For days, Hinault had been stalking the lesser-known riders who had taken their chance to lead the race in the earlier, flatter stages. They knew he was there. Watching. Waiting. As the race approached the mountains for Stage Five, their nerves became taut. Anxiety skyrocketed. Those who believed they could win the Tour suddenly began to doubt themselves. ‘The Badger’, as Hinault was known, had cast a long shadow. All appeared to be going to plan for him.
Stage Five would start in Saint-Gaudens and end in Saint-Lary-Soulan after 117 kilometres. By the standards of professional cycling, this might be considered a short day, but this stage required the riders to navigate two massive mountain passes: the legendary Col de Peyresourde and Pla d’Adet.
Hinault took charge early, leading the bunch over the Peyresourde with a resounding show of strength. But Pla d’Adet was a different story. Former Belgian Tour winner Lucien Van Impe skipped away, leaving Hinault with the lesser lights and also-rans. One by one they fell away from the Frenchman, who battled to keep Van Impe in sight.
Soon, Hinault had dispatched all his passengers but two, one of them being Spanish climber Juan Fernández, who struggled in his wake. It was no surprise he was there; it was his favoured terrain. But Hinault’s other companion sent shock waves through the cycling world and became the revelation of the race.
It was 23-year-old Phil Anderson, who clung to The Badger’s wheel like a limpet mine. Hinault’s shoulder-rolling style and piston-like legs exuded strength and authority, in stark contrast to Anderson, off the seat and wobbling from time to time, yet surviving.
Anderson was on the Peugeot team as a ‘domestique’ — a helper. But when his team leader, Jean-René Bernaudeau, went into the red and couldn’t hold the pace, Anderson, looking for a smooth wheel to follow, chose Hinault and soon found himself conspicuously at the front of the race.
Hinault was astounded: this unknown, from a country on the other side of the world with no cycling history, was challenging him in his own domain! Halfway up the climb, with Bernaudeau far behind, Anderson was given permission by team management to cooperate with the Frenchman. Sidling up alongside Hinault, he offered him a swig from his water bottle. Insulted and enraged, Hinault slapped the bottle out of Anderson’s hand, disgusted that this young man had the temerity to suggest he might need it.
Side by side they rode on, Anderson nullifying Hinault’s attempts to dislodge him. Little did they know a new chapter in cycling history was being written, and nothing would be the same again.
Lucien Van Impe ended up winning Stage Five of the 1981 Tour de France, but the real story lay behind him as Hinault battled to the line twenty-seven seconds later, just edging Anderson out of second place. After all the calculations had been done, Anderson emerged the leader of the Tour de France, seventeen seconds in front of Hinault and, with that, the European grip on the world’s greatest bike race had been loosened. Phil Anderson became the first man from outside Europe to lead the Tour, and wear the maillot jaune.
To those of us back in Australia, particularly the young and impressionable like me, the news hit us like a bolt from the blue. We had our hero! Phil Anderson proved that Australians could challenge the best in the Tour de France and triumph. He provided the impetus for hundreds of young Australian men to try their luck in professional cycling.
For me, the dream never materialised but, for many others, it did.
Phil Anderson did not win the 1981 Tour de France. Bernard Hinault soon reasserted his dominance and went on to win the third of his five Tour de France titles. But Anderson did achieve the incredible feat of five consecutive top-ten finishes in the race, a feat not equalled by an Australian until another young rider from Victoria named Cadel Evans arrived on the scene in the early 2000s. Evans’ eventual Tour de France triumph in 2011 would be the culmination of that Australian effort that began in 1981. Phil Anderson made that victory possible.
But today, Anderson’s achievements are overshadowed by men of lesser ability. He has been reduced to a footnote in history by the current generation of cyclists who are only interested in the next tweet from the newest star on the block. It seems he is only remembered today by fans like myself; those who squinted into the depths of the sports results at the back of newspapers or strained their ears to pick up minute snippets when radio sportscasters deemed him worthy of mention.
