Battle Scars Page 12

  Dave and I met while we were both living in Toulouse in the late 1990s. Our careers were just starting out but the main reason we became friends was because we were among a select few English-speaking riders in the peloton.

  Although we had much in common, Dave and I had come to cycling from very different paths. I had come through an institution, the AIS, where we had our own mechanic, coach, masseur and anything we needed. Dave, on the other hand, had to make his own way a lot of the time and did it a lot tougher. In Europe in those days if you weren’t French, Italian or Spanish it was very hard to break into the professional cycling scene. There were horror stories of guys going up to Belgium and living on one baguette a day because they struggled to make enough money to feed themselves. That’s where we differed from the Europeans—we wanted it so bad. Cycling wasn’t just a hobby or a pastime to guys who came from Australia or the UK; it was everything, and if we didn’t give 100 per cent, we were finished. So Dave and I could really relate to each other, but because of my long-term relationship with Roger Legeay, it wasn’t until 2004 that we finally became teammates.

  As I gradually began to expect, the 2003 season proved to be my last with Roger at Crédit Agricole. I took my winning form from the national titles to record my best result to date in a Classic with third place in the Tour of Flanders.

  It was a typical Tour of Flanders—hard and fast and one of the toughest I can remember because of the climbs and speed of the race. There were a flurry of attacks in the last few kilometres and because I was the only rider left from my team in the last 50 or 60 km, I had to be really careful with my moves and where I used my energy. I went on the attack a couple of times and about eight of us got away with all the big hitters. We came into one of the hardest climbs, the Muur, when Peter Van Petegem and Frank Vandenbroucke attacked and left us in their dust. After that we were racing for third place and I managed to wrap up the sprint to land a spot on the podium alongside the two Belgian stars.

  From that day I realised I was capable of winning a Classic because I’d achieved it with minimal help from my team. The Classics quickly became the new number one objective in my cycling life, but to win one I realised that I needed to be in a team where I had much more support in the final. So I came away from that Classics campaign doing a lot of hard thinking. During the Tour de France, Thor Hushovd had really started coming along and I could sense my time at Crédit Agricole was probably up. It all came to a head in the Tour that year when Thor and I were teammates but basically sprinting against each other, me down the left side of the road and Thor on the right.

  The 2003 Tour wasn’t a disaster for me, far from it. I managed to win the Centenary Classification of that year’s race which was quite special. It was decided by awarding points to the best-placed riders in the six stage finishes that matched stages from the 1903 edition of the race—in Lyon, Marseille, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Nantes and Paris. It worked like golf where the lowest score wins; so if you were first into a stage you got one point, second got two points and so on.

  Coming into the final time-trial on the penultimate stage in Nantes, Thor and I were sitting first and second in the classification. I hadn’t been keeping an eye on it but at dinner the night before the stage, we realised that whoever was fastest in the 49 km individual time-trial the following day would win the special Centenary Classification, which meant going up on the podium in Paris, a trophy and 100,000 Euros. So it was game on.

  The following day I went out and unleashed one of the best time-trials I’d done in years, finishing eleventh, 1 minute 38 seconds down on Dave Millar’s winning time. But more importantly, I was ahead of Thor who also went pretty well but was 27th, a further 51 seconds back. So in the end, I won the classification and the prize-money, which was split among the team.

  At the post-Tour party in Paris I was still getting the vibe from Roger that after nine years it was time for me to leave. When it finally happened, the first person I called was Dave because he had a lot of influence in selecting riders for his own team at Cofidis. He gave the boss a ring and because I’d just finished third in the Tour of Flanders and Cofidis had a strong Classics team but didn’t have a leader, there was a position for me. Within 24 hours of calling Dave, I received a fax with a contract offer and it was all signed a couple of weeks after the Tour de France. I would be riding officially for French team Cofidis in 2004.

  Dave and I had been mates for a long time but for him to go out of his way to get me on the team showed his commitment to our friendship. We then became roommates, I’d travel to Biarritz in our downtime for a swim at the beach, and he’d do the same by coming to Toulouse to hang out every now and then.

  I was genuinely excited by the opportunities that lay ahead when I joined Dave at Cofidis in January 2004, even though it was the first time I would miss my home race, the Tour Down Under, because of a training camp in Spain. Unfortunately, my excitement didn’t last long. Flying back into Paris after the camp I had a connecting flight to Toulouse. As we were wandering through Charles de Gaulle airport, there were suddenly police everywhere. They were going after some of my teammates and it was a pretty strange period. I didn’t see anyone getting handcuffed but I heard about it when I got to my departure gate.

  Still in shock and not knowing what had happened, I called Dave while I waited for my flight to Toulouse, but he didn’t answer. The next minute on the news, bang: ‘Cofidis scandal’ and ‘doping ring’ headlines were flashing across the TV screen. It was a really uncomfortable moment. I’d come into a brand new team, I didn’t know three-quarters of the riders and staff, and suddenly we were surrounded by controversy.

