Battle Scars Read online

  ‘When he ended up winning, I said to him, “Don’t worry about tomorrow, we don’t need to go to Disneyland.’ But he replied, “No, no, we’ll still go.”

  ‘I was pregnant with Keira so I couldn’t stay up late drinking champagne but the team had a well-deserved celebration. Then the next morning we’re walking around Disneyland in disbelief that the day before he’d just won Paris–Roubaix. I think we celebrated by watching the Mickey Mouse parade. It was really special because he could have celebrated with the boys for days but he chose to spend the day with us.’

  Vital statistics

  105th Paris–Roubaix; Sunday, 15 April 2007

  259 km from Compiègne to Roubaix; 28 cobbled sectors

  Starters: 187

  Finishers: 101

  Team CSC: Stuart O’Grady, Fabian Cancellara, Lars Michaelsen, Matti Breschel, Marcus Ljungqvist, Kasper Klostergaard, Allan Johansen, Luke Roberts.

  Top 5: Stuart O’Grady (CSC) 6hrs 9mins 7secs; Juan Antonio Flecha (Rabobank) and Steffen Wesemann (Wiesenhof Felt) +0.52; Bjorn Leukemans (Predictor-Lotto) +0.53; Roberto Petito (Liquigas) +0.55.

  Pure joy and relief – a lifetime of hard work pays off when Stuart hoists the 2007 Paris—Roubaix trophy above his head after becoming the first Australian to win the one-day Classic. (© Graham Watson)

  This is how crazy cycling can be. One day you’ve won a monument and achieved everything you’ve ever dreamt of. Then three months later you’re lying on the side of the road, almost dead.

  I walked away from the 2007 Classics floating on a cloud after winning Paris–Roubaix. Every morning I’d wake up to see this rock sitting on the kitchen table; the first few mornings I went over and gave it a little tap and asked, ‘How you doin’?’ Coming away from that spring knowing I’d won the biggest race I could ever have imagined was surreal.

  Eventually though, it was time to refocus and start training again. While riding around, people were stopping to congratulate me; I’d be introduced to people as ‘the guy who just won Paris–Roubaix’ and I heard people talking about my win as I walked past them.

  The Tour de France was my next big aim. We had a pretty serious team with Carlos Sastre and Frank Schleck expected to contend for the GC (general classification) and it was my job to protect them. That year the race was to start in London with a 7.9 km prologue through the city.

  I was really pumped for the prologue because I knew my form was good; also, rooming with Fabian automatically gets you motivated because you see how much effort he puts into his preparation and how much he analyses everything. So I tried to use his energy and expertise in that area by asking him about his gear ratios and other such things.

  Of all my Tours de France, the crowd in London that day was the biggest I ever saw on the roadside; it was absolutely phenomenal. It was a beautiful day and I was pushing it to the limit, as you do in every prologue, and at the halfway mark I had the fastest time. Then there was a tricky chicane with a left-hand corner. As I came out of it, I let the bike drift a bit too far; I thought I had it under control but my back foot clipped the barrier and the next thing I knew I was sliding along the road on my bum. I got back on my bike and finished 179th behind Fabian, who blitzed everyone to win by thirteen seconds. It was frustrating, but mostly I was disappointed for the boys because we missed out on the teams classification by just two seconds to Astana because of my crash. I was lucky to avoid injury; I lost a few freckles and a bit of pride but it could have been worse.

  Having won the prologue, Fabian took the yellow jersey, which meant I was riding on the front for pretty much the entire first week. We did massive turns starting with a team time-trial for the first few kilometres of each stage to nullify any attempted attack. Then we’d slowly back the pace off, and because we had such a strong team we decided who and how many riders we’d let go in a breakaway. I did hundreds of kilometres on the front, which was a massive workload, but I was prepared for it because Bjarne told us we had the toughest job of the whole race—controlling the front, setting the pace running into the mountains then covering moves in the last week.

