Alasdair Fotheringham charts the career of Oscar Freire – the Spanish rider who retired at the end of the 2012 season.
Freire is an enigmatic figure who, despite winning the world champion’s rainbow jersey and Milan-San Remo three times each, perhaps did not get the recognition his results deserved.
So, who is the real Oscar Freire?
IT WAS THE wrong way for Oscar Freire to end his career, and yet in some ways it could not have been more appropriate: standing in a muddy field somewhere in Holland, cursing his Spanish team-mates at the end of his last World Championships for going back on their agreement to support him as sole leader on the final lap.
In one sense, Freire has always been isolated from his compatriots thanks to his success in races – the Classics, the Worlds – whose worth they have consistently failed to appreciate. And, at the 2012 World Championships in Valkenburg, for one last time that lack of recognition that had dogged him ever since he turned pro more than a decade before became bitterly clear.
In fact, it still remains. Not one homage has been held in Spain for Oscar Freire – three-time world champion, three-time winner of Milan-San Remo, Spain’s first-ever winner of the Tour de France’s green jersey, a winner of Ghent-Wevelgem and Paris-Tours – since he confirmed he was retiring from cycling, just minutes after the finish of his last race in Valkenburg.
But should we be so surprised? Ever since Federico Martin Bahamontes took a breakthrough victory at the 1959 Tour de France, Spain has been obsessed with stage racing. The Classics are treated with scant regard, and for years their results rarely garnered more than a paragraph or two in its sports dailies. Indifference overlaps with ignorance, too: I can recall sitting in the back seat of a car at the Tour de France once, whilst in the front Spain’s two top cycling journalists had a prolonged argument about who had won Paris-Roubaix three months earlier. (They finally agreed it was either Johan Museeuw, forgetting he’d retired five years before, or the late Franco Ballerini – also long retired at the time.)
On an international level, though, in terms of results Freire had few equals in cycling. Indeed, he could have triumphed in Valkenburg if the Spanish team had stuck to the script. It would have been difficult, given the way Philippe Gilbert blasted clear on the final climb, but not impossible if Spain’s Alejandro Valverde had not disobeyed team orders and instead stayed with Freire to lead him out rather than striking out on his own to win bronze.
A fourth world title for Freire would have been an historic moment for cycling and could have given a much-needed boost to the sport’s flagging public profile in Spain.
Freire could have become the first man to win the World Championship road race four times, climbing ahead of Merckx, Binda and Van Steenbergen.
Had he won, he would have carried on for one final season, to honour the rainbow jersey. It could have been one final curtain call but instead, let down by his team-mates, Freire returned to his home in Switzerland, to his wife Laura and two children, and started planning his transition to the ‘real world’.
The fact he calls Switzerland home these days makes him an exile and an outsider, but there are other facets of his character the Spanish seem incapable of appreciating.
Over the past decade, the number of their cycling stars stained by doping scandals has reached embarrassingly high levels. Freire stands out, yet again, as one of the handful of top Spanish racers to remain untarnished by the issue of banned drugs.
Freire has won at least one race in each of his 15 years as a professional and has a total of 72 victories to his name and yet he never quite broke through into the Spanish consciousness, certainly not in the way that the grand tour contenders have done.
While the rest of the world gasped at his ability to clinch the most audacious of victories – such as when he snatched Milan-San Remo from Erik Zabel’s grasp when the German was already celebrating in 2004, or the time he bunny-hopped a traffic island to win a stage of the 2006 Tour of Switzerland, or (a personal favourite this) scooting round the outside of a roundabout in the Trofeo Luis Puig while the peloton trundled round the other side and emerged to see Freire 200 yards up the road – in Spain, most of the time, they were left cold.
Sprinting doesn’t capture the imagination in the same way that climbing does and even Freire’s status as one of the best did little to change this.
A placid, easygoing individual most of the time, Freire masked his irritation at the lack of attention his achievements garnered. I can recall his anger getting the better of him only once, after becoming the first, and so far only, Spaniard to win Ghent-Wevelgem in 2008.
Outside Spain, though, he had a wide circle of admirers – among them, Mark Cavendish, who cited Freire as ‘one of two riders in the peloton who would invariably be able to ambush me for a win each year’. As for the fans, as Freire puts it ironically, ‘There’s a far greater chance of someone stopping me for an autograph in Belgium or Holland than there ever will be in Spain.’