Yet he still remains one of the greatest Australian cyclists, a pioneer and a true sporting hero.
Captain Socceroo
by Craig Norenbergs
IT’S THE MULLET. Type ‘Paul Wade’ into your search engine, and you’ll find a football card circa 1980-something with a youthful smiling face on it. The top of the head is a mass of spiky hair, leading down to that much maligned, yet strangely popular cut that is ‘business at the front, party at the back’.
Back then, Wade and his fellow footballers wore it with pride. Stare at the picture long enough and you’ll soon be jumping on your iPod and downloading Limahl’s ‘The NeverEnding Story’ or Europe’s ‘The Final Countdown’ for a mullet music fix. They don’t make footballers like they used to, which, in some regards, is a good thing.
Not everyone looks good with a Village People moustache and a bubble perm. Wade, and his 1980s pretty-boy mates, frozen in time on the internet, have a lot to answer for.
And Paul Wade really was a footballer of his era.
Born in the north of England, Wade migrated to our shores when he was eleven years old. He landed in 1974, the year Australia first went to the World Cup. Such was the coverage of soccer in Melbourne at the time that he didn’t even know the Socceroos were taking part.
He started playing Aussie Rules to fit in with his schoolmates until his mother dragged him along to soccer training, where his high work rate and attitude shone through. A few years later, the skinny migrant kid was starring in the National Soccer League (the A-League of its day), and soon, the national team. He played eighty-four full internationals, forty-six of them as captain. He jokes that the only reason he got to wear the skipper’s armband was because his was the only surname officials could pronounce. ‘I honestly don’t think I would have got a game today. I was right for my time. There’s probably one place in each team for a hard worker who never gives in. My touch would let me down these days. The running joke was my second touch on the ball was a tackle, because I’d give it away at the first touch. My only regret is there wasn’t much money; [otherwise] life today would have been a bit easier. There’s a whole generation of blokes who played for Australia, who have some great memories, but little else. And I’m one of the lucky ones.’
His last appearance in green and gold was in 1996, but he stays fit by running coaching clinics in schools. To put that in context, imagine today’s stars in twenty years, driving around Sydney’s suburbs on a day-to-day basis, placing cones on a field and teaching kids to dribble a ball. That’s what Wadey does.
As hard as it is to believe in this age of millionaire footballers, there was a time when soccer players, at least in Australia, were like you and me. They had real jobs, rubbed shoulders with real people and trained real hard two or three times a week. To illustrate the point, Wade tells the story of a television appearance during their two-legged playoffs against Argentina in 1993. The South Americans were two-time winners of the World Cup, with a team full of international superstars, including a bloke named Diego Maradona.
The Aussies did well to draw the first game one all at the Sydney Football Stadium, before losing one–nil at the intimidating River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires. Argentina, a proud and successful footballing nation, qualified for USA ’94, but the plucky Socceroos made them work for it.
Being captain and having marked Maradona during the matches, Wade was asked to go on a top-rating chat show in Argentina. He laughs at the scenario: ‘Raul Blanco, the [Socceroos’] assistant coach, was an Argentinean. He acted as translator and they asked me a few questions to put in perspective the difference between football in Argenti
na and Australia. They knew we were part-timers. The host asked how much we made. So, I said, “Ten thousand, and I’m one of the highest paid at South Melbourne.”
‘The host and panel looked at each other, and said, “That’s fantastic … Ten thousand a week!”
‘I said, “No, no, it’s ten thousand a year.”
‘Blanco whispers to me, “Wadey, don’t take the piss out of me in front of the whole country. Tell them what you really earn.”
‘And I said, “I swear, I only make ten grand a year!”
‘Raul shook his head and made something up for the host, and to this day still thinks I was joking. But the sad thing was — I wasn’t.’
Wade, his spiky mullet now a fierce-looking crew-cut, laughs at the image of footballers three decades ago. ‘It was “sheilas, wogs and poofters”. Johnny Warren couldn’t have put it any better [in his autobiography]. That’s how the Aussie public saw us. And overseas? Forget it!’