  Fabian had just surrendered the yellow jersey to Linus Gerdemann when we began Stage 8 on Sunday 15 July. We faced a couple of major climbs on the relatively short stage of 165 km from Le Grand-Bornand to Tignes, and I knew I was on good form. Every Tour de France, I always have one day when I climb really well. I can never predict when it’s going to be but there’s always one stage each year when I think, ‘Holy shit, I feel like a climber.’ And so it was on Stage 8 that year.

  I negotiated the first three climbs before we faced the first serious Category 1 ascent, the Cormet de Roseland, which was a fairly brutal 19 km climb with an average gradient of 6 per cent. By the time we got over the top there were only about thirty guys left in the front group and I was quite surprised to be there. The bunch had split and I was hanging on to the front group when Bjarne called me on the team radio to tell me to come back to the car to get water because it was important our riders had water bottles before the next mountain.

  So I dropped back to the team car, filled up my jersey with eight water bottles and started descending at about 80–90 km/h to try to distribute them. By this stage everyone was riding in single file because of the speed of the descent. I was in the full tuck position to stay out of the wind when the guy in front of me—and to this day I don’t know who it was—swung out to his right to miss a pothole as I was coming around him. Suddenly, his back wheel swiped my front one from right under me. I didn’t even have time to blink; there was no way I could avoid it and I was sent catapulting through the air.

  He rode off while I was flung to the left of my bike and slammed into a wooden post. Along with those eight water bottles stuffed down the back of my jersey that acted like an airbag around my spine, that pine post probably saved my life that day because without it, I would have gone hurtling over the edge of the mountain, free-falling God knows how many metres into a ravine, and probably to my death.

  My body took most of the impact, but judging by my helmet which had cracked in half at the back, my head had wrapped around the post and I later found out I had a blood clot and bleeding on the brain. It was the scariest moment of my life. I couldn’t feel my legs while literally metres away guys were riding past me at 80 km/h. All I could hear was ‘whoosh, whoosh’ of their tyres. I wanted to get out of the way but I couldn’t. I had no sensation in my legs, which freaked me out big time. I tried to sit up but I couldn’t. I couldn’t even turn my head to look to the side. I was conscious throughout the whole ordeal so kept looking straight up into the sky when suddenly a circle of camera flashes appeared from everywhere. Then I heard the familiar voice of BS Christensen who was holding my hand telling me I’d be okay. BS was a member of the Danish military who worked with CSC and ran some of our pre-season camps; he was the first person from the team on the scene.

  The pain was beyond comprehension. I’ve broken a lot of bones in my time, have even got up and finished bike races with broken collarbones, but this was different. This was internal and it wasn’t just in one area; my whole body was an inferno of pain. I was terrified that I still couldn’t get up because of the pain in my back, and I was in a panic, thinking, ‘Am I paraplegic?’

  There was water everywhere, and initially the onlookers had no idea where it had come from, but then they saw our team bottles scattered across the road. If it wasn’t for the water bottles in my jersey protecting my spine, I don’t know if I’d still be here. I could have snapped my spinal cord straight through.

  The medicos had quite a lot of trouble getting me off the ground but eventually I was put into an ambulance on a stretcher and taken to hospital at the bottom of the Roseland. I was injected with morphine, given an oxygen mask and then everything became a blur of noise and pain.

  BS came to see me in hospital and said, ‘Look, we’re going to have to put you in a helicopter and get you out of here.’ At that point I knew I was in some serious strife. As
I was loaded into the helicopter, I noticed I was wearing a neck brace and could only look straight up at the rotor blades. I’m not ashamed to say I was absolutely terrified. I started thinking about my family and what would happen if I couldn’t walk again.

  A new wave of panic set in when I arrived by chopper at Chambery Hospital because the doctors and nurses were rushing around everywhere, which told me I was either in a fair bit of trouble or they were just really keen to help out. I needed an MRI scan so they lifted me up and put me inside the machine, which has scarred me ever since. I was placed on a flat, hard surface and my back roared with pain. My nose was only a couple of inches off the surface and it felt like I was being put in a coffin. The MRI revealed that I had two broken shoulder blades, eight broken ribs, three broken vertebrae, a punctured lung, two broken collarbones, bleeding on the brain plus all the superficial wounds.