  When I got home I watched it all unfold on television, trying to understand as best I could with my limited French. I had a lot of questions and I wanted answers but the information coming through was pretty vague because the police were involved. We had a team meeting soon after and we voted to bring in internal team drug-testing. We continued racing for the early part of the Classics season and I went to Milan–San Remo with great form. It was the first time I got to captain this new outfit and the whole team was there to ride for me. I finished third behind Oscar Freire and Erik Zabel and was really happy with my performance because I had delivered on my first big race for my new team.

  But a few weeks later in April, the team decided to suspend all racing pending the ongoing doping investigation at our team. It made me really bitter because I knew I was in great shape and was just so desperate to race, but for the first time I had to sit at home and watch Paris–Roubiax unfold without me.

  It was a really low time for me; I’d done everything I could to be in good form but when something happens that’s completely out of your control, you feel helpless and I was devastated.

  I’d met a heap of Australian rugby players in Toulouse so I invited them around for a barbecue to watch Paris– Roubaix. I tried to make a day of it, but to be honest it sucked because I was meant to be racing. The only good thing about watching the race was seeing my good mate and former teammate Magnus Backstedt win.

  I soon realised that I could look at the situation two ways. The easy option was to say, ‘Stuff it, the team has been suspended,’ and just throw in the towel. But at the same time I understood the steps the team needed to take to protect itself and come out of this with a better image. My other option was to train like a man possessed.

  No matter what happened at Cofidis, I still had the Athens Olympics coming up, which was really important to me. So instead of throwing in the towel, I used my bike to unleash my fury on the roads while out training. I’d be out riding in Cofidis clothing and people would yell abuse at me, things like ‘doper’, which really fired me up. Yes, I’d made a mistake in the past but this abuse was unjustified. I had moved on, refocused and didn’t want to be cast in that mould for the rest of my life. If you stole something when you’re a teenager does that mean you are a thief for the rest of your life?

  So I trained my arse off and every
single ride was behind Rok on the motorbike; we clocked up some serious kilometres. I have always said that when something happens in life, quite often you’re not going to understand the reason, there’s no logic to it, but you’ve got to deal with it. My way of dealing with it was to be out doing 150 km behind the motorbike. As I rode, I would say to myself, ‘I’m going to prove to you bastards what we’re capable of.’

  The team was eventually back racing in time for the Criterium du Dauphine in June 2004. I stepped straight in and won stages 5 and 7; then my heart was set on winning the points classification.

  Going into the final stage I had the green jersey and we faced a 200 km mountain stage into Grenoble. I was pretty pissed off about this because it meant a sprinter was unlikely to win the green jersey. So we went out on an absolute mission. Dave and I went out in a break and I got through the mountains but was dropped on the last climb. But I really dug deep and caught the French rider at the top, then I did the descent from hell—it was one of the fastest, maddest descents I’ve ever done. This time I had both wheels skipping off the road around each corner, I was pushing everything to the absolute limit and was in the zone. Fear was never in my mind, only complete concentration. I was braking with everything I had on the front wheel and steadily pumping the back brake. This is something a lot of riders don’t know how to do properly—if you brake too much on the back, you risk locking up the rear wheel which means you go straight ahead, ultimately leading to a crash. It’s an art form bombing down a mountain at warp speed, adrenaline pumping, using every centimetre of the road, constantly watching for changing tarmac, gravel and wet spots all while being kept upright by 3 mm of rubber. When you’re doing it right, it’s so much fun; you’re at one with your machine and it’s the best feeling you can have on a bike.

  On that day I rode solo to victory to win the stage and green jersey, so mission accomplished. My form was right on target and everything was good again.

  But then it all changed. Again.

  I was at home in Toulouse on 23 June 2004 when I got a call from a friend saying Dave had been arrested while at a restaurant in Biarritz. Police could have done it nice and quietly but they decided to make it a big, public Hollywood scene and arrest him in front of everyone. I was shocked, it was another blow and probably the biggest blow of all because it was a mate—I didn’t want to believe it.

  One of the first questions I asked Dave when I called him was, ‘Is this true, did you actually do it?’ When he did confess, he got out of France for a while. I was really worried about his health and just wanted him to know that while it seemed that everyone had dropped him like a hot potato, his true friends would always be there for him. I told him that whatever had happened couldn’t be changed, but he still had a life to consider and a future and I wanted him to know he had some support.

  Dave came to Toulouse after a while and we hung out. He was in the darkest of dark holes and I wanted to be there for him. I wanted to listen to his story, and he was very open and honest about it all. He was thrown in jail and treated like an axe murderer and I couldn’t see how that punishment fit the crime. Maybe that’s because I’d made a mistake too and gotten away with it, but I was never tempted to tell him what I’d done. It was something I wanted to take to my grave; I was so ashamed of it that I didn’t ever want to open up about it to anyone.

  Millar says he and Stuart were trying to survive in a world that wasn’t nice and was ‘the dark ages of cycling’.

  ‘I had no idea we had actually done the same thing—dope, that is. When I was doping I never told Stuey about it; similarly, he never told me what he’d done. I’m guessing he had come to his conclusions with regards to what I was up to, and by that time he had chosen a different path.

