Battle Scars Read online

  Wearing the yellow jersey in the 2001 Tour de France.

  Throughout my career I was always good at managing the lifestyle of an elite athlete but at the same time trying to be as normal as possible—even though ‘normal’ isn’t really the right word to describe my life.

  Being a junior athlete at international level, then leaving Australia to move to Europe at such a young age, meant I didn’t have the typical teenage/early twenties experiences of summer holidays, barbecues, parties, eighteenths and twenty-firsts. I’m not for one minute complaining—I chose this pathway and I wouldn’t change it for a second—but there are certain things you miss out on. On my twenty-first birthday, I did 10 x 4 km and 10 x 2 km efforts on the track with Charlie Walsh holding a stopwatch and screaming at me.

  As professional cyclists, we’re basically trained animals because pushing ourselves to suffer through pain is all we know and it’s what we do best. With all due respect to other sports, we don’t stand around a stadium playing with a ball; we go out on the roads and bloody hurt ourselves and if you’re not hurting yourself, you’re not achieving anything. So at times during my career, mostly in the early years, I’d go out on a 200 km training ride, hurt myself, get home and crack open a few cold beers. It was part and parcel of the lifestyle of being a young bloke living the dream in Europe.

  In the early years of Stuart’s career he and Jens Voigt became close friends and shared many good times together, including in Toulouse where Stuart lived along with fellow Aussies Henk Vogels and Jay Sweet.

  Voigt says he had to grow up fast when he met his new Australian friends. The three of them ate breakfast together, went training together and grocery shopping which normally ended up being sidetracked by a few beers.

  According to Voigt, by the 1990s Stuart could drink more on a night out than just about anyone who cared to join him, despite weighing no more than 70 kg. Voigt says he learned very quickly that it was not smart to go beer for beer with him. ‘People who tried, they just went down,’ he remarks.

  ‘But Stuey, he knows, “Okay, I’ve got to turn the switch now, be professional, train hard”—and he’s there.’

  Voigt remembers one particular morning turning up at Stuart’s house for training after a night out. ‘So I show up there at 9 am and you could see Jay and Stuey were suffering but they were dressed and ready to go; then they attacked in the big ring out the driveway. I was like, “Oh, we are in for a shit day here,” because they dared each other. That day we trained for five hours with intervals on the climbs at full gas. I said, “Hey, coffee stop maybe? Half-time break?” But they just wanted to get it done. They lived up to the idea that if you can party, you can also work.’

  There is, however, a serious side to Voigt when he talks about his longtime Aussie teammate. ‘He is—and this is a pure, honest compliment straight from my hear t—a freak of nature, in every sense of the word. People like him—they don’t get made very often. Look at how long his career has lasted, the amount of crashes, his palmares.’

  Sweet—who describes himself as a lazy cyclist who loved to race but hated to train—says that as much as they par tied, Stuart always motivated him to do the hard yards. ‘Especially in my last few years when I was starting to have enough of the sport. He’d say, “What do you want to do today?” and I’d say, “Go home,” and he’d be like, “Come on man, I’m doing 180 km, come for a ride with me.”’

  According to Sweet, Stuart remained a loyal friend both on and off the bike for years even though they were on opposite teams. ‘He’d ride up next to me and say, “Listen, when we turn left there’s a crosswind and our team is going to put it in the gutter and try to decide the race so make sure you’re at the front,”’ Sweet recalls.

  ‘We still keep in touch and when we see each other it’s like it was only yesterday; we’re like family and I felt so privileged to be best man at his wedding.’

  There were two very different Stuarts went it came to riding and socialising. There was the Stuart everyone saw back in Australia for two months of the year—having a few beers at the local pub and enjoying myself because trying to be a normal person is a big thing to me. I sacrificed a lot during the year and loved nothing more than coming back to Adelaide and going out with mates for a long lunch in the city. Then there was the Stuart in Europe for the other ten months of the year. That Stuart doesn’t even have a local pub, if you can believe it. Most Friday nights I was either in the middle of a race, travelling to a race, or preparing for a race, which meant lots of training and no time to let your hair down.

