Battle Scars Page 6
You go through a real high in the Tour Down Under, there’s no external stress from the race organisation, you’re eating at the same hotel every night, and it’s the only race like it all year. My friends in Adelaide think every race on the calendar is like the Tour Down Under, and they say, ‘Mate, you’ve got an awesome life.’ But I tell them, ‘This never happens again for the year.’ You’re constantly moving hotels, packing your suitcase, transferring between stages and not eating until 8.30 or 9 pm.
When the inaugural race rolled around, no one quite knew how it would be received in Adelaide. To my surprise, something like 50,000 people turned up to the first criterium. I rode around the corner, saw a sea of people and went, ‘Holy shit!’ At that point I’d only won one stage race in my career, the 1998 Tour of Britain, so week-long races weren’t quite my thing and I thought I’d be happy just to win a stage.
I got through the criterium, which doubled as Stage 1, without any dramas and the next day sprinted to third place behind Erik Zabel in Stage 2 to Strathalbyn. Then it all happened on Stage 3 when I’d basically conceded that it wasn’t going to be my day. I went away with the break on the road from Glenelg to Victor Harbor and by the time we got to Cement Hill with a group of ten, I thought it would be the race-winning move. But eventually a couple of teams worked on the front of the peloton to chase us down and just before the race was about to come back together, Phil Liggett, who was commentating on the road, came up to me in the car. He said, ‘Oh well mate, what are you going to do now?’ I just shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘There’s always tomorrow.’
As I was talking I realised that I’d slipped off the back of the breakaway so I forgot about Phil and quickly sprinted to get back on. When I got there I felt surprisingly good and decided to attack. We didn’t have anything to lose because the bunch was bearing down on us, but it was one of those spontaneous decisions and it paid off. Because the peloton had worked so hard to catch us, they were all nailed and when they caught the break they didn’t realise that I had taken off again. By this stage I was a minute up the road and riding my heart out to stay away. I ended up holding them off to win the stage which put me in the lead by eleven seconds which I extended to fifteen seconds when I won Stage 5 from Nuriootpa to Tanunda. I finished second on the final day through the Adelaide CBD to claim the inaugural Tour Down Under by 21 seconds.
I know it’s not the Tour de France but for a kid from Adelaide to win the first big bike race around my home streets was an achievement I’ll never forget. It was a magical moment and a dream start for the race to have a local boy win first up.
When July came around it was time to return to the Tour de France for a third time. After the 1998 affair, I figured the peloton would’ve had a big kick up the arse and everyone would be racing on the same level: clean. To me, it seemed inconceivable that guys would continue doping through 1999—how would they transport it, get through controls and more testing? I was sure the EPO era had gone. Evidently, that was far from the case.
I wore the green jersey in the Tour for three days and was sixteen seconds off the race lead when I sat second overall after Stage 4—but that was as close as I got to wearing yellow. I had a huge battle with Zabel in the points classification; on three separate sprint finishes I was one place behind him. I was also one place behind Mario Cipollini twice and was fourth on the Champs Elysées, which was won by Robbie McEwen, but I just didn’t have the top-end speed to come around them.
For those who don’t know how the green jersey works, it’s the prize for leading the points classification at the Tour de France. While the overall race leader wears yellow, the fast men compete for green—the ultimate prize for a sprinter. Points are awarded to the first riders across the line every day, and to those who are the first across the line in intermediate sprints out on the road. Zabel, who was so calculating about when and where he would accumulate points, went on to win his fourth straight green jersey while I was second, 48 points behind. The 1999 Tour also marked the first of Lance Armstrong’s seven Tour de France victories while I was 94th, 2 hours and 30 minutes behind him.
Henk Vogels vividly remembers riding the 1999 Tour de France in support of Stuart and says that the events following it sparked his decision to leave GAN (which had changed its name to Crédit Agricole). He felt that Stuart did not do enough behind closed doors to keep him at the team.
‘I wouldn’t say we ended up on bad terms but I was a little disappointed with how I left the team in 1999,’ Vogels says of his friendship with Stuart.
