Battle Scars Read online

  According to McKenzie, despite Stuart’s four-year absence from the track, his decision to nominate for the Athens Olympics did not come as a shock. ‘I wasn’t particularly surprised because I knew he was desperate for an Olympic gold medal, he had this burning desire. To be honest, I was actually quite pleased when I got the call from Shayne,’ McKenzie says.

  ‘The selectors and I didn’t believe we had a strong enough team to win medals. It was a bit of a roll of the dice and it was my decision, but I gambled on Stuart because I knew he would be in super form, that year he was probably at his peak. I’d seen him previously off no track preparation step straight into national level racing and perform.’

  After making the call to Shayne, I remember putting the phone down on the table and saying to Rok, ‘Can you imagine in a few months if we’re sitting around with a gold medal? How funny would that be?’

  With good friend and former teammate David Millar in the Tour de France.

  Once I got the all-clear to ride the track at the 2004 Olympics, I suddenly got very nervous. You don’t forget how to ride on a velodrome but I hadn’t been in that environment for a long time; in fact, the last time I had ridden a madison was at the Adelaide SuperDrome in the 1990s. Brett Aitken and I were a pretty deadly madison combination in the early days; we won the national championship a couple of times and also the Bendigo Madison, which is one of the most famous races in Australia at over 100 km on an outdoor velodrome.

  With my sudden inclusion in the team, it obviously meant someone had to make way. I was told that Mark Renshaw probably would have ridden the madison if I didn’t. Displacing another rider was one of the reasons I was hesitant about the whole thing initially. I knew what it was like to be part of an Australian team pursuit and the years of work that go into it. You’re basically training for four years on hardly any money, all of it geared towards one race that lasts for four minutes.

  Thankfully, it has never been awkward with me and Mark. At the end of the day, we were both candidates for one position and it was up to selectors, who I guess realised that I had the Tour de France in my legs and I’d had success in the past, so it was a gamble worth taking.

  By early 2004, still only a handful of people knew what was going on—Rok, Ian McKenzie, Shayne Bannan and Anne-Marie. The bloke I was going to ride with, Graeme Brown, didn’t even know until he was called in to a meeting with Shayne and Ian a few weeks before the Games; that’s how secretive it was.

  When I look back on it now, it was pretty amazing. I was a professional road cyclist so even though I was doing the madison, my number one objective was still the 224 km Olympic road race. If I could tailor-make a course to suit me, the Athens race wasn’t it, but when I’d checked it out the year before, I realised how hard it was, which would work to my advantage. Throw in the heat, and it was like riding in a pizza oven so I knew it would take a tough bike-rider to win the gold medal.

  The road race went fairly smoothly and we did everything we could, but in the end Italian Paolo Bettini attacked where we all knew he would and rode to the gold medal while the rest of us were left to scramble around for the minor medals. Sergio Paulinho and Axel Merckx attacked in the final to win silver and bronze. I led Robbie McEwen out in the sprint and he finished eleventh while I was back in 33rd place, so a solid race but nothing special.

  The team went out for a few beers that night and we talked about the race, then the following morning I flew back to Toulouse so I could spend the week recovering and training for the madison. It was impossible to train in Athens. Being in the athletes’ village can be very distracting because it’s such an exciting place; you can sit in the food hall people-watching for hours and suddenly half the day is gone. I knew this would probably be my last Olympics—or my last realistic shot at Olympic gold at least—so I did not want to stuff anything up.

  When I got home I had two rest days then was back behind the motorbike for 150 km and doing race simulation, which is about preparing the body for what it’s about to do. I knew that no one else in the madison field would be doing that because at the velodrome in Athens, you’d have a half-hour time slot to ride, if you were lucky.

  Despite my nerves, the week went really quickly. I flew back to Athens two days before the race with Anne-Marie and Seth because I had a feeling that something good was going to happen and I wanted them to witness it. It was a pretty gutsy thing to do because it was 10 pm when we arrived and Seth was only eighteen months old. I put him and Anne-Marie in a taxi to a hotel while I headed to the athletes’ village. By this stage it was 11 pm and I was on a bus with no idea where I was going. I didn’t know where the Australian quarters were or even which room I was staying in.