Only in his home town, Torrelavega, is there some kind of recognition, although even that seems a little grudging. They named their local velodrome after him – which is pretty much the least they could do.
Sports scientists raved about Freire, though, as soon as they started testing his physiological capacity.
‘He’s unique,’ said the late Aldo Sassi, the long-standing trainer at Mapei, Freire’s second pro team. ‘He has the body of a climber, 1.71 metres tall and 65 kilos, but he’s a sprinter and he can produce huge amounts of power in a short distance,’ said Sassi.
‘We analysed his performance in a sprint and, in 12 or 13 pedal strokes, he gained between seven and 10 metres on his rivals,’ Sassi marvelled. ‘It’s something out of the ordinary.’
Physical talent was combined with a savoir-faire in stage racing that took the form of staying out of sight (and mind) until the crucial moment of a race. It made him a formidable rival, and he was very much respected in the peloton.
‘You never even notice he’s in the race,’ said Paolo Bettini, himself a double world champion. ‘And then you turn around in the last few kilometres and he’s right at the front. Always.’
The one time even the Spanish sat up and noticed Freire was there, of course, was when he produced his first major win, in the 1999 World Championships at Verona. With just one minor victory to his name as a professional beforehand, Freire was the least-known factor in the leading break, and he gambled on nobody following him when he skittered away on the far side of the road with 700 metres to go.
Few in the race knew who he was and, to their cost, they hesitated. Freire calls it his ‘most intelligent victory’. Not bad, to misquote Bradley Wiggins, for a working-class kid from one of the roughest areas of an ugly industrial town. And even better for a kid who contracted tuberculosis aged three – and whose doctors only decided at the last moment not to amputate one of his legs.
Freire was riding for Vitalicio Seguros, one of the smaller Spanish teams, when he won his first world title but the rainbow jersey attracted attention from some of the bigger squads in his home country.
However, it was Mapei, the Italian super squad that swept up all the talented Classics riders, who swooped for his signature. From that day, Freire never raced for a Spanish team again. Instead, he enjoyed a self-imposed exile in Italy, then with the Dutch Rabobank team and finally with the Russians at Katusha.
The Spanish Once team was interested before Freire won the world title, he says, but that victory pushed the asking price too high for a man who could have been perceived as a flash in the pan at the time.
But if failure to appreciate his stature and achievements dogged Freire’s career, provided it did not affect his racing chances – as arguably it did in Valkenburg – he was wise enough not to care too much. Freire was never too big on cultivating the image of a cycling star; he’s too practical and unpretentious for that.
Take his attitude towards his first World Championship title, for example. When I visited him, after the Worlds in 1999, the fabled rainbow jersey got no special treatment. The first glimpse I got of his new striped jersey was one hanging on a washing line among the rest of the family’s washing.
The surroundings were a little down at heel. The family home in Torrelavega was a flat in a tower block, four floors up, where he still lived with his parents, a small tribe of brothers and his ageing grandmother. (If you look at pictures of Freire before he went up to collect his Worlds medal, he’s listening to somebody on his mobile phone. It was his grandmother, singing him a regional folk song, as she always did each time he called after winning a race.)
A few months later, Freire turned up to his first training camp with Mapei, home to a host of more sophisticated and glamorous operators. Michele Bartoli, the Italian Classics ace, was aghast to learn that the Spaniard had driven there in something as singularly unshowy as a six-year-old Opel Corsa – Freire’s one and only car.
More than a decade later, Freire still has it. Rather than spending his money on cars, a large chunk of Freire’s first wages had been spent on a down-payment for a new home for his family.
‘I wanted to get them a flat in a block with a lift in it, so my grandmother could get out and about,’ he told me at the time.
But then Freire was always a one-off, a true individualist. It showed, particularly, in his refusal to follow trainers’ advice, for example, believing he had developed enough sense over the years to do what was right for him, to the despair of his teams.
‘I remember him turning up for a Rabobank training camp in very early January and telling us he’d been back on the bike and training hard for the new season – since the day after Christmas,’ Rabobank’s Adri Van Houwelingen says, indicating that Freire had little over a week of proper preparation under his belt before meeting up with his team. ‘But that was Oscar.’
They could hardly criticise him, given his ability to get results. Prior to his first Worlds win in Verona, Freire used the roads around Torrelavega to design a circuit as similar as possible to the Italian course, and then trained on it day in, day out, come rain or shine.