  When I would finally get back to Australia at the end of the year it was time to relax. As cyclists, we get our arses kicked for 95 per cent of the year—you only win a very small percentage of races that you start—so you do a lot of losing and it can be a tough gig. Being able to release the pressure and switch off from cycling helped the longevity of my career. Whenever I started my off-season, I wouldn’t want to even look at a bike for the first few weeks. There were no coffee rides with Dad, as much as he’d love to, but it just wasn’t fun for me. Fun was going down the pub and having a beer with Dad, or shooting some pool or playing a game of golf.

  It was not until I would wake up one morning, usually about a month after relaxing and enjoying myself back in Australia, that I would go, ‘Right I want to ride now.’ Then I flicked the switch, got back on my bike and was hungry to ride.

  In my twenty years as a professional cyclist, I never let going out for a drink or having a beer at a barbecue get in the way of my training or racing. Waking up too tired or hungover was just never an option. I suppose I became hardened to it back in the early days when Henk, Jay and I would train ridiculously hard and at the end of the day fire up the barbecue. What could be more Australian than that?

  In the early years of Stuart’s career in Europe, he and fellow Australian Jay Sweet were virtually inseparable while training around their home in Toulouse, at barbecues and on nights out.

  ‘I’ve always been a bit of a wild boy and those who know Stuey well know that he doesn’t mind a drink either, so he and I just meshed straight away,’ Sweet says. ‘He’s a redhead, he might have dyed it blonde but he’s a redhead and he’s fiery.’

  Among memories of their escapades together is the 1998 Tour of Britain which Stuart won, with Sweet featuring on several stages. The pair went out celebrating and made it home early the next morning just in time to catch a bus to the airport.

  Stuart’s likeable attitude endeared him to sportspeople around the world. One of his longtime friends and personal trainers, Leigh Bryan, said this was evident during an end-of-season trip to Dublin in 2002. Celebrating the culmination of one season and planning the start of another, they ran into retired Australian football identities, including Robert DiPierdomenico, who were in town for the International Rules Series against Ireland.

  ‘We started talking and the next thing we’re going to the Aussie Gaelic footy match,’ Bryan says. ‘To cut a long story short, Australia won the game and we ended up on the team bus with them. So we’re on the bus and the cup is being passed around full of champagne or beer and then it gets passed to Stuey. He grabbed it and skulled the whole thing and everyone on the bus just erupted. We had legend status for the rest of the night and went back to the after-party at the players’ hotel.

  ‘Everyone loves being around Stuey, he’s a fun guy who always makes time for you and can develop close relationships with people from all walks of life. He’s impossible not to like.’

  There are plenty of urban myths about my partying and I’ve just about heard them all. Stories about nights out, which I haven’t even had! Some guys like to exaggerate and say, ‘I was out with Stuey until this hour’ or ‘We were at the pub and I couldn’t even move and he had to race the next day.’ But the best urban myth I’ve ever heard—and I can guarantee you it’s a myth—is that I supposedly went out on the town the night before winning Paris–Roubaix in 2007. One of my young teammates, Luke Dur
bridge, asked me about it while we were out training one day. I said to him, ‘Are you fucking joking? There is absolutely no chance in hell I’d go out the night before Paris–Roubaix … it was two nights before.’ Again, that’s a joke.

  The closest I came to a night out before a race was in 2004. We’d just finished the Tour de France and our next race was the Hamburg Grand Prix—or HEW Cyclassics World Cup as it was known—but in between I’d been invited to ride a criterium in Vienna. It was a one-hour race at night where we rode around like circus monkeys trying not to crash, then afterwards we were contractually obliged to go to the VIP party. So we started dropping a few big Austrian beers; one led to another and the organiser got me back to the hotel sometime after midnight.

  The next morning, sitting with the boys at the airport, we were shaking our heads saying, ‘What the hell?’ And sure enough, the guilt kicked in and I was pissed off with myself. By the time we arrived at the hotel in Hamburg I was so tired that I went straight to bed.