  But just as the bus pulled up at the village, a guy got off in front of me: it was longtime Australian swimming coach Laurie Lawrence whom I’d met a few times at previous Olympics. It was a massive blessing to find someone who knew what was going on.

  I finally got to my room at 11.30 pm where my roommate, track sprinter Ryan Bayley, was fast asleep. Everything in the village was quiet.

  Waking up the next morning surrounded by all the track guys was like a trip back in time; I felt totally out of place. I’d been out of the system for so long, hadn’t been to any camps or world championships. But all the riders were really cool and a couple of them lightened the mood by telling me, ‘Don’t forget you always turn left on the velodrome, Stuey.’

  The entire Australian track cycling team was on a mission that week and the gold medals started to flow. One night Ryan came back to our room with a gold medal and just flung it on the bed; it struck me that I was rooming with the Olympic sprint champion! I looked at his medal and the pressure valve went up.

  Then he walked in with another gold medal, this time for the keirin—again, flinging it on the bed as if to say, ‘How do you like them apples?’

  He wasn’t the only person getting medals. The team pursuit boys absolutely blitzed their event so another four gold medals came banging down the hallway. With each gold medal that came swinging past me I thought, ‘Holy shit, I’ve really got to do something here.’ Browny, my madison partner, was a member of the team pursuit quartet that won gold and I became like his dad saying, ‘Don’t you go out too late celebrating tonight, get your arse to bed.’ It was hard for him because all the other boys had finished their racing, but to Browny’s credit he kept the celebrations to a minimum until our madison was over.

  Outside of the Australian team, no one knew about my upcoming madison event until one morning I went for a ride with Browny. As we headed back to the food hall I noticed all the cyclists’ bikes were parked out the front. I walked in and British riders Bradley Wiggins and Rob Hayles looked at me and said, ‘Oh, you’ve decided to hang around for a while and party?’ And I said, ‘Na, I’m doing the madison.’ I can’t remember what they said but their reaction was a cross between a nervous laugh and a ‘you’re kidding me’ look.

  It was the same when I eventually got to the velodrome for training and saw Matt Gilmore, an old teammate of mine who was now racing for Belgium. Besides Wiggo and Hayles, they were the hot favourites for the event. I looked down behind the motorbike and saw Matt walk into the velodrome. When he noticed me, the expression on his face was: ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  I did a few practice hand-changes with Browny because it’s extremely important to get that aspect right in a madison. It may look easy on TV or from the grandstand but you make one mistake throwing your teammate into the race at 60 km/h and not only are you going to rip one of your arms off but there’s a very good chance of a crash which would wreck everything. It’s hard enough doing it when there are just two of you on the track let alone throwing in twenty other teams which is absolute mayhem.

  Brown says he had no problems staying motivated for the madison after winning team pursuit gold. His only concern was being able to keep up with Stuart when they started racing.

  ‘I walked in with my gold medal and
he had this concerned look on his face as if he thought I didn’t care about the madison anymore but I said, “Don’t worry Stuey, I’m greedy.”

  McKenzie’s enduring memory of Stuart’s Athens campaign was the look on the faces of opposition riders when they saw him enter the velodrome. ‘They were shitting themselves. Stuart had just won the Hamburg World Cup and it was like [Eddy] Merckx walking in.’

  Boarding the bus on race day I was nervous as hell worrying if I had everything in my bag; I was like a little kid going to school. Sitting at the front of the bus was Ian McKenzie. I felt that I had to thank him, so I walked up and said, ‘Ian, I just want to say again that whatever happens, thanks very much for giving me the opportunity to be here.’ Ian just looked at me and without even a flinch or a moment’s hesitation said, ‘You’re not going to let me down, are you Stuey?’ I curled up in my tracksuit and said, ‘No, no mate, of course not,’ and walked to the back of the bus thinking, ‘What the hell have I got myself in for?’

