Stuart and good friend Jay Sweet on a training ride.
The 2002 season started with a heart problem and finished with a heart-to-heart that would dramatically alter the path of my cycling career.
The issue associated with my heart and blood-flow went undiagnosed for years, and when it was eventually discovered, it came as a shock. After the highs and lows of the 2001 Tour de France, by early 2002 I was building into another big season. I was back in Europe training and during an effort or interval my left leg would just blow up. It felt like a cramp so I’d slow down and try to shake my leg as I was riding along, guessing that it was full of lactic acid because I’d gone so hard. But it just wouldn’t go away and I figured I was either over-training or not training enough.
I really started noticing it one day when I went out riding with Jay and his girlfriend. When I did an effort, I had to sit behind both of them just to get home. The pain in my leg would last a couple of hours, so I started talking about it to my team because we’d heard stories about athletes getting a blocked iliac artery. Eventually it was decided that I’d go to a local hospital for some tests. The doctors put me on a home-trainer where I had to go from stationary with no warm-up to full gas in a matter of seconds, then hold that pace until I nearly exploded. Then straight away I was thrown on a table and they took the blood pressure in both my ankles. At first they couldn’t get a result on the left leg and I thought it must be the machine playing up because I was lying there sweating my arse off. So they tried again, still nothing. Eventually the doctors realised that my blood pressure was so low, there was virtually no blood getting to my left leg, with my calf muscle the worst affected.
Following the test they put me in touch with Professor Chevalier in Lyon who’d discovered this iliac artery problem in athletes. But the team had me booked in to race Het Volk and Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne, and although I felt fine I went up to Belgium to race thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing?’
I got through both races without a problem, did plenty of work and my left leg was fine. By Monday I went home scratching my head, thinking it couldn’t be the iliac artery after all because I’d just ridden 400 km in two days without a glitch. But by the Wednesday I went out training and bang, the leg blew up again so this time I flew to Lyon to see the professor for more tests.
Like the other doctors, he quickly discovered there was no blood reaching my left calf. When I stopped to consider how long I’d been getting this strange feeling in my leg, I realised it had been years—so you could say that for a long time I was riding on one leg, which is kind of amazing, really.
Professor Chevalier told me the problem was reasonably common in some athletes but because they didn’t know what it was, they either retired or just gave up on cycling. He realised that my career was on the line and helped me out a lot, putting me through all the tests quickly; then I went straight downstairs into an operating theatre. They injected me with dye so they could trace where the blood flowed and it showed a massive blockage in the iliac artery—a very serious problem. The iliac artery delivers blood from the abdomen to each leg, and while no one wants to hear bad news, I was relieved that they’d found it. Given that it was hindering my performance, I wanted it sorted as soon as possible. Being early February, I still had plenty of goals for later in the year so now was as good a time as any to have the operation.
I was sent some digital photos of the artery and it’s hard to believe how bad it was—my artery was 10 mm wide in my left thigh and 9 mm was completely blocked. So there was a 1 mm hole where the blood could pump through. The professor said it was the worst case he’d ever seen. They don’t know exactly what caused the blockage but the most likely thing was from all those years on a track bike where I was quite bent over and leaning forward.
The operation involved taking a bit of artery from my left ankle and using it to replace the blocked artery in my thigh—quite a complicated little task. It was like cutting open a hose then stitching it back up, and if there’s too much pressure and you blow the hose open, you could die from internal bleeding. So the doc said in no uncertain terms that I had to go home and do absolutely nothing for a month. He said, ‘If you elevate your heart-rate, you could die.’
After three frustrating weeks I finally decided to get outdoors. I’ve never been much of a gardener but I had to do something. Anne-Marie saw me outside mowing the lawns and told me to stop but I said, ‘It’s okay, I’m taking it easy.’ I missed all the 2002 Classics but once I finally got back on the bike I was in a good place mentally, thinking, ‘Geez, if I’d been riding on one leg all this time, imagine what I can do now that I’ve got two legs working properly!’
