I’ve pretty much recovered from the Hell of the North, what a day, what a race, words do little to describe the punishment I gave my body … I was really counting the final kms down, absolutely knackered. But when I passed under the flame rouge for 1 km to go and entered the velodrome with 1000s of screaming spectators the feeling and emotions were incredible. It had always been a dream of mine to ride into that velodrome and when it happened I crossed the line and it was the biggest feeling of achievement I’ve yet felt.
I am quite content with my first proper effort at the Paris–Roubaix. In five years’ time, who knows hey! No Aussie has ever won that race, you never know!
After my first little stint with the road team in 1995, I went back to the track. Because I’d been riding the road I could push a much bigger gear and we won the team pursuit world championship for the second time. I also managed to get bronze in the individual pursuit behind Chris Boardman and Graham O’ Bree, so it was a perfect way to finish the year.
At the time, I still didn’t know what kind of rider I was developing into and I don’t think the team had any idea of what I was capable of either. I knew I wasn’t a mountain climber but I was third in the world in the individual pursuit and we were team pursuit world champions so I guess they thought I might have been the next Chris Boardman, the next big time-trialler, but I could sprint and they just let me roll with it. They’d throw me in a race and see what happened.
That was the cool part of being with my director Roger Legeay; he was like my second dad. He was the key to my transition from track to road and vice versa. He didn’t put any stress on me and took me under his wing. Whether it was a little experiment or whether he saw a bit of talent in me, he was really good.
Frenchman Legeay, a former professional cyclist and longtime team manager, had been monitoring Stuart’s progress while he was in the Australian track program. He had spoken to Charlie Walsh and was in no doubt that Stuart would be able to transfer his ‘very big talent’ from the track to the road. But he knew it would not be easy. Legeay said European cyclists had a distinct advantage of turning professional in their own backyard while young Australians had to venture to the other side of the world.
‘When he was nineteen years old and came with us, he was a boy, he was beginning in the professionals and it was very hard,’ Legeay says. ‘His family, they gave him to me and Stuart arrived in France with a bag and from the beginning we had a very good feeling with him and later with his family.
‘I knew he had a big talent and if a rider like Stuart did everything well, I was sure he would have a very nice career.’
Almost twenty years later, they still keep in touch. ‘Not many riders are my friends because they change teams and the like,’ Legeay says. ‘But with Stuart, every two or three months we text each other. He’s a friend now, as is his family, there’s a great history.’
By 1996, my standing at GAN began to change. When I got back to France we had our team photo and normally it’s the big team captains in the middle of the poster but suddenly there I was standing in the middle with Chris Boardman in our world champion rainbow jerseys. It was a massive moment for me. I went back to live in the same hotel and 1996 was pretty much identical to my first season in terms of half on the road and half on the track.
But the focus was all on the Atlanta Olympics where it was decided I would do the points race and teams pursuit. We went there as defending world champions but in the end we didn’t go fast enough as France took the gold medal from Russia. I was pretty devastated because I thought that would be my last Olympics—on the track at least—because road professionals were only allowed to race in the Olympics from 1996 and I hadn’t even thought of making that team. I was hoping to do a bit better in the points race but I ended up winning two bronze medals. For the second straight Olympics, I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth. I still hadn’t got the gold that I so desperately wanted. In Barcelona we’d come so close, but in Atlanta we were beaten fair and square. All that training, all that pain—and I still hadn’t succeeded.
1993 team pursuit world champions: Brett Aitken, Tim O’Shannessy, Billy Joe Shearsby and Stuart.
There wasn’t a hint of sadness as I left the track for what I thought would be the final time in 1997 and became a full-time road cyclist. In fact, it was surprisingly easy to say goodbye to velodromes and Charlie’s training programs, even though they had been such a big part of my life and was the reason I found myself on a professional road team in the first place. But it was time. After the Atlanta Olympics I’d had enough. It was as though I’d resigned myself to the fact that I’d done everything I could to get that gold medal but it wasn’t enough. And as much as it hurt to miss out, I didn’t want to commit to another four-year cycle with the track program.
