Battle Scars Page 15
‘He told me it certainly wasn’t and he would miss most of the key races he wanted to race. “So if you could ride for any team, who would it be?” I asked him.
‘He replied, “CSC but that’s just not an option”. But for the first time I noticed the thought creeping into his mind that maybe this was it for his cycling career, and he may not ride for much longer. I think he got real motivation from that perspective.
‘I said that I bet it was an option [to ride in team CSC] if you rang Bjarne and said you would ride on a basic domestique’s salary. He did, he was riding now for his cycling career, he won Paris–Roubaix and the rest is history.’
The day after calling Bjarne I was pacing up and down the hallway when he rang with a figure. I nearly choked on the phone. I said, ‘Mate, I know I said you could screw me over, but come on.’ It was less than one-third of what Unibet had offered and it shocked me. But eventually I managed to get another 50,000 Euros out of him and the deal was done. In hindsight I could have gone for 100,000 Euros extra but didn’t want to push my luck. I knew it was the right decision and I didn’t give a shit about the money because at that stage of my career I would have ridden for nothing. Paul made me realise that what I wanted most in life was to win a Classic, no matter the price. I’ve never been big on money, it’s a nice thing to have but I’ve never been obsessed by it. I’ve been able to do what I love and get paid for it.
I was relieved to be joining Bjarne and wanted to start with all guns blazing. Yet I also knew that I was going to a team that already had Fabian Cancellara. Although he was yet to win a Classic, he would be our leader in the big one-day races and go on to become one of the greatest Classics riders of our generation. But I looked at it as a positive and thought it could work in my favour. Fabian had been such a big hitter in the Classics; not only could I be there to support him, I knew the team would have four or five riders still there in the final when the race was won and lost. And that opened up a whole new opportunity for me to attack and have a crack for myself.
But just as the excitement grew for the Classics, I crashed during Tirreno–Adriatico. I had already missed the national titles and Tour Down Under to attend training camps; now here I was, at one of my first races with my new team and I hit a hole the size of a small car at 60 km/h. I snapped my forks, the handlebars punched straight through my chest and I snapped my collarbone and seven ribs. So in one crash my Classics campaign was over.
I had mixed emotions watching Fabian win Paris– Roubaix that year from my couch. I was devastated not to be there, but I was also so inspired. I was straight on the phone wanting to be part of the celebrations. My point had been proven—I was in a team that was capable of winning these big races so I felt I was a step closer to realising my dream.
I recovered in time for the Dauphine but bad luck managed to find me again at the Tour de France when I was taken out on the 216.5 km Stage 3 from Esch-sur-Alzette in Luxembourg to Valkenburg in the Netherlands. We were flying on a downhill when someone in front of me took my front wheel out with him. We were doing 60 km/h and as I looked up I saw a big steel pole with a road sign coming at me and there was nothing I could do. I smashed straight into it and when I got up there was a cracking pain in my back but I got on my bike and managed to finish the stage in all sorts of trouble. That night I had X-rays which showed a hairline fracture in one of my vertebrae. It was a tough gig but I decided to ride on and finish the Tour de France even though at times over the next seventeen stages I was in excruciating pain.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt that consistently shit for so long. On the team I felt like a third leg because every morning we’d talk tactics on the bus and the director would look at me and say, ‘And Stuey, you just try to get to the finish again.’ The boys helped me out, especially the day after the crash, because it started on a mountain and they pushed me up.
I felt better as the Tour went on. I got a lot of respect from the boys and was able to do my fair share of work in the latter stages. I rank getting to Paris that year as one of my greatest achievements on the bike.
One day I will never forget was being in that famous breakaway on Stage 17 from Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne to Morzine when Floyd Landis attacked us on his own, 128 km from the finish. It was the first day after the crash that I started to feel good and I managed to get in the breakaway on the mountainous stage. There were thirteen guys in the breakaway and we were ten minutes up the road from the peloton when we heard over the radio that Landis was coming.
Normally with a break that size the race would be won by someone in the group, but not today. ‘So who’s he coming with?’ I asked our team director over the radio. ‘He’s on his own,’ he replied. ‘What the hell? He’s on his own? As if he’s going to catch thirteen blokes!’