Coming back from my iliac artery operation in 2002, I realised that I had to get my shit together pretty quickly. It was mid-May and I didn’t have Dad around the corner or any teammates free to motor-pace me, and Anne-Marie certainly wasn’t getting on a motorbike again. But I needed someone to help me get fit really fast for the Tour de France, which I would use as preparation for the upcoming Commonwealth Games in Manchester.
So I picked up the phone and called an old mate, Leigh Bryan. Leigh was still racing as a cyclist in his own right but was coming off a big crash in America. I asked him if I could hire him as my full-time soigneur (trainer/masseur). I needed someone who was going to commit to helping me. And that’s a big ask; there aren’t many people in the world who’d pack up everything and help you at the drop of a hat. They might do it for a week or a month, but I needed someone full-time and I was happy to pay him to do it.
A lot of athletes try to bank every single cent they make because they think they’ve only got a short career and have to make every penny count. In some ways that’s true, but I realised I had to invest in myself. I was getting paid a good salary and had to make the most of it; if it meant employing someone to help me, so be it.
I told Leigh—who was known to everyone as ‘Rok’—that he could live with me and I’d pay him to help me train. His answer was, ‘Yeah, why not,’ and the next minute he was on a plane on his way to Toulouse. It was a pivotal moment in my career because his influence took me to a new level. He was making me breakfast in the mornings, giving me massages after training and I was behind that motorbike every single day. Rok turned even a coffee-shop ride into a 100 km motor-pacing session which was like race simulation and exactly what I needed to get up to speed again.
Much of the time when you’re out training, you don’t get much feedback. Often, your coach isn’t there and there’s not much he can say when you tell him how you felt on the phone afterwards. But Rok was constantly looking in the rear-vision mirrors, seeing every detail of what was going on in my body from my facial expressions. Together we made a 180 km loop around Toulouse which we called the ‘form finder’ because it had twenty-five climbs ranging from 1 km to 3 km long and would usually take six hours to complete. By the end of our time in Toulouse, I could do it in 4 hours 15 minutes which you’d be lucky to manage in a car.
When Rok arrived in Toulouse I told him we needed a realistic goal—to try to win the road race at the Commonwealth Games which was nine days after the end of the Tour de France. I’d never won a gold medal on the road so it was a massive incentive for me. I knew I always came out of the Tour de France in great nick and on great form, which is probably due to the thousands of kilometres of training I’d done with Charlie, so the whole time in my head during the Tour was the mantra: ‘Comm Games, Comm Games.’
My other heart-related problem was a condition known as tachycardia which affected me as early as 1992. It was just before the semi-finals of the team pursuit at the Barcelona Olympics and we were about to go on the track so I did one more sprint on the rollers, but the next minute my heart went through the roof. Before tachycardia comes on, my heart usually skips a beat, gives a couple of big beats, then goes insane, firing away like a machine gun. The timing in Barcelona obviously wasn’t ideal but I had no idea what was going on. As I got up on the track my hear
t-rate had been sitting on 230 bpm for five minutes, then went down to 180 but I can remember starting the team pursuit and not having any feeling in my hands or legs, and it took half a lap for it to come back.
It probably did happen at times when I was out training, but not often enough to really worry me and evidently a lot of people have it but you might not notice it unless you’re putting your body under stress.
The next time it happened during a race was on Stage 3 of the 2002 Tour de France from Metz to Reims. I was sitting in the bunch with 50 km to go and suddenly felt my heart in my chest, looked down at my heart-rate monitor and it was showing 240 bpm. I thought, ‘You have got to be kidding!’ so I dropped to the back of the bunch and told my team car to leave me at the back, it would go away in five to ten minutes. But unfortunately we were doing 50 km/h in a stage of the Tour de France and half an hour later it still wouldn’t go down. My teammates, who were pretty concerned, dropped back and started pushing me along. All this was live on TV so there was quite a bit of attention.