  Entering the velodrome was like walking into the Colosseum with people in the stands and gladiators waiting to do battle. I put on my shoes and looked around thinking, ‘Here I am, hey, the Olympics on the track, so much has happened in between but I’m back to my roots again.’

  Because it had been such a covert operation, Browny and I didn’t have months beforehand to discuss tactics so I just said, ‘Look mate, we’ve obviously never ridden a madison together but I can see you’re on pretty good form. I haven’t ridden one for a long time but every one that I have won, we were aggressive and I’ve attacked.’ I knew I had form and hundreds of thousands of kilometres in my legs so strength wouldn’t be a problem but I was pretty worried about the speed of the race. In my limited knowledge of watching the other teams, I knew the Spaniards waited until the end to take a lap on the field because they didn’t have the speed to take the points. So I told Browny, ‘Follow for the first couple, try and grab some points but don’t try to win the first sprint. Then bang, when everyone does the third sprint, we hit it full tilt and try to get a lap and basically just bloody hang on from there.’ I was trying to get in his head that we needed to be aggressive; we could not afford to hang back. It was only a 50 km race so I wasn’t worried about the distance, we just had to give it a red-hot crack.

  It wasn’t until I got to the start line that I realised I’d forgotten a lot of the rules of madison racing. I forgot what happened if I punctured or crashed. One rider starts and the other guy lines up on the other side of the track and Browny and I hadn’t even spoken about any of this stuff so I said, ‘You start mate because I’ve got no idea what’s going on here, I’m just going to follow one of the other riders who has plenty of experience.’ All the nerves were getting to boiling point and I just wanted to get this race started because the build-up had been so intense. Once I’d got going, I knew I’d go into autopilot and everything else would become a kaleidoscope of colour and noise around me. I wanted to be in the zone.

  It didn’t take long because we started really well, got the first few changes out of the way quickly, which was a big relief, and were soon flying along at 60 km/h and attacked. We got the lap and so did Germany but I knew that we were on.

  In a madison you’ve only got a second or two to speak to the other rider as you’re grabbing his hand and I remember yelling at Browny, ‘Let’s go!’ I wanted him to attack first because he had the sprint and raw power to get a gap, then he’d throw me in and I’d have the strength to turn that into a lap on the field. After 138 laps of the 200-lap race, Browny had a go and we were quickly shut down but as soon as he threw me in, I had this killer instinct.

  Now it was a matter of making sure we kept getting points but I didn’t want to rest on what I thought would be enough; I wanted to keep driving the nail in the coffin, there was no way I was slowing down. I won the very next sprint which put us into the lead on eight points with Germany second on five. I was thinking, ‘There’s less than 25 km to go, that’s nothing.’ I guess that’s where the road mentality takes over. I wanted to be consistent with the sprints and we were. We took points on every sprint and took the lead in the race as I kept throwing Browny in saying, ‘Come on mate, this is for the gold!’ He was trying to tell me to relax but I wasn’t listening; it was one of those rides that no matter how hard I went, I didn’t feel a thing and don’t remember suffering.

  As the race wore on I was on that much of a buzz and adrenaline rush that I was having the time of my life. The stars had finally aligned and this was my time to get the gold medal. My only worry was being really thirsty because the crazy thing about this race is you can’t have any outside assistance, you can’t even get a drink—which is pretty medieval given you’re riding 55 km/h for 50 km. I was so thirsty I was trying to find moisture on my skinsuit but even the sweat had dried up. My mouth was the sorest part of my whole body, which was cooking.

  The Spanish started their attacks pretty late in the race, as I expected, and we shut every one of them down. I was having that good a day that they attacked with everything they had and a couple of times got quite big gaps but I just shut them down. That’s when you know you’re on fire on the track—when you can go ‘bang’ and kill any gap, then as soon as they’d swing up I’d attack them because I wasn’t finished, I wanted to hurt them in return.

  Even when Browny won the second-last sprint to secure us the gold medal I didn’t have time to become emotional because the race was still going. Coming into the last sprint I knew we were about to win gold but I was still yelling to Browny, ‘This is it, another gold for you, come on mate!’ I lined up and knew I didn’t have to win it but I didn’t want to lose it either.

