anticipate was how that would impact my family by changing the way other people viewed or treated them, and created false expectations of them."
Duke is now incredibly protective of those close to him. He declined to talk about his longtime girlfriend for this story to any greater extent than to say he was in a happy, stable relationship