  I went straight into intensive care and all I can remember is BS talking to me. I was in and out of sleep with the amount of medication they were feeding me. It was like a bad dream; every time I opened my eyes I prayed that it was time to go for breakfast at the Tour de France. But it was just more nurses, more tubes, more cables and more pain.

  They didn’t bother operating on the broken bones; I was told they’d eventually heal themselves. But all I cared about were my legs and whether I’d walk again. Later that night I noticed pins-and-needles in my legs and I started moving my toes which was one of the biggest wins of my life. If I hadn’t been in so much pain I would have been doing handstands in the hospital, I was that relieved.

  I spent the next week in intensive care, trying to get my head around what had happened. It was pretty scary because every night people would come in screaming—car accident victims and other seriously injured people; it was like living in a bad movie. For the first few days doctors would come in and speak to me, but it was as though they were speaking in a foreign language.

  Besides BS, the first person I remember being there was my brother, Darren. Anne-Marie had apparently been there for two days but I don’t even remember, which is kind of scary.

  Brian and Fay were watching the Tour de France from their lounge room in Adelaide when they noticed something wasn’t quite right. ‘I said to Fay, “That’s funny, I haven’t seen Stuey for a while.” Just then, Phil Liggett commented that it was one of the most dangerous descents in European racing,’ Brian recalls.

  ‘Then soon after he said, “We’ve just heard that Stuart O’Grady has been injured in a crash.” Naturally, I thought, “Oh shit, but he’ll be okay, it’s only a prang.”

  ‘The next thing we heard was, “Stuart O’Grady is being taken by ambulance off the mountain.” We saw it on TV but there was absolutely nothing we could do.’

  They eventually heard from Anne-Marie, who told them Stuart was alive but badly injured. ‘We didn’t hear about the extent of his injuries until the next morning but we were just happy he was alive,’ Brian says.

  Within three days Fay was on a plane to visit Stuart in hospital. ‘When I got there he couldn’t move. I got a big shock because we’d been able to speak to him on the phone and he’d sounded okay,’ Fay says. ‘But when he came home we had to dress him and there was a chance he might not get back on the bike again.’

  Darren was working for CSC at the Tour de France that year and was at the stage finish with VIP guests when Scott Sunderland told him he had some bad news. ‘He took me aside and the world turned inside out for a minute. It was a really bad crash, it was so bad they couldn’t tell me how he was,’ Darren says.

  Anne-Marie was eight months pregnant with their daughter Keira and had just picked up her mother from the airport when she got a text message from her father saying Stuart had been in an accident. ‘The next minute I’m trying to arrange to drive five hours to the hospital,’ Anne-Marie recalls.

  ‘Unfortunately Stu has had a lot of accidents but that was by far the biggest and the scariest. I’ve never seen him so vulnerable; it was heartbreaking to see him lying there in hospital. How he gets through such moments and gets back on the bike is beyond me; it takes so much mental strength and dedication,’ she says.

  Doctors told me that, to the best of their knowledge, when I first crashed I broke my left collarbone and left shoulder blade. Then I flipped onto the other side and broke the other collarbone; then hit the pole and did the eight ribs, the other shoulder blade, three vertebrae and punctured the lung. The ribs were blown to pieces; on the X-rays it looked like somebody had hit me with a sledgehammer. But by far the worst pain was in my back. Doctors explained that my injuries weren’t life-threatening and no internal organs had been damaged; the bones just needed to heal on their own. This was fine; I could deal with it, I could come back.

  Having spent a week by my side, Anne-Marie went home. I really wanted to be closer to my family, so I was allowed to be transferred to hospital in Monaco which involved a six-hour drive in the back of the ambulance. This is when I remember getting up for the first time. It was only a few steps to sit in a wheelchair but it was a very big moment for me. I spent another ten days in hospital in Monaco before I was allowed to go home, but it never crossed my mind that I might have ridden my last bike race. No way. I wasn’t letting this sport take me out on its terms, especially not lying in a hospital bed. My team manager Kim Andersen came to see me and I remember saying, ‘Mate, it’s only broken bones, don’t worry. Put me down for the Vuelta in September.’ Of course I was joking but every time I felt down and out, I started thinking about rehab and my next race. It gave me an objective, and every little progression meant something.