  When I crossed the line it was a dream come true. Even though we’d won, there’s a photo of me looking quite angry. Of course I wasn’t angry but it was sixteen years of pressure, of built-up frustration, finally coming out all at once. Suddenly thoughts were going through my head at a million miles an hour; I had flashbacks of my first bike, of joining SASI, going to Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney and missing out, of riding hundreds of thousands of kilometres, sometimes in the rain and hurting like you wouldn’t believe. Now finally it was absolute, pure relief, which a few seconds later turned to joy. Browny and I had won by 22 points and a lap on the field while Switzerland and Great Britain were next on 10 points.

  As I started slowing down it hit me, it’s almost indescribable, like I was on another planet. The first thing I did was find Browny, then got over to the side of the track to find my family. Anne-Marie and Seth were there to greet me and if I wasn’t crying then I wasn’t far from it. I threw my helmet and glasses into the crowd and it’s lucky the bike didn’t go over as well.

  ‘I remember lying on the floor in the pits calling my missus to say we’d won but that was all I had. I could not have done another lap. Stuey was ridiculous; I don’t think I could have won with any other partner,’ Brown says.

  That night we caught up with our families then took our gold medal—our VIP entry into any club we wanted—into town. When I eventually got back to the village in the early hours of the next morning, I walked into my room and just like Ryan had done twice, finally got to throw my own gold medal on the bed.

  Brown says he knew he was in for a big night out when he and Stuart were on the bus on the way in to the city to celebrate. ‘We got back to the athletes’ village, had some McDonald’s and went for a shower. I was so tired I just wanted to go to bed. By then it was already after midnight but I heard a knock on the door and someone saying, “Browny, you ready?”

  ‘We were on our way into town and Stuey said, “Shit Browny, I’ve got to go to the bank, I’ve only got 500 Euros.” I remember thinking, “What are we in for here?”

  ‘I only had two drinks that night, I just couldn’t do it. I left and the next time I saw Stuey was in the morning.’

  While winning Olympic gold with Stuart is one of the most memorable moments of Brown’s career, he remembers what unfolded weeks l
ater just as clearly.

  ‘At the time Australia Post paid athletes $18,000 for every gold medal they won at the Olympics. In our case it was to be split $9000 each,’ Brown says.

  ‘The night of our win we were high-fiving each other and I said, “That’s half my yearly salary.” Stuey turned to me and said, “Well, you can have my share mate.”

  ‘I told him he didn’t have to do that. In all the emotion of the moment, it’s very easy to say things like that. A few days later I told Dad about it and he said, “Well, just wait and see.”

  ‘Then about a month later I got a call from Stuey saying, “Browny, what are your bank details? That money has come through.”

  There’s no doubt my career would have felt a bit empty without winning that gold medal. To me, the Olympics has always been the epitome of sport. No Tour de France or world championship or Classic can replace an Olympic gold medal; I guess that’s the Australian in me. We take the Olympics very seriously and have a great history of Olympic legends. Coming through school and starting cycling, all I wanted to do was represent Australia at the Olympics. At Barcelona we came so close to gold and I thought my chance had gone up in smoke, so to finally get it twelve years later was massive.

  Anne-Marie says she’d never seen her husband so happy as in the moments immediately after the race. ‘That was the first time I had seen him race on the track because I’d missed all his track years. To see him win gold was by far one of the most exciting moments of our lives.’

  After the Olympics I still had good form and it would have been a shame to waste it so I went back to my road team for the rest of the season, which was proving to be my vintage year. Podium in Milan–San Remo, winning stages in the Dauphine, the Tour de France, the Hamburg World Cup, the Olympics—it just kept rolling along so I went back to the pro peloton with a different kind of confidence. All of a sudden I wasn’t only Stuart O’Grady the stage winner of the Tour and wearer of the yellow jersey, I was Olympic champion and with that came another level of respect. I went to the Vuelta a España and did some great sprints with eight top-ten finishes, had the points jersey and was second on one of the most difficult stage finishes I’d ever done in my life.