If I hadn’t been in that breakaway that day I would never have believed it. We were watching the time board come down—nine minutes, eight minutes, seven minutes, six minutes—and everyone started getting nervous and eating and drinking. We were looking behind us waiting for Floyd to come past on a motorbike when, sure enough, he caught us. He turned to me and said, ‘Stuey, hang on,’ and off we went. I tried to hold onto his wheel for as long as possible but he blew everyone out the door. I was the second-last one to get dropped and was with a lot of good climbers while Floyd went on to win the stage by a whopping 5 minutes 23 seconds and in doing so, sealed overall victory.
Later on we found out the truth. Floyd wasn’t racing clean, but I knew at the time that what he did that day wasn’t normal.
Having ridden the Tour de France that year basically as a training ride while I recovered from my back injury, I came out feeling okay. The team wanted me to do a world cup race in Switzerland called Grand Prix Zurich. It was a super-hard hilly race, right up there with Tour of Flanders and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and I asked the boss if I could skip it because it was just too hard for me at that time. But he said, ‘Come on, you’re really important for the team, we need your motivation for the boys even if it’s just for 150 km.’ So I agreed to race.
I remember sitting down the night before with Jens Voigt, Karsten Kroon, the Schlecks and Fabian. They were a team of absolute kickers and were all so pumped for this race. Their motivation gave me a huge lift so when I got the start line, bang, we were off and I found myself in the breakaway with Fabian.
Racing in his home country, he sacrificed himself for me 100 per cent that day. He made it possible for me to sprint to second place behind Samuel Sanchez. I thought, ‘Holy shit, this guy has just helped me get second in a world cup on his home turf!’ He got a lot of respect from me that day. It showed me his level of commitment and the sacrifice guys on this team were prepared to make for each other. It marked the start of something very special, and from then on we became inseparable. We roomed together at every race and helped each other win a lot of big races. He even flew me to his home city of Bern on a private jet after the 2011 Milan–San Remo (where he came second behind Australian Matt Goss) to celebrate his thirtieth birthday.
Fabian Cancellara said the only thing he knew about Stuart before they became teammates at CSC was that he was ‘a great rider with blonde hair’. They met on a pre-season training camp in Denmark and soon realised they had a connection, but they didn’t do a lot of racing together until the 2006 Vuelta a España when they won the team time-trial and then Grand Prix Zurich.
‘It was shit weather, raining all day, and I wasn’t the guy to go for team leadership that day,’ Cancellara says. ‘Then suddenly I was in the break with Stuey. I was so dead but I sacrificed myself from the bottom of the downhill until the last kilometre—everything that day was for him and after that our friendship started.’
But according to Cancellara, their friendship went well beyond the bike and included Stuart teaching him to speak English. ‘I learnt a lot from him about leadership, about taking the pain out on yourself and going fully in. He taught me that pain is temporary, but memories are forever.
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sp; ‘He now lives in Luxembourg and we are busy. But I know that when I need someone, when I have a problem, whatever it is, Stuey will help me and be there for me. We have something from the past that will not go away.’
Leading an escape with Simon Gerrans (far right) on stage two of the Tour Down Under. (© Graham Watson)
The night before 2007 Paris–Roubaix, Fabian and I sat in our hotel room in Compiègne and watched a replay of him winning the race the year before. Fabian was pretty big on looking at videos of old races; it was part of his pre-race motivation, though not something I would do that often. Fabian would even watch races that he didn’t win, just in case he could learn something from them, so being his roommate that week we watched footage of three or four different Paris–Roubaixes. It’s a bit like a Formula One driver memorising a circuit in his head. Obviously we can’t memorise all 260 km of roads and cobbles, but there are pivotal moments in the race where you have to be at the front to either inflict damage or avoid it. So we’d sit and talk tactics for hours, discussing different race plans or the perfect scenario. I guess other riders were doing the same thing in their rooms, but we certainly didn’t leave any stone unturned in our preparation.