‘He had a reputation for being lazy,’ Pedro Horrillo, his one long-standing domestique and team-mate for nine years, says. ‘But I know Oscar, and when he got the bit between his teeth and had an objective in mind, he would train like an animal.
‘When he used to quit the Vuelta a España and go home to train for the Worlds,’ Horrillo continues, ‘it wasn’t because the Vuelta was too hard. It was because the racing wasn’t tough enough.’
Freire was equally back-to-basics and independent-minded when it came to nutrition.
‘When you do more [training], eat more; when you do less, eat less,’ was how he described his eating plan once, enough to put the entire dieting industry out of business.
And, unlike many other sprinters who are famous for being self-centred, fussy and given to the odd temper tantrum, one reason Freire was popular at Rabobank was that he would never complain about what turned up on the dinner table during races. Put simply, he never considered himself better than anyone else.
‘He would conform with whatever was given to him. [Mario] Cipollini might have thrown a fit because he had the wrong food,’ Horrillo recalls, ‘but that wasn’t the case with Oscar. Everything was okay, and it was the same with the mechanics, the soigneurs and with the management. I really don’t think he ever made any enemies.’
Only one food appeared to break down Freire’s resolve completely: yoghurts.
‘Oscar was nuts about them,’ Horrillo reveals. ‘He would always carry a spoon in the glove compartment of his car so that if we happened to see one in a supermarket that he hadn’t tried before, nothing could stop him from eating it.’
During his years at Rabobank, Freire never enjoyed the same level of support that other top Classics riders and sprinters would take for granted. At most, Horrillo would give him a lead-out, but that would be it. Yet if Freire had to fend for himself when it came to the elbows-out, rough-and-tumble world of bunch sprinting, he never had a reputation for foul play, unlike other lone sprint stars. Cavendish recalls once getting into a bit of argy-bargy with Freire, and was left feeling more amazed than worried about the outcome of their tussle, ‘because Freire never, ever used to do stuff like that’.
‘I’ve had my fair share of injuries,’ Freire points out when discussing his career. His various problems – from nasal surgery to groin strains – have all added up to more than a season off the bike. ‘But only once, just before I won the Vuelta a Andalusia [in 2007], when I had one physical problem after another, mainly back problems, did I ever think that I was going to have to quit the sport.’
‘His health was the only thing he was fussy about, but that was because he’d been through so many doctors that he ended up only trusting one person,’ Horrillo says – and that was Freire himself.
‘At one Tour he completely destroyed half his saddle so that he could sit comfortably on it because he had an injured bone in his pelvis,’ Horrillo recalls. ‘The mechanics were horrified, but Oscar was determined that was the right thing to do.’
In the early spring of 2007, though, even Freire was close to cracking. ‘I was feeling really depressed, and didn’t know what to do, yet my form was good and the results kept coming. That’s what encouraged me to continue.
‘I never once fell off my bike in a sprint in 15 years as a pro, and I think that says something about the way I raced,’ he says. ‘It could be because I was lucky, but I also think it was because I respected others. You have to take risks, but I always knew which moments were the right ones and which ones were the wrong ones. There are too many crashes these days because riders are so nervous, so disrespectful towards each other. There was a certain degree of respect in the bunch when I started racing, but now that’s gone. There are now so many guys that are doing well that even if they can’t necessarily win, they can certainly help make you lose. To win you have to keep a cool head and, above all, race straight.’
There were other reasons for Freire’s success.
‘He was nicknamed The Cat, but he was more like a panther,’ says Van Houwelingen. ‘He’d be invisible in the peloton, waiting and waiting for his moment. And then, in one single moment – blam! – he’d stretch out his paw to take what he wanted.’
‘People would forget he was there; they’d make the mistake of underestimating him,’ recalls Italy’s Dario Cioni, now retired, but who raced with Freire at Mapei. ‘It was like he was asleep. And then suddenly, just at the right moment, he’d wake up to be on the right side of the break or the sprint.’
‘It was like a sixth sense,’ adds Horrillo. ‘You’d ask him how he did it, but he wouldn’t be able to explain how he had suddenly realised something was going to happen in the race. But he would. In the Tour, he could often tell you what would happen tomorrow, and nine times out of 10, he’d be right.’