So it was back to Europe to go full gas on the road, not really knowing what lay ahead of me. After my first two years in Paris I decided to say goodbye to the city’s crap weather and lonely existence and moved to a little place on the north-east coast of Spain called L’Estartit. The accommodation was cheap because no one was around and it was fantastic for training because there were no distractions and the weather was 15–20 degrees warmer.
Now in my third season with the team, my wage started to improve. My new deal was almost double what my first two-year contract was worth and it was justified by my early-season form because I could focus 100 per cent on the road.
It started with the spring Classics. In my third attempt at Paris–Roubaix in 1997, I managed to finish seventeenth while two of my teammates, Henk Vogels and Frederic Moncassin, were in the top ten. It was on the cobbles that I noticed my track background was a massive advantage because I could spin my legs and maintain a high cadence. On the cobbles during races like Paris–Roubaix and Tour of Flanders it’s all about keeping a fluid pedal stroke and trying to float across the uneven surface because if you’re pushing a high gear, you lose momentum and you stop.
Stuart’s smooth pedalling became one of his trademarks in the international peloton. German Jens Voigt, who rode alongside the Australian at GAN, CSC and Leopard-Trek, says it was one of the first things he noticed when he met him in 1998. Voigt’s earliest memory of Stuart is of a ‘little track kid, not chunky, but there was just more of him then’—and he was complete with blonde spiky hair and an earring.
‘The first thing that impressed me was his smooth pedal-stroke, he was not even moving an ear,’ Voigt says. ‘Some people just have it. Like Dave Millar as well, he looks really good on a bike, even when he gets dropped he still looks good. I look shit when I get dropped. I look okay when I win.’
The other aspect of Stuart’s career that continued to amaze Voigt was his ability to descend at frighteningly high speed. ‘I’m still trying to work out if he is a gifted descender or just a daredevil,’ Voigt remarks. ‘I still haven’t worked out if he really does know what he’s doing or if he just goes, “I don’t care, I just go.” But he is a great bike-handler.’
My directors obviously liked what they saw in me throughout the rest of the 1997 spring because I was selected for the biggest race of all—I was to debut in the Tour de France. It was a pretty big deal for several reasons, not least because I was taking a Frenchman’s spot, in a French team, for the Tour de France. And for it to happen at such a young age—twenty-three—it probably shocked a few of my teammates. But once again, Roger Legeay could see a bit of potential. I’d had a good season, done my job and he was giving me a chance.
From a pro bike-rider’s point of view, making the Tour de France was bigger than being selected for the Olympic Games. The crowds are unbelievable and that’s when I realised that this was on another level. I had never done a Grand Tour, maybe a Paris–Nice which is a one-week stage race, but my preparation certainly wasn’t what it’s like for young guys nowadays who are eased into the Giro d’Italia by racing for two weeks then pulling out. Back then, if you got a spot in the Tour de France, you had to get your arse to Paris.
For the first week of the race, it was like being in a dream. Chris Boardman won the prologue in Rouen then another teammate Cedric Vasseur took the yellow jersey on Stage 5 and kept it for six days. The day he took the jersey, Cedric was on his own and I jumped into a break behind him. Because I didn’t have to work, I pumped them in the sprint and we took first and second—a momentous occasion for our team.
But it wasn’t long until the race went into the mountains and I was hung out to dry. The speed of some of the guys in the peloton was phenomenal and I was dropped. Having the yellow jersey in the team didn’t help my cause as I’d already done a lot of work on the front and was learning to maintain tempo for the breakaway, so when we got to the mountains I was nailed. And if I was exhausted when we hit the mountains, I was completely wasted by the time we got to Paris. I clearly remember every day in the mountains just saying to myself, ‘I’ve got to get there, there’s no way I’m pulling out.’