  The following morning at our team meeting the director asked every guy in the room whether they wanted to win. By now I’d had enough of always being the one who took responsibility while others palmed the pressure on to me. My plan was to do 150 km and re-assess at the feed zone. Towards the end of my time at Cofidis I was putting my hand up and riding my guts out all the time and none of my teammates gave a shit except for one guy—Matt White. He was the only teammate out of thirty who rode in front of me every single race, got me drink bottles, got me food. He was the ultimate doméstique (helper)—100 per cent committed.

  So this day in Hamburg we were cruising along in the Cyclassics World Cup and going that slowly at the feed zone that I couldn’t bring myself to stop. We went through at 35 km/h and I looked at Whitey and said, ‘What am I going to do? I can’t stop now, that’s just ridiculous.’ So Whitey said, ‘Come on mate, you’ll be right, keep going.’ I got to the final circuits of the 250 km race and thought, ‘If I’m here, I might as well have a crack.’

  All of a sudden I got better and better and started attacking off the front, opened up the body and my legs came around. Whitey brought back a big group on his own and set it up for me. I came around the last 400 metres, did the sprint of my life and won my first ever world cup race. It was the biggest moment of my career at that point—bigger than a stage win of the Tour de France. I’ll cherish that photo of me winning forever. The world champion was second, Paolo Bettini was there, Oscar Freire, Erik Zabel, the who’s who of cycling—and little old me sticking my hands up in the middle. It was a massive, massive win. I dedicate that victory to Matt White because without him it wouldn’t have happened. Of course we went out and celebrated in style that night.

  White and Stuart have known each other since 1989 when they raced the national road titles and became friends when White moved to Adelaide in 1992 on an AIS scholarship. Six months later White moved to the road program full time, but the two were reunited in the national team for the 1994 Commonwealth Games.

  White says he knew of Stuart’s reputation as a tough cyclist and fierce competitor, but saw it first-hand at the 1998 Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur. ‘Stuey was set to win the time-trial before he bit the dust and took half his freckles off. But when I saw him get up and finish the race, that’s when I realised he was a real hard-arse. It was a really high-speed crash and he still finished the time-trial in second place.’

  The pair roomed together at the Games and White says Stuart, never one to miss out on anything, was determined to celebrate with his teammates.

  ‘He was in a lot of pain after the crash and the doctor came in to give him some pain killers. I started to kit up and get ready to go out for a couple of beers when I heard him say, “Whitey, can you come in here?”

  ‘So I walk in and there he is, arm in a sling, trying to put on his shirt, telling me he’s coming out with the boys. Later that night the doctor said to me, “How’s Stuey going, has he gone to sleep yet?”

  ‘“Gone to sleep?” I said. “Look at him, he’s over there!” And there he was, drinking a jug of beer.’

  White and Stuart grew even closer when they rode the 2000 Sydney Olympics together and then were teammates in 2004 at French team Cofidis. ‘My role was working for other riders and when I got to Cofidis I started getting involved in lead-outs for Stuey,’ White recalls. ‘And yeah, you can work for someone, and you can work for someone—and I really did bust my balls for him because of our friendship.

  ‘They definitely broke the mould when they made Stuey. I don’t think many people realise what he’s done right across the spectrum of cycling. We’ve had bigger road stars and bigger track stars but no one has achieved what he has across the many disciplines of cycling.’

  In 2012 White took charge of Australian team Orica-GreenEDGE. That year he also directed Australia’s road team at the London Olympics in which Stuart finished sixth.

  ‘Other people have done six Olympics but no endurance athlete has done it,’ White says. ‘Twenty years after winning an Olympic silver medal on the track, he’s in the breakaway looking like winning gold in the Olympic road race.

  ‘It was a special moment for me to go to Stuey’s last Olympics as manager because we are such good friends. And I copped a bit of criticism for even picking him in the team, people saying he was too old, but again he didn’t let me down. It was one of the best results we’ve had in the Olympic Games men’s road race.’

  One night out that got plenty of media attention was during the 2010 Vuelta a España because it ended with my team boss at CSC-Saxo Bank, Bjarne Riis, throwing me and Andy Schleck off the race. Bjarne was pretty cool and he and I always had a really good relationship; in fact, he was the best manager/team director I worked under and I’ve got the utmost respect for him, but at times he was hard to read. One day he’d be cracking bottles of 1998 reserve chianti classico and the next day if he saw a bottle of wine he’d tell you to put it away.