Freire’s intuition made him an unusual leader to work for, Horrillo says: ‘I remember in the 2002 Tour when I was in charge of leading him out, he’d say, “We’ll hook up with 40 kilometres to go,” and then for the next 30 kilometres it’d be him looking after me! He’d be able to accelerate hard, even with 40 kilometres to go, and still have the strength left to sprint at the finish.
‘We’d move up with about 10 kilometres to go, Oscar still guiding, and it was only with five kilometres to go that I’d take over, with him following me. But I wasn’t really his lead-out man; I’d get him in position, and then what he did best from there was let other riders take the initiative – then get past them in the last 30 metres. That’s what he did against Zabel at the 2004 Milan-San Remo. Oscar was like Robbie McEwen – he didn’t need a lead-out train. What he missed most at Rabobank at the Tour were riders to support him earlier on – like me.’
To be able to pull off the ‘trick’ of out-sprinting rivals at the last moment – winning, as it were, with the last card – doesn’t only require high levels of self-confidence; it also requires something Freire had in spades: tenacity.
‘He was stubborn,’ explains Cioni. ‘If you tried to make him change his mind about something, he’d dig his feet in even harder. Oscar always knew what he wanted.’
‘I was always learning, every time I went into a race,’ Freire says. ‘Too many riders these days repeatedly make the same mistake. But not me.’
Part of that natural tendency to educate himself was that Freire’s family had no history in cycling. He was the first to show an interest. ‘I didn’t have idols as a young amateur because, to be perfectly honest, I knew nothing about the sport.’
Besides, in Spain, if you want to learn about the cobbled Classics, you must do your own research. They are barely covered.
On a training camp with the Vitalicio Seguros team, Horrillo remembers the sports director, Javier Minguez, saying: ‘We need volunteers for Flanders and Paris-Roubaix,’ which illustrates how popular those races were with the Spaniards.
‘Nobody raised their hands except for me and Oscar. The rest of the team killed themselves laughing: they thought we were crazy to want to go and race there, because for them racing Flanders was a punishment. Oscar and I, in fact, were delighted.’
Even with his senior team-mates laughing at him, Freire was never afraid of speaking his mind – he once called the Tour de France ‘a boring race’.
But when dealing with matters outside racing, his willingness to put his head above the parapet is even more noticeable.
As world champion, he was by far the most high-profile of the handful of riders in the entire peloton – 11 or 12 out of 180 – who supported a general strike in Spain in 2002, refusing to race the bulk of that day’s stage in the Volta a Catalunya. Then, in 2007 as race leader of the Tour of Spain, he attacked the UCI for being ‘a business that failed to look after the riders’ interests, instead just exploiting them’.
He also refused to automatically back compatriot Alberto Contador in the Tour winner’s clenbuterol case – not the easiest of attitudes to take in Spain, where Contador is a national hero – instead adopting his own, very individual point of view on it.
‘He could be guilty, he could be innocent,’ Freire said in early 2012. ‘I’m not putting my hand in the fire for anybody.
‘The [two-year] suspension [for Contador] isn’t very fair,’ he continued, ‘but the rules are what they are in cycling; nobody’s done anything to change them and if you’re a cyclist that’s what you have to obey. It doesn’t matter if we’re right or not.’
He states, matter-of-factly, to me that his 15 years of racing without the remotest hint of a doping problem ‘is something that is not valued’.
‘Well, probably some fans do value it,’ he adds, ‘but at the end of the day it’s the results that count. If something [a doping scandal] happens, then you’re a delinquent and a cheat, but up until that date, everybody’s viewed equally. Nobody’s going to value it [my clean record] ever, but I feel proud that I could win a lot of races and do very well despite my misfortune of having lived through this particular era of cycling.’
Not that he had any real faith in the ‘system’ governing cycling, pointing out that ‘anti-doping tests aren’t carried out in a secure way. The UCI does what it wants’. He was also one of the few riders to protest – for common-sense reasons, rather than ethical ones – against the imposition of the whereabouts system.
‘But that was the last time I put up a fight,’ he told Spanish newspaper AS this spring. ‘I told the team it was unacceptable and they told me I had to sign it to be paid. I realised then that everybody does what they want and they all seemed to find it normal.’
Freire’s opposition to ADAMS [Anti-Doping Administration and Management System], which requires athletes to make themselves available for an out-of-competition test for one hour of every day, was relentlessly logical.