One of the biggest lessons I learnt in my first Tour de France was the value of your teammates. It was a big mountain day and after 5 km I was dropped with three sprinters. Then sure enough, about 10 km up the road, the sprinters I was with all stopped, clicked out and got in their team cars, leaving me on my own. I looked around in disbelief and thought, ‘I can’t do that,’ so I just kept pedalling on my own, knowing the peloton and my chances of making it to Paris were getting further away. I kept going for another 10 km when suddenly I noticed a rider way off in the distance. At first I thought it was another victim of the pace at the front of the race but then I recognised his jersey. It was my team, and the closer he got I realised it was one of the older guys, Eros Poli. When I reached him I asked, ‘What are you doing?’ and he said, ‘Just sit behind and don’t panic.’ He then began towing me for 180 km through the mountains. At one point I felt bad and went to go around him to help and he barked, ‘Get back!’ so I just sat on his wheel, kept a nice tempo and finally we caught the grupetto—the last bunch—on the last climb and scraped through the time cut by the skin of our teeth. It was the epitome of teamwork. At the time I thought, ‘My God, we both could have been out of the race that night,’ but he was so cool, calm and confident. I learnt a lot from Eros that day and it stuck in my head because I did it for many of my own teammates over the years. Cycling is all about the team—individuals don’t last very long and that stage was one of the most punishing days of my life, but also one of the most significant.
Despite that, I still didn’t know how I was going to make it to Paris and the longer the race went, the harder it got. I would wake up in the morning and it hurt to get out of bed, it hurt to take those steps to go to breakfast and I would think, how the hell am I going to ride a 200 km stage? It doesn’t matter how good a mountain climber you are, the speed of some of the guys was unbelievable. Maybe I was naïve, but I kept telling myself that the problem was I trained too much on the flat, I did too much sprint training and not enough in the mountains; I figured these guys were superheroes. But at the same time I was seeing guys doing this day in, day out and of course I questioned whether it was physically possible. But a part of me didn’t want to believe they were cheating.
As far as I was concerned, doping was a taboo subject. No one openly talked about it and barely anyone spoke English, so even if it was discussed, I wouldn’t have understood much. But even so, after a couple of years in the peloton I was aware that not everything was what it seemed and performance-enhancing drugs were out there. You’re doing so many races throughout the year; eventually you find out what is going on. I began to notice that riders who had no real physical advantage or natural ability were suddenly becoming winners and doing phenomenal rides. There’s an old saying, ‘You can’t turn a donkey into a racehorse’ but I was seeing guys batting way above their average, doing ridiculous rides and I’d think, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ But from what I now gather, the performance-enhancing drug Erythropoietin, or EPO, probably had something to do with it.
I finally made it to Paris and I was rapt; I certainly didn’t think, ‘I’ve got to get some assistance here.’ I was just thrilled to finish my first Tour de France, having achieved something great after putting myself through hell; it was very satisfying. This time I wasn’t coming in to the Champs Elysées to get McDonald’s and go to the movies; I was finishing the Tour de France—albeit in 109th place and 3 hours 35 minutes and 56 seconds behind German winner, Jan Ullrich. It’s a magical feeling to hear the crowd roar as you come around the corner onto the Champs Elysées; three weeks of pain and suffering goes out the window and is erased from your memory like wiping clean a hard drive.
The first thing the boys did when we got there was put beer in my water bottles. Each team does a lap of honour after a glass of champagne but the boys knew I liked beer so that’s what went into my bidons. It’s a tradition for every team to have a pretty large night celebrating when they get to Paris. Even though I’ve obviously never been in a war, the Tour de France is sport’s version of a battle, and you sit there all night telling war stories. It’s this tradition that has always stopped me from pulling out of the Tour because I knew that if I pulled out and abandoned the race, I’d be in the hotel sitting around the table and feeling like shit. It must be one of the most depressing moments of any cyclist’s life because there’s no hanging around to watch the race. You’re flying home the next day. The closest I ever came to pulling the pin in my seventeen Tours de France—race-ending injuries aside—was in 2012 when I had a mechanical problem early, was dropped and had no way of making it back to the peloton on my own. I swear to God if my wife and kids weren’t waiting for me in Paris, I would have pulled out but I knew I couldn’t let them down so just kept pedalling.