Physically, what happens to me is that I find it difficult to take deep breaths; it’s like my body has pins and needles. This day during the Tour I was praying to God that it would stop, but because the race was going at such high speed, I didn’t have the opportunity to force my heart-rate to go down. Then, with 10 km to go, it suddenly stopped and my heart went straight back down to 140 bpm. Relieved, I decided to still go for the sprint and, despite my team telling me to take it easy, I managed to finish tenth even though I hadn’t gone all-in.
The following day was a rest day and the organisers of the Tour de France made me go to hospital for some tests. The doctors told me they were going to bring on an episode of tachycardia that would tell them if it was that career-threatening. I was pretty nervous—more so because to bring on tachycardia they actually make your heart stop for a couple of seconds which feels like an eternity—then it kicks back in. I had to hang around for the results and, anxious that they could potentially end my career, it was an uncomfortable wait. But the doctors came back and said, ‘It’s not career-threatening, you can continue,’ so I walked out and went back to the hotel thinking, ‘Beauty, the show would go on.’ Ever since then, it has happened less and less, and while I might notice it every now and then sitting on the couch, it’s never bothered me.
With the tachycardia drama of the Tour de France behind me, it was on to Manchester for the Commonwealth Games. We took an awesome team, including Cadel Evans who was becoming a big hitter in world cycling, and Cookey (Baden Cooke) who was closing in on winning a green jersey, so every country was expecting us to win. At the team meeting we decided we were all capable of winning the 187 km race; it was just a matter of who and how we’d do it.
On race day, we got straight on the front and let a group go. On the sixteen-lap course there were two major climbs, the second of which everyone expected us to attack over the top. But just before we hit the first climb, the peloton had to thin out because we went over a small bridge; it was like sand going through an hourglass.
After we’d done a few laps I said to the boys, ‘How about we go full gas into this bridge; we’ll be on the front when guys are still hitting the brakes and we’ll attack up the first climb.’ It was one of those rare races where the script in your head actually works out perfectly. Sure enough, I ended up getting away from the bunch on the first climb, Cookey and Cadel covered any move that would come from the peloton, and I rode solo to the finish line for a Commonwealth Games gold medal on the road. It was a really special moment, particularly given what had happened in the few months before, but also knowing the calibre of the guys in our team and that anyone could have won. In the end, Cadel attacked and finished second, and Cookey wrapped up what was left of the peloton to grab third spot so we were all on the podium, which was pretty cool for Australia.
It was a very satisfying way to end the season after all the drama of my iliac artery operation, month off the bike, then tachycardia at the Tour de France.
After Manchester, Rok and I and another mutual friend went to Dublin to toast a successful comeback from my health scares and to plan the new season ahead. As it turned out, that trip would prove crucial to the next few years of my career.
Leigh Bryan recalls the defining moment of their trip to Dublin when he and Stuart had a heart-to-heart conversation.
‘I told Stuey that I believed he should adjust his focus from the Tour de France and to target the spring Classics. I believed this was where he could really excel and it would not be detrimental to his Tour form, but it was going to require a huge amount of planning and a massive commitment from both of us if we were to do it properly,’ Bryan says.
‘He was going to need to have trust and faith in the daily process I would implement as now all forms of training and recovery were to become his priority. We needed to be more selective about what type of workload he did, both on and off the bike, to ensure he made use of his best physical condition and form at the right times during the season. The natural talent he’d been relying on was still there but now he needed to work with more structure and intelligence to attain his objectives.’
In the months leading up to that trip to Dublin, I’d realised that Rok was a key element to my success in Manchester because the work we did paid dividends straight away. When we first started working together, I was the one telling him what I needed to do; but Rok has a strong background in physical education, he is a bike-rider and a smart guy who knows a lot about physiology and the human mind. He was also very good at telling me the truth, he wasn’t afraid to call it as it he saw it or to put his ideas forward. It was really important for me to have someone to bounce ideas off because life in Toulouse was pretty solitary at times. I didn’t have another coach to talk to, or anyone besides Anne-Marie to confide in, and I didn’t like bringing my work home. I wouldn’t sit around the dinner table and tell Anne-Marie, ‘I just did five hours and all these efforts.’ Rok, however, would fit right in to that conversation. We’d been friends for a long time so it was the perfect relationship because he was also a mentor for me.