As we sat there watching the replay of Fabian winning his first Paris–Roubaix trophy, we were interrupted by a knock on the door. Our sports director, Scott Sunderland, walked in. ‘Boys,’ he said, ‘it’s going to be 27 degrees tomorrow. Stuey, this is right up your alley.’ He wasn’t trying to undermine Fabian’s role as team leader, but he said, ‘Look mate, we’ve got to be prepared for anything to happen out there because a lot of Europeans are going to suffer.’ At that moment, I don’t think I’ve ever been as excited before a race in my entire life. I just had an inkling that maybe tomorrow might be my day because even Mother Nature was on my side. It had been the warmest period in Europe for many years, with sunshine replacing the usual wet, cold, gloomy conditions of Paris–Roubaix. I always performed well in hot weather, perhaps because I had thirty-four Australian summers in me, whereas Fabian was the opposite.
My lead-in form was pretty good. During pre-season I went to one of CSC’s famous training camps which involved a hell of a lot of bike-riding. It was two weeks of intervals, hill climbing, race simulation, sprints and everything in between. We’d do 120 km in the morning on road bikes then swap over for 120 km on the time-trial bikes in the afternoon, which was unheard of in any other team that I knew of.
I went from the training camp to the Tour of California in February where I finished fifth overall. This really kick-started my season and I went to Europe with a lot of confidence. I was now in my second year with the team, we were riding well together and had so many big-hitters that we could control every race we went to. It was a lot of fun. Instead of being the guy on another team saying, ‘Wow, there’s CSC,’ now I was in that very train. We took every race super-seriously and aimed to win every one we started.
I was fourth in Milano–Torrino, had really good form in Tirreno–Adriatico and managed to get over a couple of quite hard mountain days to finish fourteenth overall. Then I was fifth in the first big Belgian classic, Het Volk. I was fifth in Milan–San Remo and tenth in Tour of Flanders. For the first time I wasn’t up there on my own; I’d turn around and there’d be Fabian Cancellara, Matti Breschel and Lars Michaelsen right next to me. I knew we had a super-strong team.
In the build-up to Paris–Roubaix, all the pressure was on Fabian. He was the defending champion who rode solo to victory in 2006 and the outright favourite to win again. I was still feeling pretty fresh; my tenth place in Flanders involved a lot of work for Fabian and yet I was still up there in the final so my confidence was high. In every race that spring, I went back to the team bus and knew deep down that my form was awesome. And while Fabian was the favourite to win Paris–Roubaix, there was no pressure at all on me. No one would have even mentioned my name that week, which was fine by me.
For two weeks during the spring Classics our team would be based in a hotel in the Belgian city of Kortrijk in West Flanders. It became our home away from home where we formed our own family and experienced so much together. And we knew that after Paris–Roubaix on the Sunday night, we’d be on holiday.
The week of Paris–Roubaix we raced Gent–Wevelgem on the Wednesday, did 120 km of reconnaissance over most of the cobbled sections on Thursday, then on Friday we rode the 80 km into Compiègne. Saturday is all about the food—it’s about eating until you can no longer fit one more piece of penne in your mouth. It starts with breakfast—oatmeal, ham and cheese omelette, a baguette and a couple of coffees to kick-start the engine. Then lunch—absolutely no salad, a piece of lettuce is not going to help you the next day, you’ve got to stock the engine with pasta, rice and chicken. We snack in between and dinner is two proper plates of pasta or rice, a steak, vegetables to help it all go down and a French apple pie because when you get to the line in the morning, you’ve got to have the tank on full.
At the team meeting on Saturday night, it was decided that we should have two men in the breakaway. Fabian—the raging favourite—would sit in the bunch on cruise control with a designated teammate in front of him the entire time, blocking the wind or helping in case he crashed or punctured. Luke Roberts and Matti Breschel’s job was to make sure a break didn’t go up the road without us being represented. It was like a chess game: putting riders out the front knowing that their day might be over after 200 km but they would have done their job. My job was to be up there at the start, make sure we had one or two guys on the front so we didn’t miss the break, then go in the last wave of attacks before Fabian when the race reached the pointy end.
