Battle Scars Read online

  As I opened the door, an old man appeared from out the back where he had been quietly repairing an old mountain bike. The look on his face was priceless. Without any hesitation I asked, ‘David?’ ‘Stuart!’ he yelled as a huge smile spread across his face. I could not believe it. It had been seventeen years since I’d been in that bike shop. Back then I was a 23-year-old kid with a dream of making a cycling career in Europe. Now I walked in as a Paris–Roubaix champion and an Olympic gold medallist; I’d ridden sixteen Tours de France, won stages and worn the yellow jersey; and I was a proud husband and father of three beautiful kids.

  As we stood around chatting, David told me that the internet was killing his bike shop business and that no one was coming in to buy things anymore. Feeling guilty, I looked around and decided to buy a spare tyre and whatever else I could find just to help him out. I showed him photos of my three gorgeous kids and wife and said goodbye.

  I then found a cafe on the beach, ordered a coffee and a sandwich and sat there staring out to sea. I really had come full circle. Perhaps I should have stopped riding then and there, but I was committed to the team for at least another year and wasn’t ready to retire.

  In April 2013, I competed in Paris–Roubaix. Dad had come over to watch the race for the first time and I wanted to go all-in and give 100 per cent. We had Sebastian Langeveld as our team leader, who achieved a great result, but I didn’t have a great ride, and the only reason I finished was because Dad and my family were in the velodrome waiting for me.

  By now I was getting sick of people asking me, ‘When are you going to retire?’ so I decided to put a date on it and work towards a finish line. After speaking with the team, we decided it would be at the 2014 Tour de France. But I had to get through the 2013 Tour de France first and, looking back now, I honestly don’t know how I did it.

  The story about the French senate report and French cyclist Laurent Jalabert started bubbling the day before I left Luxembourg to go to the Tour. While having breakfast at the kitchen table at home, I read a story about an investigation into the 1998 race and how retroactive tests on samples from ’98 were done in 2004 and would be publicly released to reveal which riders had tested positive to EPO. In that moment, I felt like the ground had opened up and swallowed me whole. I must have looked pale because Anne-Marie asked if I was feeling alright. I read out the story and Anne-Marie said, ‘Well, you’ve got nothing to worry about, you never did anything wrong.’ And that was the beginning of the end, mentally anyway. I was about to leave for a record-breaking seventeenth Tour de France, I’d trained and sacrificed so much, but it all went out the window when I read this report about the 1998 Tour. I thought about my successes of that year and what I’d done building up to the Tour, and I just felt so empty.

  I went to the start of the Tour in Corsica but I couldn’t get the senate report out of my mind. I tried to put on a brave face, be a leader and motivator, but it was ridiculously hard. If anyone noticed something was up, it wasn’t mentioned. I didn’t try to find out anything further about the report because I didn’t want to raise suspicions in case people started wondering why I was bringing it up. So I just shut up and suffered in silence.

  It was a blessing when the race started because for a very brief time, it was all that mattered to me. My teammate Simon Gerrans won Stage 3, which was amazing, and the following day we had the chance to put him in the yellow jersey with the team time-trial. By now I was feeling a lot of anger and uncertainty. I wanted to prove that I was here and was 100 per cent—which I did.

  To win the team-time trial by one second was beyond amazing, and standing up on stage with the boys, I was overwhelmed by emotion. Behind the presentation I was in tears, knowing that at almost forty years of age I’d managed to contribute to a team effort on such a monumental occasion. For a few minutes I forgot about everything else that was going on. Two days later we had Daryl Impey in the yellow jersey; to have one of the nicest blokes in the peloton leading the race in your own team—well, it made me so happy.

  But deep down I knew the writing was on the wall. More stories were emerging that forty riders could be named in the report. I was well aware that in 1998 I had the yellow jersey, stood on the podium and was drug-tested so I accepted that it was only a matter of time before my name came out.

  Originally the senate report was supposed to be released after Stage 18 to Alpe d’Huez but for some reason it was postponed. I think this was to protect the Tour de France because of the potential fallout during the current race. Yet I expected it to be tabled then, so that’s when I planned to tell the team and Anne-Marie.

  It’s hard to get one-on-one time with anyone at the Tour de France, let alone when you’re one of nine riders on a team. But I knew the Stage 17 individual time-trial from Embrun to Chorges on 17 July was my best hope of sitting down with general manager Shayne Bannan to tell him what was going on. It had been such a magical Tour for the team and I didn’t want to wreck things; but at the same time, after everything Shayne had done for me over the years, he had to know.

  I actually managed to do a pretty good 32 km time-trial; I must have been riding on emotion and adrenaline because for a while I was leading, but it was very early in the day.

  Afterwards I called Shayne to say there was a chance my name would be on the list of riders in the French senate report. When I met with him later I explained that it was because of what I had done leading into the 1998 Tour de France. I didn’t feel relief, just more of that hollow, empty feeling that I had been unable to escape for the previous two weeks.