  I remember walking down the hallway at home shaking my head because two days earlier I couldn’t even get out of bed. They were little steps towards my big goal. People always ask me, ‘How do you come back from something like this?’ The answer is, it’s just a psychological game and a battle to remain positive. The power of the mind can do great things.

  I didn’t get back on a bike for ten weeks after the accident and the first time was to do twenty minutes on the home-trainer in my sneakers and shorts. I’d lost all my strength, my upper body was depleted and the muscle mass on my legs was gone. It was the longest recovery I’ve ever had. I was pretty grumpy around the house, in bed I had a bunch of pillows keeping my body at a 45-degree angle to take pressure off my shoulder blades and my ribs were in constant pain. But I had so much support from everyone around me.

  Anne-Marie did an incredible job, not only giving birth to our beautiful daughter Keira, but keeping me on the right path with my rehabilitation. She actually gave birth just a few doors down from where I’d been parked in hospital ten days previously, and at one stage I joked that when she went into labour, at least I wouldn’t have far to go.

  By mid-August I decided that my first race back would be the Herald Sun Tour in Australia in October as part of the national team. It was quite a defining moment for me. On 15 April I won Paris–Roubaix, on 15 July I had my accident, and on 15 October I was pinning on my race number at the Herald Sun Tour. I wasn’t there to win; I just wanted to finish the first stage.

  On the first day we went up a big climb. Somehow I managed to get over the top with the front group, and as we were plummeting downhill it was blowing a gale. The next thing I knew, a guy right in front of me was blown off the road and crashed into the bushes. I had big carbon 808 Zipp wheels in, which are like disc-wheels that catch the wind, and I thought, ‘You have got to be kidding!’ I started having flashbacks to July and the Tour de France but I managed to keep it upright. It was a bloody scary introduction back into cycling, I can tell you.

  I finished the stage and knew that if I finished one stage, I could finish the Tour. That’s where my pre-season started. I was excited like a neo-pro. I can’t tell you what it meant to be able to put my leg over a bike and race again because it so easily could have gone the other way. I was a few millimetres away from being in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, or I could have died. Bu
t I didn’t and I was back.

  In 2009 we got to Milan–San Remo and, as expected, the first hour was really fast. There are a couple of tricky sections called pave; they’re not really cobbles and have nothing on Paris–Roubaix or Tour of Flanders, but they’re paves all the same. Guys were saying, ‘Be careful, there are cobbles up ahead.’ Just as I laughed to myself thinking, ‘As if anyone would crash here,’ we hit the first section at 60 km/h with a left turn up ahead. Obviously guys just shit themselves when they see these things. I was riding along in cruise control when a group of blokes went sliding across the road. One guy wiped me out and I skidded into a concrete curb which was about 20 centimetres high. My chest bore the full brunt of the impact; I was on all fours and couldn’t get my breath. How could guys crash here? Yes, I was hurting but more than anything I was angry.

  A couple of people helped me get up. My bike was smashed so I got a new one and the team car towed me back up to the peloton. Bjarne was driving; he got up to 80 km/h and I was hanging on for grim death when I said, ‘I’ve got to let go, this is killing me,’ so then he motor-paced me back to the peloton. I tried to get out of my seat to sprint out of a corner but it felt like I was winded; I couldn’t get any air in my lungs. A few kilometres later I had to get off my bike because I knew something was broken.

  An ambulance took me to hospital. I was waiting for the results of the X-rays when a doctor came in and told me that I hadn’t broken anything. I looked at him and said, ‘Are you sure? I’m in a fair bit of pain here pal, and I’m not talking crap.’ But he told me I’d only done ligament damage and he sent me home. I was in shock but I thought, ‘Well, he’s the doctor.’