Regardless of the weather, anything can happen when you’re racing on cobbles. Some of these roads are only open for one day of the year; the rest of the time they’re used by farmers and their tractors. The Arenberg forest is a historical site only open to the public for this iconic bike race. With such rough terrain, your bike has got to be able to handle a thrashing and the bikes for Paris–Roubaix are especially built to be one centimetre longer in the frame so the rake is a little bit smoother and you get a more comfortable ride over the cobbles. We have special wheels and 28 mm tyres, which are like tractor tyres compared to what we normally race on, and they have a lot less air pressure. That day I had five-and-a-half bar (79psi) in the front and five bar in the back and usually we race on 10–12 bar.
The night before the race, a few mechanics who usually work on MotoGP bikes came over from Italy to prepare Fabian’s and my bikes; no one knew except us and a few people on the team. The mechanics used a special low-friction lubricant on every moving part of the bike. As the centre bracket and the bearings in the hubs heated up, they became less resistant, and where the lubricant heats up the molecules create less friction so everything is spinning a lot quicker. It was the first time I was privileged enough to have these guys come in to help me. It was all new and freaky to me, the mechanics were walking around in a sealed room with masks and gloves in what looked like an operating theatre. It was a lot of effort for a bike that is done and dusted after one race, but that year it would prove well and truly worth it.
International cycling commentator Phil Liggett is widely known as the voice of cycling, having been given a front-row seat to the sport’s biggest races for over forty years. According to Liggett, the only way to describe Paris–Roubaix is ‘hell on wheels’.
‘The roads were built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and they’re pretty much left the way they were,’ Liggett says. ‘Unless you ride Paris–Roubaix, even on a touring ride, you can’t really appreciate it. Riding those stones is quite bloody ridiculous and once you start struggling and slipping in the cracks, you’re as good as dead. For days afterwards your body is still humming, it’s still vibrating from all those cobbles. You’ve got sores on the palm of your hands and on your fingers.
‘Bernard Hinault said it best. He told organisers he rode it to win it so he could tell them they’d ne
ver see him ride it again—and that’s exactly what he did.’
Stuart’s brother Darren was given a unique insight into Paris– Roubaix in the late 1990s when he travelled to the race as a guest of Stuart’s then team, GAN. ‘Standing in the Arenberg forest, as anyone will tell you, it seems impossible for a push-bike to pass through. Motorbikes collapse, suspension systems break, cars get flat tyres—yet bike-riders somehow come flying through,’ he says.
On race day we were up at 7 am. I looked out the hotel room window to see clear, blue skies. I grabbed Fabian’s portable speaker, which cranked out some serious decibels, and put on U2’s ‘Beautiful Day’—which in hindsight was an omen for how the day would pan out. We were so pumped, how I imagine footballers must feel on the morning of a grand final.
The start was mayhem as usual with huge crowds there to see us off. I remember feeling so relaxed and confident; I had done everything right—I’d been training for months, done all the preparation races and I was fit and healthy. I didn’t want to be signing autographs or talking to any more journalists, I just wanted to pin on my number and race. We had one final debrief in the team bus to go over everyone’s roles and I said to the boys, ‘If I win this race, first of all I’m going to take you to Ibiza for a party, then I’ll be happy to retire.’
The race started mad fast as it always does. Ninety per cent of the peloton would love to be in the morning breakaway because you’re first into the cobbles and there’s no fighting for position.
From experience, I know pretty much where the break is going to go. Each year, it’s on one of the small climbs after about 40 km because everyone has gone mental for the first hour and they’re starting to get tired. So I started poking my nose up the front when suddenly a group went away. Matti Breschel was in it, and Luke Roberts was going up with another group. Normally eight, ten or twelve riders maximum would be allowed to go in a breakaway but this day it was huge. Then a rider in front of me attacked so I jumped on his wheel, turned around and saw we had a gap on the bunch which had pretty much sat up. I sprinted across to the front guys and that was it, the break was done and I was in it with two teammates and thirty other riders. I thought, ‘This is unbelievable,’ so straight away I told Luke to get on the front and work as hard as he could to keep this break moving.