  Bannan says his message to Stuart was to be honest about everything.

  ‘Stuart did inform me on the day of the time-trial that he wasn’t too sure what the report would bring regarding him being named or not. The rumours had circulated for a while, but that often seems to be the case during the Tour. I urged him to tell the truth and also reiterated his obligation to keep us informed and face the consequences if something differed from the statements he’d given to the Nicki Vance report and to the different inquiries.

  ‘After the Tour he wanted to announce his retirement straight away and we did so according to his desire. Tuesday he called me and told me that he wanted to admit and talk about this with the media.’

  After Stage 18, expecting the senate report to be released, I called Anne-Marie and asked her to come to my hotel at the top of Alpe d’Huez. She came, but Dad happened to go with her for a walk and when they got there, I suddenly felt that it wasn’t the right time to break the news. It would have put them in a catastrophic hurt bag and I couldn’t bear to see my wife and Dad hit with the news at that moment. So, not knowing what the next few days would hold, I told them, ‘Make sure you enjoy the rest of the week and enjoy Sunday in Paris because it’s going to be a special occasion.’ I didn’t elaborate, but I think I hinted strongly enough that it was probably going to be my last race.

  As we got closer to Paris, I realised that I really didn’t have the drive to continue riding anymore. It was a hard tour and I’d had enough. I knew that winning the teams time-trial two weeks earlier was as good as it would ever get for me again. The final two mountain stages to Le Grand Bornand and Mont Semnoz were about the hardest two days I’ve ever had to deal with on a bike. They were incredibly difficult physically but mentally I wasn’t there, I was on another planet and found it hard to focus. Of course I didn’t want my career to end this way but it was happening whether I liked it or not. The report still wasn’t out but it may as well have been because I’d already confessed to Shayne. By now I was very reserved and feeling so ashamed of what I’d done. I was imagining what would happen in the media and what the consequences would be. It was like watching a movie that starts off good but ends really badly, and I was the main actor.

  I had a lot of family on the Champs Elysées when we got to Paris—my parents, my mother-and father-in-law, my sister, brother-in-law and my kids; they were all just enjoying the moment. That night we had a quiet dinn
er and I went back to stay with the team at the hotel. I decided that the following day I would tell my family my secret. The next morning I got a taxi to their apartment, walked in, told them I had something to say and asked them to listen.

  I didn’t have a pre-meditated speech, there was no way I could make it sound good. I just wanted them to at least try to understand the situation back then and why I had made that bad decision.

  For a while, I couldn’t get the words out. When I did, it was the worst moment of my life. When I finished speaking, I expected someone to walk up and punch me for being so stupid. But their reaction was the exact opposite. I was expecting the worst but they were very supportive and emotional, there were lots of tears and lots of hugs.

  When I spoke to Dad days later, he said at the time he thought I was going to tell them I was sick and dying so his reaction was almost relief. His comment did help me put things into perspective––that people around the world are going through a lot worse than I was, every day. Yes, this was a bad mistake; yes, it was going to hurt me and a lot of people; but I was still healthy and I had my family.

  Brian O’Grady says that when Stuart hinted to him and Fay that Stage 21 in Paris would be his last race as a professional and he would retire, he was surprised but didn’t ask any questions. ‘My conclusion was that he was mentally exhausted and he’d had enough of the lifestyle,’ Brian says.

  ‘In Paris on the final day, I had this great feeling of sadness that our son, who had had such a wonderful career and was loved and admired by so many, would end his last ever race with no fanfare at all after such a quick decision to retire.

  ‘The next day we were at the apartments and got a message saying Stuart was coming over and wanted to speak to us before we went out sightseeing––but I was expecting that because that’s when he’d explain why he’d suddenly retired. When he got there he asked us to get a drink and take a seat, then he took one of the kitchen chairs and sat it out the front of everyone. I still had no inkling of what he was about to say.

  ‘Then it became really horrible, distraught is the only word I can think of to describe him, because he could barely speak. And for about twenty seconds before the words came out of his mouth was the worst time of my life. I thought he was going to tell us he had a terminal illness and that’s why he had to stop riding because I couldn’t imagine anything that could make him so distraught.

  ‘When he finally said for two weeks before the 1998 Tour de France he took EPO, I nearly jumped up and said, “For fuck’s sake, is that all?” In a way, I was relieved. But of course I couldn’t jump up and down because it was still a big admission to a big mistake. He told us he was telling us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’

  After the Tour, Brian and Fay spent time with Stuart, Anne-Marie and the kids in Luxembourg before returning to Adelaide where Stuart’s confession had gone public.

  ‘Fay and I were disappointed with Stuart, but you have got to take things in context,’ he says. ‘When we got back to Australia we were overwhelmed by the support from people. We were sent handwritten letters and I spent a week and a half responding to emails. People wanted us to know they still loved us and they still loved our son who had made a mistake; it meant so much.’