  Bjarne is a massive wine fanatic so we had that in common. When he came to Australia for Tour Down Under, I took him out to East End Cellars. There was a very expensive bottle of wine that Bjarne had been dreaming about drinking his whole life and he and I sat there that day and cracked it. On training camps in California he’d say, ‘Okay boys, midnight curfew,’ and he’d send the team home. But somehow I’d find myself still sitting at the bar with him chatting hours later.

  To understand why Bjarne reacted the way he did at the 2010 Vuelta, you’ve got to put yourself in his shoes. At the time he had the best team in the world—Jens Voigt, the Schlecks, Fabian Cancellara, Carlos Sastre and me. Within one month we’d all jumped ship to join the Schlecks’ own team at Leopard. I hadn’t actually made up my mind during the Vuelta when Bjarne called me into his room and said, ‘I heard you’ve already signed.’ I said, ‘Bjarne, I swear to God I haven’t. Yes, the Schleckys want me to go there and yes, I’m having a talk with the owner, but I haven’t signed a contract.’

  Bjarne didn’t believe me so it wasn’t a good meeting. I walked out the door and thirty seconds later my phone rang; it was the head guy at Leopard. After the meeting with Bjarne I thought, ‘You know what, I’m going,’ and that’s what I told Bjarne the next day even though he didn’t believe that I’d only just made my decision.

  At the Tour of Spain you don’t usually finish dinner until 10.30 pm so Andy and I walked outside to sit in the square. It was a hot night, we’d been doing 200 km stages and we had a beer. We kicked on sitting in the square watching the world go by, then walking home we came across an Irish pub opposite our hotel. We looked at each other, looked at our watches; it was 1 am, but the stages of the Vuelta don’t start until 1 pm so it wasn’t like we had to be up at 7 am. I don’t mind the odd Guinness so we went inside. We walked in the door and bang, who’s sitting at the bar—Bjarne. He glared at us, and Andy and I must have looked like possums in the headlights as we backpedalled out of the pub and walked straight back to the hotel. In hindsight, we should hav
e stayed and had a beer with him, but we went back to our room and listened to music. The walls were paper-thin and the team manager heard the music. The following morning Bjarne came in and said, ‘You guys, this is not on, you were out all night’—which wasn’t right, but I think a lot of it had to do with the tension of us leaving the team. Then he said, ‘Right, you guys are off the race, pack your bags, you’re going home.’ And I lost it, I went off my rocker, we both said our piece and that was it. We went home.

  I didn’t speak to Bjarne for the rest of the year, I was that disappointed. But the following season I wrote him a letter. ‘Yes, I was wrong,’ I wrote, ‘I shouldn’t have been at a bar at 1 am, but in retrospect, how many nights have you said, “Come on Stuey, you’re coming out with me tonight.”’

  I have absolutely no resentment towards Bjarne. I still consider him a friend and we get on fine, but it was so disappointing because the incident was taken way out of context due to us leaving the team.

  Times have changed. The culture around sport is so different to what it was two decades ago; the current era is ultra-professional. Where once upon a time we wouldn’t think twice about a few beers after training, now the first thing you think about is recovery, hydration, stretching, massage; and if you aren’t doing that, you’re falling behind everyone else. These days, going out for beers is frowned upon. There are no shenanigans during races and no messing around when you should be training. As an example of how much things have changed, on our Orica-GreenEDGE training camp in Australia in 2012—the first time we’d been in Australia for ten months—we landed in Brisbane and didn’t touch a drop of alcohol for the entire ten days. It was more of a bonding than a training camp but we all decided that it wasn’t a good look for a top-level Australian team to be drinking or having any mess-ups out on the town.

  I’m not saying we’re perfect. I’d like to see someone else go to a foreign country for ten months of the year for twenty years and live like a monk, but it’s about being sensible. I have certainly enjoyed myself over the years, and I realise that’s not how things are today. But I am adamant that you can be an elite athlete and a normal bloke at the same time. The secret is knowing when to flick the switch.