‘Stuey was racing for the green jersey and I led him out every day, for every sprint stage and every intermediate sprint. Some of the other guys on the team wouldn’t even get him a fucking water bottle.
‘So I led him out for three weeks and at contract time at the end of the Tour, I asked Stuey to put in a good word for me with the team to renew my contract. Stuey had just signed a new deal with the team when Roger Legeay sat me down and said I’d got no results and I would be getting a one-year contract extension but it [money] would be cut in half. I literally told him to get fucked and I left.
‘Looking back, I’m really stoked that I ended up moving to America and I signed for more than what I was on [at Crédit Agricole] anyway. But I was a bit pissed, more with Roger than with Stuey, because in the end he can’t dictate what the team does. It just left a sour taste in my mouth after an awesome three years. It didn’t end our friendship and the following year we rode the Sydney Olympics road race together so there are plenty of good memories.’
After the Tour, my teammate Henk Vogels decided to leave GAN. This was a really tough period because I was not only losing a teammate but also my best mate. Henk was one of the most loyal teammates I ever had, along with Matt White. Both blokes would sacrifice themselves 100 per cent for you. I think it’s a part of the Australian mentality, but with Henk it went further than that. We rode the Classics together in the early years of my career and if anyone deserved to win a Classic, he did. After races like Paris–Roubaix we’d get the same plane home together, have a beer and talk about the race and I’d say, ‘Henk, you could win this.’ So it was really difficult when things didn’t work out. I was getting a big offer from Roger Legeay and Henk probably doesn’t know half the phone calls I had with Roger, telling him I was holding off on signing until Henk got his deal.
But it’s tough, teams back you into a corner and, rightly or wrongly, I’ve always done my own contract negotiations. This time I had one of my best mates hanging on my word and when I eventually resigned with the team it would have been nice to blame it on my manager, but I couldn’t. I had a big offer on the table and that’s when cycling becomes more than just a sport, it becomes a business.
Henk moved to America and I really missed him. We grew apart but he will always be one of those blokes who you might not see for six months, then when you catch up, it’s like you saw each other yesterday.
Funnily enough, four years later I experienced exactly what Henk had gone through when I left Crédit Agricole; Roger and I didn’t end on good terms. That’s what happens when business gets in the way of friendship. It was the final week of the 2003 Tour de France, we were negotiating my contract and I could tell that Roger was hesitant. The Tour de France is where all the negotiating is done—every year I’d finalise my contract on the TGV on the way to Paris, and it was pretty consistent. I’d always roll over a two-year deal and the money would basically double every time because I was winning. But in 2003 the deal hadn’t been done and I felt the vibe on our last night in Paris at the post-Tour party. We had a young Thor Hushovd coming through and by now he was a better sprinter than I was, which he was proving day in, day out, so my role was slowly changing. I started aiming for the Classics and needed the whole team to support me.
I went home on the Monday after the Tour thinking, ‘Something is not right here.’ I had a gut feeling that I needed to move on. So I decided I would throw out a ridiculous figure—deep down hopin
g that Roger would say no—and then I could leave the team.
But the reason we finished on bad terms is that after nine years of my loyalty and Roger being like a second father figure to me, he just rang me and said, ‘Look, we haven’t got a place for you on the team.’ I was standing in my home in Toulouse when he said that the budget was spent. I was pretty pissed off that he didn’t tell me face-to-face. I said to him, ‘Well, if the budget is spent there was never any negotiating going to take place. You’d already made your decision so why didn’t you man-up and tell me?’ All I wanted was a handshake and for him to say, ‘It’s been a fantastic venture, look at what we’ve achieved but it’s time to move on’ and I would have felt exactly the same way. But instead he led me to believe there was always a position there when, in actual fact, he’d made up his mind.
I thought back to Henk and another teammate, Magnus Backstedt, who’d been through the same thing. Suddenly I was on the receiving end and it’s not a nice feeling. I’ve seen it a lot in my career; many cycling managers are old bike-riders, they’re not businessmen. They’re not really good at one-on-one communication when it comes to ending contracts and saying, ‘Au revoir.’