He smiles as he recalls a tour by Italian giants AC Milan in the early 1990s. ‘We went out to a Sydney restaurant, and the Aussies were all sitting around wearing our tracksuits, and in walked the boys from Italy. They were dressed in suits, and had drop-dead gorgeous women on their arms.
‘All of a sudden twenty Socceroos slouched in their chairs and slid under the table.
‘The tour was pretty shambolic. In the second game in Melbourne, the first half ran ten minutes short, and the second half even shorter, because Milan had to fly home. The worst part was, when we played at Princes Park, there was a cricket pitch in the middle. You had millions of dollars worth of Italian players sliding all over the place and falling over.
‘They also had portable floodlights because the lights weren’t good enough. We couldn’t see a thing. God knows what the Italians thought. Franco Baresi, one of their greatest-ever players, went home and did an interview, and absolutely slaughtered us. He famously said something like “It’s not the end of the world but you can see it from Princes Park.”
‘It was a tournament sponsored by Coca-Cola, so we had “Coke” across the shirt. I’m not sure if it even had the Australian emblem on it. And then, after we’d swapped shirts, the manager came in and asked us to put them out for washing. We all looked at each other and said, “What do you mean? We’ve just given them away. Take a look at that: Roberto Donadoni’s shirt. How good is that?”
‘And he went, “We haven’t got anything for the next game now! What are we going to play in?” He got up and said, “Well I’ll go out and get them myself!” And he did. He walked into the visitors’ dressing room and asked for them back. I thought, no wonder the world didn’t respect us.
‘The world respects us now, although it took a while.’
Wade played under the old Soccer Australia administration, now referred to as the ‘bad old days’ of the game in this country. We hadn’t qualified for the World Cup in thirty-one years, and the organisation was broke. The Socceroos struggled to attract quality opposition, and even when they did, no one turned up to watch. Any talk of ‘football’ meant rugby league, union, or AFL.
But as any self-respecting Aussie sports fan will tell you, the government held an inquiry which found the game was indeed being badly run, and which led to sweeping changes, including the involvement of billionaire Frank Lowy, and the creation of the Football Federation in 2005.
Old soccer became new football. Australia shifted its allegiance from the Oceania Confederation (goodbye American Samoa!) and started testing its skills in Asia (hello Japan and South Korea!). Wade knows that if he emigrated now, he’d definitely know if we were taking part in the World Cup. ‘I think the fact that people are talking about hosting a World Cup shows how far we’ve come. We’re in the big time now and Australia has figured out how big the game is. People who used to follow Greece or Italy or Croatia don’t want to any more. I go to the schools and sign green-and-gold shirts. I used to sign black-and-white ones, or red-and-white chequered ones.
‘The war is over. We don’t even think about not qualifying for the next World Cup. As far as we’re concerned, we’re there. In my day, people didn’t even know we were playing.’
Wadey was the kind of player coaches love, because he’d run all day, and almost shame the rest of the team into keeping pace with him.
Off the field, though, he’s also faced his fair share of battles, mostly private. It’s best if he explains in his own words.
‘In 2002, I had to interview Paul Okon, the Socceroos captain, after a game, and felt terrible, absolutely terrible about it. I had an epileptic seizure on air, while I was talking to him. People used to look at me and see I was licking my lips and think I had a funny taste in my mouth.
‘But I’d be having a seizure. I’d actually had my first one in front of another person at the doctors just before we played Argentina in ’93. The physio and doctor ordered me to see a neurologist when I got home. I didn’t even know what a neurologist was. So I didn’t go, but the team doctor rang again and asked if I’d been, and he told me I had epilepsy.
‘I didn’t know I had it. I would get an “aura”, which is a feeling over your body, and is part of the seizure. I used to drive with my daughters in the car and have seizures I didn’t know about.