Before any big occasion—Olympic Games, Paris–Roubaix—I’d always phone him just before the race to tell him how I saw the event unfolding, as though it was a film in my head. ‘Every dog has his day mate, what do you reckon?’ I’d say. Because ultimately, no matter how much training you’ve done, one of the most important ingredients for any bike-rider is confidence.
After my conversation with Rok in Dublin, I decided to go for the Classics. I was done chasing the green jersey at the Tour de France, I’d been up there but if it was going to happen it would have happened by now, so we shifted our focus to races like Paris–Roubaix and Tour of Flanders. I thought I was more suited to Flanders because Roubaix guys tend to be bigger with legs twice the size of mine so they could handle the cobbles better. Flanders was a race I thought I could maybe win; it was one of those out-there dreams. Flanders has more climbs so there’s a thinner field when the race gets interesting at the end and, unlike Paris– Roubaix where guys can sprint into each sector and come in kamikaze-style, Flanders is hard, twisty and windy with 20 per cent (gradient) climbs so the field thins out selectively.
Milan–San Remo was another spring Classic I wanted to believe I could win, but I knew there was always going to be someone quicker than me in the final. I had some success in that race—third in 2004, fourth in 2005 and fifth in 2007—but never quite the ultimate success. I wasn’t a pure sprinter like Alessandro Petacchi or Erik Zabel; they were quicker than me and there was nothing I could do about it.
My new training regime with Rok started in Australia in December 2002. He had me in the gym—something I’d never done in my life—but now I was there four or five times a week. I used to do my strength training on the road by riding up and down a hill in a massive gear. But Rok was using the gym to get my head away from the bike.
The strength came quite quickly, so one day I said to him that I really w
anted to win a national championship before I retired so I could wear the Australian jersey in Europe and at the Tour de France. This then became our first target and we trained bloody hard. We went to the Bay Criterium Series in Melbourne and every morning I’d do two to three hours before the criterium, ride to the event, do the race and ride home—so I was clocking up 180–200 km a day with an hour of racing in the middle; I knew that no other bike-rider was doing that. On one occasion we rode back to Geelong from Ocean Grove and racked up 280 km because I was that focused on winning the national championship. By the time we got to Ballarat in January for the 2003 national championships I knew my form was good and I’d done everything possible to put myself in a winning position.
The course was around Buninyong in Victoria. I got in the early move because I didn’t want to have to chase everything later on. I made the race very hard then attacked up every climb until it was down to me, Allan Davis and Patty Jonker. I managed to beat them to win my first national title.
Patty’s a good mate but he’s never been the quickest guy in a sprint. Davis, on the other hand, was one of the most talented young sprinters coming through the ranks so I knew I had a race on my hands. But everything just worked out for me and when I crossed the finish line it was a mix of emotions—joy and relief but ultimately satisfaction that Rok and I had targeted a race, trained hard and I’d been able to deliver. It marked the start of something special.
Stuart wins the 2004 HEW cyclassics.
I’ve made so many friends in cycling over the journey. We’ve laughed and celebrated the highs, and comforted each other and cried at the lows. I know I’m biased but I doubt there’s a closer bond between a sporting team than what exists in professional road cycling. We are on the road with each other for hundreds of days each year; we room together, eat together, relax together and ride, hurt and fight like hell during a race together. Everything we achieve is a result of the sacrifice and dedication of our teammates. Without them we are nothing. But it’s not unusual for a cyclist to have at least three different teams throughout his career so sometimes, just as you’ve built that bond with your teammates, it’s time to move on and start again. But a bond with your best mates is unbreakable, whether you’re riding together or not. And so it was with Scottish cyclist Dave Millar.
Battle Scars Page 11