So I got off the phone to Roger, really annoyed, and that’s when it hit me: ‘Holy shit, I’ve got to find another team!’ I remember Lance Armstrong coming up to me in the Tour one year as we came into Paris, saying, ‘Stuey, it’s about time you changed teams and came to a big team.’ I looked at him and said, ‘What do you mean? I’m on a big team.’ He replied, ‘No you’re not, you’re on a small team.’ Lance did ask me to come to US Postal a couple of times, but I looked at his team and saw all eight guys riding on the front every day in the mountains of the Tour de France and thought there was absolutely no way I could ever do that so there wouldn’t even be a position for me. So I’d just say, ‘No worries Lance, thanks,’ and nothing ever came of it.
Eventually I ended up finding my way to another French team, Cofidis, where I spent the 2004 and 2005 seasons riding alongside Dave Millar and where I had some of the best results of my career with another Tour de France stage win, consecutive top-five finishes in Milan–San Remo and, of course, the Athens Olympics.
But back to 1999: life was pretty good in Toulouse and on 9 September I went out for tea with Henk, Dave and our girlfriends to a Japanese restaurant in the city. We had a few drinks and were walking down the main boulevard in Toulouse at about 12.30 am. I was a couple of paces ahead of the others and suddenly I noticed three guys walking straight at me, not looking like they were going to deviate. So I tried to walk between them, but one of the guys swiped at my neck and whipped off a gold necklace that my mum had given me. I instantly swung around, grabbed him around the throat and smashed him against a parked car, demanding that he give my chain back. I was punching above my weight because this guy was 20-odd kilograms bigger than me but I didn’t care. Things were still fairly calm and I thought I had the situation under control but the girls started freaking out.
Just as I turned around to tell the girls to calm down, the guy I was holding had pulled the windscreen wiper off the parked car and cracked me over the head with the metal motorised section. Henk and Dave then came in with arms and legs going everywhere, not that I remember any of it, but I’m told there were a few misguided karate kicks and haymakers because Henk ended up getting himself dropped as well. All I remember is seeing a lot of blood coming from my head then waking up in hospital.
I managed to get a fractured skull and blood clot on the brain out of it, which was pretty nasty and ended my season. The most unbelievable thing about the incident was that it happened right in the middle of the boulevard in downtown Toulouse. There were people everywhere as it was a stock-standard time of the night in Europe to be coming home from a restaurant. Because it was in full view of plenty of people the cops were called and they managed to catch the guys. I had the opportunity to go to court and press charges, but I eventually decided to let it slide because I didn’t need these guys knowing where I lived and I just wanted to get on with my cycling. I spent a week in hospital and recovered enough from my injuries to get back on the bike but I had ongoing troubles with the blood clot on my brain which was a few centimetres in size.
Later that year when I got back to Australia I flew to Noosa for a sponsor’s ride. I was pinning on my number when my vision became really blurry and I passed out. I’d had a seizure and ended up in hospital. You only need one of them to scare the crap out of you, but it happened again ten years later at the 2009 Valencia MotoGP. I was good mates with Anthony Peden, who was a track sprinter for Australia before he moved to Europe and became Casey Stoner’s personal trainer.
I’d been talking to Anthony about going to a MotoGP race for ages because I’m an adrenaline junkie—I’ve jumped out of a plane, been in a fighter jet, a V8 Supercar and bungee-jumped. But one of the things on my wish-list was to be on the back of a two-seater MotoGP bike. Anthony, who we call ‘Weapon’, messaged me the night before the Valencia round and said, ‘Mate, have I got a surprise for you. Don’t have a night out and don’t eat too much for breakfast.’ He’d organised for me to go on the back of a Ducati with Randy Mamola.
The following day, shaking like a leaf, I got kitted out in the leather gear and signed a waiver that if I died, it wasn’t their fault. We cruised out of the pits and I thought, ‘This isn’t too bad.’ But then he hit the throttle and I was hanging on for grim death, convinced I’d be sent sprawling across the track. Then we were up on the front wheel and I was riding Randy’s back, being thrown around by G-forces you cannot imagine. I later found out we hit 280 km/h on the back straight. I was trying to turn my head to look at the crowd but it was a blur of colour and noise. We did the lap, had photos and I was still shaking from the adrenaline.