‘Okon wasn’t happy about me interviewing him anyway. He was under pressure and had to do the interview, because there was a guy with a camera standing right in front of him. Full credit to him, he could have told me to go away, but he didn’t. I actually liked him as a person and player, and he knew it was part of his job as skipper.
‘I asked him three questions, but I didn’t know I was having a seizure and my voice was slow and slurring. I came out of the seizure, and Okon thought I’d been taking the piss out of him, licking my lips and speaking slowly. He was livid.
‘He thought I was going, “Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah.” I had no idea what was going on. So I chased him, and the team manager came out at the tunnel entrance and also told me to stay away. Then another guy came out and did the same.
‘All the time, I’m thinking, “What the hell is going on here?”
‘Then someone said, “He’s telling you to leave because you were taking the piss out of him,” and I started to realise what had happened.
‘For a good ten minutes, I was lost. It was all a case of bad timing. I used to take my medication like clockwork, so I wouldn’t fall apart on air, and this was the first time I got caught out.
‘That night, I tried calling Okon. It was on the radio all the next day, so I rang again and left messages saying, “Hey, it’s Wadey, I’ve had a seizure. Can you call me?”
‘Nothing.
‘I tried again and again and again. I eventually saw him at the airport on the way to a game and told him not to worry about it, I’d had a seizure and apologised. It was so awkward, because Okon looked at me and didn’t know what to say. It was like he thought, “I’ve treated you badly, and let myself down.”
‘He didn’t know.
‘I had my first grand mal seizure, a big one, in front of a doctor, and ten minutes earlier I had had the whole family in the car. I think back on how lucky I was. The doctor looked across the desk from me and said “You’re having a seizure,” and bang!, I was out of it, shaking uncontrollably. The ambulance came and they stretchered me out of there, and the waiting room was full, so I didn’t move.
‘In the ambulance, I said to the female ambo that I was bloody sweaty.
‘She shook her head and said, “I think you’ll have to have a shower”, because I’d pissed myself. But that’s what happens when you have a seizure. I was so embarrassed.
‘The doctor said to me: “We can try and juggle the medication cocktail, or see if you’re a candidate for an operation.” And I was.
‘The doctor sat me down and said I could be paralysed or blinded. He also said, “You could die. But someone died last week, so the odds are with you now.” I love their gallows humour.
‘My wife, Val, the kids, a
nd my closest friends were all worried about me, but I just didn’t want the life I was leading. I was relying on everyone to get me everywhere. Lawrie McKinna, the Central Coast coach, was great, as was Brian Brown from Marconi FC. Channel Seven director Brian Barnard would pick me up on the highway, and I’d sit there and watch cars go by. I look back now, and think, “There was an Australian captain, who played 118 times for his country, standing by the road in the rain, waiting for a lift.”
‘The lowest point was getting on a train, and a group of youths got on and one of them knocked me into the window and started to take the piss out of me. While they were doing it, I had flashbacks to marking Maradona and playing in front of massive crowds and winning championships and wearing the green and gold, and there I was on the train, almost midnight, getting pushed and shoved and abused by kids. I thought, “It can’t get worse than this.”
‘The operation was a big one — anything with your brain is. They cut me from the top of my head, down to the front of my ear. They pulled the front of my face down, took a pile of bone the size of your palm out of my head, went in, took out part of my brain the size of two matchboxes, put the bone back, patched up my face and slammed sixty-five staples into my head. I thought that was bad, but it got infected, and I had to go through it all again!
‘[At first] I thought it was a pimple, but it got bigger and bigger and didn’t look right. So when I saw the surgeon again, he put his face in his hands and said, “We have to go straight into hospital again.” I was there for six weeks. The nurses and I got on famously. I knew their life stories back to front. To get rid of the infection, they had to cut the bone in my head and leave it open. So I could touch the side of my brain. I still have a lump on the side of my head. They put a steel plate with screws in. I thought I was screwed before, but now I really am.
ABC Grandstand's Unsung Sporting Heroes Page 13