  ‘I can now understand part of the reason why he was so understanding towards me when he saw my life fall apart in 2004 after my arrest and doping confession. It’s strange how we could be so close and yet still ashamed to share that, the most important of things, but that’s how dark the world was and how much we disliked ourselves for having crossed a line we never were meant to.

  ‘I now know why he never judged me. He helped me out a lot and was always there for me through my ban to this day, and no doubt he’ll be there for the rest of our lives. I hope I can be as good a friend to him as he has been to me.’

  As shocking as it was, and on top of everything that had already happened to our team that year, I still didn’t want to hang up my bike. Blow after blow kept coming but I saw each one as a new challenge. I was super-determined that year, but I was also angry. Why was this happening to me? Why this team? You could search for answers as long as you like but I found the best answer on the bike. I went to the Tour de France that year knowing I had trained hard, and aiming for a stage win.

  From the start I was up against it after losing my most loyal teammate in Matt White, whose first Tour de France was over before it even began. On the morning of the prologue in Liège we left the team bus to do a lap of the course and there were people everywhere. As we were riding along I noticed a little speed-hump up ahead hiding all the TV camera cables. Just as I turned around to tell Whitey to watch out, doing 10 km an hour, he t-boned it and went straight over the handlebars, snapping his collarbone.

  Stage 5 on 8 July was a hard, wet, cold, rainy, crap day and we had to ride 200 km from Amiens to Chartres. I had to use a lot of experience in the final, I attacked and went solo, thought I had it in the bag but they caught me so I had to re-shuffle my tactics. Then I attacked again, put my head down and sprinted like crazy. I ended up winning in a small sprint that gave me the green jersey before Robbie McEwen took it all the way to Paris.

  The stage win was a huge moment for me and the team. We’d come back from an absolute disaster at the start of the year and by July we were having a champagne shower. I shaved the team director, Francis van Londersele’s head as promised if I won a stage of the Tour. But the win had extra special meaning for me because I dedicated it to Dave. I wanted him to know that he was the reason I was on that team and that life is a rollercoaster. You can go from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs in weeks or months and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. There was a lot of emotion in that victory salute as I crossed the line, a big double-arm punch in the air. I spoke about Dave in my media interviews. People make mistakes and people pay for it and I wanted him to get his life back on track.

  I always finished the Tour de France in good nick so after a few recovery days I was back behind the motorbike doing some crazy training. The world cup win in Hamburg was the biggest of my career to that point. As mentioned earlier, I went to that race thinking I’d just take it easy but when I got there and Whitey worked so hard to bring the race back together, I found myself with a perfect opportunity to sprint for the win. Winning was massive and all of a sudden I was being talked about as one of the favourites for the upcoming Olympic road race. I had Olympic gold on my mind alright—just not in the race that everyone expected.

  Earlier that year, Bryan had realised that with a full week between the road race and madison at the Athens Olympics, Stuart was a chance to do both events.

  ‘We hadn’t spoken about it, but we stopped for a coffee out training and I just threw it at him, “What do you think about riding the madison at the Olympics? It’s eight days after the road race so you can come home to Toulouse, rest, recover, do some good training then head back to Athens. Why don’t you call Shayne Bannan and have a chat about it?”

  ‘Stuey can tend to procrastinate to avoid confrontation sometimes so when he said “Yeah, I’ll call him later” I didn’t want to give him an option so I simply grabbed his phone off the table and said, “You need to make that call right now and we are not leaving here until you do.”’

  When Rok suggested I take part in the madison, I just laughed at him and thought, ‘Whatever, I’m not doing the track, it’s not possible. Surely you’ve got to qualify and there would be a rule making it impossible f
or me to race.’ But he had planted a seed in the back of my mind. He told me to ring Shayne and wouldn’t take no for an answer. So I mustered up the courage and said, ‘G’day Shayne, it’s Stuey here … Now I know this is pretty left-field, but what are the chances of me riding the madison at the Olympics?’ Shayne paused and said, ‘I wasn’t expecting that call, but leave it with me and I’ll get in touch with Ian McKenzie.’

  Ian was the head of the track endurance team. In the next day or two Shayne rang back and said it looked like it could be possible. Because I was on the road team, it qualified me for any cycling event at the Olympics, so I wouldn’t have to race a track event leading in. Rok had two conditions on me doing the madison as well as the road race: it was to remain a secret for as long as possible to avoid unnecessary scrutiny and pressure, and that I be allowed to return to Toulouse after the road race so I could train properly and prepare. I also wanted it kept quiet, mainly because I wanted to make sure it was happening, but also I didn’t want to piss off another rider who’d been training his arse off for the last four or eight years only for some professional road rider to stick his hand up and say, ‘I’ll do that.’

  It was a big shot in the dark for Ian McKenzie. I hadn’t been on a track bike for four years so it was a massive risk for him; to this day I still thank him for giving me that opportunity. Look at it from his perspective: he gets a random phone call from a road racer wanting to just ‘pop in’ for the Olympics. Who in their right mind would say, ‘Yeah, no problem,’ unless they knew I could do the job. But I’d proven myself on the road, there was no question my form was going to be good. It was just a matter of making the Australian selectors believe it could be possible.