If 1997 was a steep learning curve then 1998 was a turning point in my career. But it also involved a decision that I will regret for the rest of my life. I had ridden my first Tour de France and, as they say, ‘With every grand tour you ride, the stronger you get.’ I was coming off a good pre-season in Australia so I was ready for a big year on the road. The hard work paid off when I won my first ever stage race, the Tour of Britain, in May. Known as the Prudential Tour, it was considered a lead-up to the Tour de France. I won Stage 2 and Stage 7 and had three other podium finishes to win the race by 46 seconds, defeating Chris Boardman.
I was on a roll, which led to my selection in the Tour de France. But I was also scared because part of me didn’t want to struggle like I had the year before. It’s unnerving going into the Tour when you absolutely know that you’re going to suffer for three weeks—just to make it to the finish.
Just before the Tour, most European riders race their national championships but, being Australian, I had about twelve days at my new home in Toulouse. That’s when I agonised over the decision to experiment with EPO. I still can’t recall exactly why I decided to go down this avenue—maybe I was intrigued by what all the fuss was about—but even before I got in my car to go and get it, I remember thinking, ‘This goes against every moral grain in my body.’ I had ridden the Olympics, I’d come up through the AIS and injecting even vitamins was against an Australian’s nature. But in Europe, recovery with vitamin injections was common and legal, and I had previously been injected with Vitamin C to stay in a healthy state. But I don’t know what pushed me to go further.
I remember sitting at home having a really big moral battle with myself; it was in steps. The first was to say, ‘Okay, I’ll try and find it.’
I never discussed using EPO with anyone, but when you’re on the road with two hundred guys for two hundred days a year, you hear things, and at that time, there was a fair bit of talk about EPO being used in the peloton. No one ever approached me to talk about it or offer it to me and, similarly, I didn’t approach anyone. That would have just opened up a whole new ball game because once you talk to someone about it, who do you trust?
I didn’t research it, I didn’t read up on it, I just joined the dots from what I could gather in the
peloton that you only had to go to Spain to get it, and so I did. I didn’t know much about it and, of course, I was shit scared about the health side-effects or going over the limit. But I figured if you took a lot, you’d be putting yourself at risk which is why I took the absolute minimum dose.
I didn’t tell anyone where I was going or what I was doing; I felt terrible. When I got to the pharmacy in Spain, I sat in my car outside for God knows how long. It took me quite a few attempts to go in because I was so nervous and I knew that what I was doing was wrong. But still, I went in and decided to buy a small amount to take home. EPO is used to create red blood cells, which carry more oxygen, and it’s generally used by people battling a big illness. But the pharmacist didn’t ask what I needed it for or why I was buying it. So I grabbed a box, I can’t remember what it cost, and some small syringes, and headed home.
While I had a few friends and teammates living with me in Toulouse, I only had one housemate but he wasn’t there at the time because he was out of the country. So I was living on my own when I went down this path and, again, it was a lonely feeling at times. No one knew what I was doing.
Even though I had the EPO in my hands, my mental battle continued. It was a really shit moment. I sat there thinking of everything I’d done, my upbringing, the people who’d guided me … but they weren’t there; there was no one to bounce this off and I knew it was going to be a turning point. I was about to experiment with doping and the person I was about to cheat the most was myself. There was no one I could hurt any more than myself. Even thinking about it now, I still don’t understand why I went down this avenue; it’s an inexplicable decision.
Battle Scars Page 4