  The report was still not out the day after the Tour finished, but I told the team I wanted to retire immediately and made my announcement via a media release. By this stage, I probably wasn’t thinking clearly; it was a sudden decision but I didn’t know how to retire from the sport and at the same time confess to what I had done fifteen years ago. Having already told Shayne and my family, I decided to confess publicly as well. With something this big, you don’t just tell one person and that’s it. Although the senate report wasn’t out, by now I’d confessed to the people who meant the most to me, and nothing could have been worse than that.

  A lot of people questioned ‘Why now?’ and claimed that it was only because of the French senate report, but that’s easy for them to say. When you’ve achieved so much clean and on natural ability it’s hard to confess to something that was done so long ago and that could taint everything. I fully admit that yes, it did take this last push and shove from the senate to make me realise that it was time to face up publicly to what I’d done and accept the consequences of my actions.

  By the Wednesday when the senate report was due to be handed down I was back in Luxembourg. I didn’t know where or when to look for it and was outside with my family when initial reports came through that I wasn’t on the list. When that emerged, the obvious question I asked myself was, ‘Okay, do I still go through with this?’ I was almost upset that my name wasn’t on the list because I was ready to talk and no story that any journalist could write would hurt more than me telling Shayne and my family. So I made up my mind that I would go through with it, regardless.

  Eventually it came out that my name wasn’t on a list of riders who tested positive at the 1998 Tour de France but on another list of those who were ‘suspicious’. What the hell did that mean? What is suspicious? You could have a virus or be dehydrated and your blood samples could be up or down.

  But there was no turning back. It was a pretty surreal moment and a day that I knew would change my life. I decided to text News Limited journalist Reece Homfray, who has helped me write this book, and tell him the truth. I wanted to do it publicly then be around my family. As soon as we’d finished talking I turned off my phone. I’d said what I needed to say and that was it. There was no other story, no other angle; that’s what happened and that was it.

  There are no further admissions to lifelong or systematic doping and that’s why I can be proud of my results and proud of my Olympic medals. The Olympics have got all my urine and blood tests stored away somewhere; they can test them for the next thousand years if they want.

  I hugged my kids and got a lot of support from Anne-Marie. After a couple of days I turned my phone back on to find many messages from people saying, ‘Times have changed, people make mistakes and remember what you’ve done for your sport.’ But eventually it became impossible to walk past the computer at home and not check out the wider reaction to my confession.

  What I read was hard to take. You can read a hundred messages of support but it only takes a couple of bad ones and your brain focuses on them. The hardest ones were comments about the Olympics and that I’d tainted my whole career. That’s what cut me really deep.

  I was removed from the Australian Olympic Committee’s athletes’ commission and other sporting organisations, but I completely understand that and I’ve written a letter of apology to president John Coates and other AOC members.

  So much negativity came out. People were asking, ‘Why didn’t you say something earlier?’ But what I was experiencing was the exact reason. When you do put up your hand, you’re crucified, so who in their right mind would do that?

  For a while it was like I was living two lives. Some days I felt like the worst person on the planet, but then my kids would run around the corner oblivious to what was happening, wanting to play because they’d barely seen me for a month. There were times I was quite depressed and this lasted for a few weeks. I’d look at a photo of me during my career and something that should have made me proud suddenly hurt because people now thought I had been cheating my whole career, which certainly wasn’t the case.

  Eventually it was time to look forward. Anne-Marie had been planning my fortieth birthday which should have been a time to celebrate. Initially I decided that I didn’t want to see or talk to anyone, and we should call off the party. But when I stopped and realised that everyone who was invited had contributed something special to my life, and to the person I believe I am, I wanted to go ahead with it.

  About sixty people, mostly from Europe, attended my birthday; it was a massive show of support. It was a really important opportunity to confront everything that had happened and to thank my guests for being there because every single person in that room had had a positive influence
on my life, whether they were friends we’d met in Luxembourg or old teammates and coaches. It really did click me out of my depressed bubble and make me realise there are people who support Stuart O’Grady the person not Stuart O’Grady the bike-rider.

  Bannan says Stuart’s confession triggered a range of responses.

  ‘There were many emotions that went through my mind. Obviously, the first one was real disappointment in the fact he’d made that decision at that particular time,’ Bannan says. ‘But there was also an understanding of the environment and imagining the pressures those guys were under. Then I thought about what Stuart and his family were going through. The biggest thing would have been standing in front of his family and telling them what had happened.’

  Bannan says he did fear the repercussions of Stuart’s confession on the team, which had conducted an independent review into the doping history of its riders and staff earlier in the year.

  ‘I certainly thought, “How is this going to affect the team?” given we’d just been through the Nicki Vance review. Stuart had been interviewed by ASADA and had not been truthful. But at the end of the day, we are not the FBI or CIA; we rely on honesty and the information athletes give us, and in this particular case Stuart was untruthful and that’s where the disappointment comes in. But also the understanding that none of us knows the pressures those guys were under, which is where the compassion comes into it.’