As I started walking back to the hospitality tent I got blotchy vision and it was getting worse. I sat down and a guy walked over to me and introduced himself but I couldn’t see who it was. That’s all I can remember. The next thing I knew, I woke up in hospital. When I came to they told me I’d had a seizure and had to stay in hospital for tests. Casey Stoner came in one night with his now wife Adrianna and brought me McDonald’s—I so appreciated that he took time out to visit me, I’ll never forget it. According to the doctors, the blood clot on my brain had left scar tissue and because the helmet was really right, combined with the G-forces and blood pressure, it triggered a seizure. It was all pretty freaky but I lived to tell the tale.
Once I’d recovered from my head injury in 1999, I geared the following season towards the 2000 Sydney Olympics. I wasn’t in the best shape as I made a tentative return to racing but I had enough kilometres in the legs to ride the Tour de France in July, which would serve as the perfect preparation for both the points race and road race in Sydney soon after.
Things were going pretty well in the Tour until Stage 6—a 198 km flat stage from Vitre to Tours—when everything went horribly wrong. A spectator on the roadside banged a drum, making a booming sound which rippled through the peloton, eventually causing a crash. Suddenly I went over the handlebars, landed on my shoulder and was on the ground in a world of pain. But as you do, I jumped up, grabbed my bike and the race doctor came over to have a look at me. I wasn’t expecting to get the all-clear but he said, ‘You’re okay,’ and off he went.
It’s hard to explain the mental state you’re in when you crash because of all the adrenaline, pain and emotions of the Tour de France coursing through your body. Under no circumstances do you want to pull out. Ever. The doctor was telling me my collarbone wasn’t broken and even though I knew deep down that it was, I got back on my bike and rode 90 km to the finish in central France. For the first 10 to 15 km I tried to get out of the seat in an attempt to catch up to the bunch but I couldn’t because my shoulder was absolutely killing. I couldn’t put any pressure on my right arm so I draped it over the handlebars like I was in the time-trial position. A couple of guys who were in the same crash but from di
fferent teams waited for me and were pushing me up the climbs, which shows the camaraderie between cyclists when they’re out on the roads together. By 20 km after the crash, the adrenaline had worn off and I was in absolute agony. I should have stopped, clicked out and left the race with a broken collarbone but I didn’t. I finished inside the time cut, which was an epic in itself, but the last 20 km of that day on 6 July 2000, I was in a world of pain that I didn’t even know existed.
Cyclists seem to have an astonishingly high pain threshold and the Tour de France takes it to a new level. I’ve seen guys in neck braces, guys with half their skin missing and with cracked vertebrae—but they’re still pedalling. That’s what it means for a bike-rider, especially during the Tour de France. Unlike other sports, like soccer for instance, there’s no showboating in cycling and there’s no interchange bench to go and have a rest. You’re either in or you’re out, and every pedal-stroke is one closer to the finish: a motto I adopted throughout my career. Eventually you get from A to B and you pray to God that you’re in the time cut.
When I finally made it to the finish that day I went straight from my bike to the ambulance where people were looking at me and wondering what the hell I’d just done. Scans in hospital showed that I’d broken my collarbone in three places, which would require surgery to insert a pin to hold it in place. There was no denying it any longer: my Tour was done. Even though the Sydney Olympics was only a month away, all I cared about was the Tour de France. I was devastated at having to abandon, especially because of a crash caused by someone hitting a drum. But more often than not, it’s the stupid things that cause crashes. We’re racing centimetres away from each other for thousands of kilometres but it’s normally people jumping on the road or on the roadside drinking wine and getting pissed that cause the accidents. Spectators put their chairs on the road and they don’t realise that at 50 or 60 km/h, we take up every single centimetre of bitumen. It’s bloody scary because you’re only just missing people at really high speed and hitting the brakes quickly—the most common cause of crashes in the bunch.