‘There can be situations where it gets complicated, like when they give you a “strike” because you’re in an area without phone coverage… I haven’t done anything to be treated like a suspect.’
For those that have committed a doping offence, though, Freire believes the UCI should be more ruthless, calling for lifetime bans for EPO use, ‘because it isn’t fair we all end up with the same image’.
At the same time, he was willing to concede that a large part of the responsibility for cycling’s poor reputation was a result of the sport’s own errors. ‘People think badly of the cycling profession,’ he once said, ‘and they are right to do so.’
Freire’s attitude to the ADAMS system is very much the same as the one he has towards life in general: one of extreme practicality.
‘His father’s wages – three times less than what he could make, or twice, or whatever – were the yardstick he’d use whenever he had a financial question to resolve,’ Horrillo says. ‘I think it was a good system. He’d be racing in some awful town in Holland, it’d be tipping down with rain and if he got a bit gloomy he’d start comparing what his dad earned in Torrelavega with what he was earning for one hour’s racing.’
It is perhaps surprising that somebody so astute on the bike and canny in his financial affairs could be as forgetful as Freire. Yet his ability to mislay everything was legendary.
‘It was even worse in reality,’ laughs Horrillo. ‘It got to the point where we’d play tricks on him, telling him he’d lost things when he hadn’t.’
Things that went missing while in Oscar’s possession ranged from the merely trivial, like race numbers, cycling shoes, his passport and mobile phones, to losing himself and his bike for five hours in Lisbon during the Worlds build-up (he had to ask a taxi driver to take him back to the team hotel, the only problem being that he had forgotten the name, remembering only it was ‘white and had a swimming pool’). Losing his passport three times en route to Marrakech for a family holiday was one of the most famous episodes of the ‘forgetful Freire’ stories. Another was driving 200 kilometres to pick up his mislaid racing licence from a friend’s house, getting his attention diverted by the number of different yoghurts the friend had in his fridge (which he promptly devoured) and then driving all the way home again. Without the licence.
There is even a rumour Laura, now his wife, was on the point of ditching him after three months of going out together because he could never remember her name, but that could be an exaggeration.
Minguez once joked: ‘Oscar Freire doesn’t get lost at the World Championships because it’s the only race in the world with barriers around the whole circuit.’
Even Minguez was wrong. Freire in fact did get lost while training with his team on the circuit in Verona prior to taking the title a few days later.
Yet Freire’s natural talent was something not even he could mislay. And this, it should be emphasised, was as a Classics rider with a huge capacity for sprinting, rather than a pure sprinter who happened to have a talent for the Classics.
‘My first big win as an amateur was the Memorial Valenciaga, Spain’s top one-day race, and that’s really hilly,’ he points out. ‘I beat some top climbers that day – like Francisco Mancebo, Carlos Sastre and [the 2003 world champion] Igor Astarloa.’
A silver medal in the under-23 road race at the 1997 Worlds was the key to his first professional contract with Vitalicio Seguros.
‘I had a very good first year as a pro, but when they wanted me to sign another contract at the end of that first year, I refused,’ says Freire.
It was a standard tactic at the time: managers would force neo-pros, contracted by law for two seasons, to extend their deal beyond their ‘rookie’ first year to a third or fourth year, but often for the same money or only a small rise.
Freire’s first pro season had included bronze at the Spanish national championships behind two team-mates, and 17th at the World Championships on an exceptionally difficult course in Holland.
‘Although I had a second year with a lot of injuries, I finished second in my first race back [the GP Cuenca] and then went to the Worlds where the Spanish national team manager [Paco Antequera] had a lot of faith in me.’
Yet it all could have turned out so badly.
‘Antequera saw what Oscar could do in the Worlds the previous year and told him that if he recovered in time, he’d be part of the squad,’ recalls Horrillo. ‘But when it turned out that Oscar was one of the Vitalicio riders taking part, Minguez called up Antequera and told him he didn’t want Oscar to go.’
Minguez was convinced Freire had already signed with another team for the 2000 season and was furious with him for ‘faking’ injuries. But they were anything but fake.
‘I remember we did Paris-Brussels two or three weeks before the Worlds and Oscar did a good race. But then, on the way back on the plane, he was asking for ice from the air hostess because his back was hurting him so much,’ Horrillo recalls, before using a motoring metaphor to explain Freire’s propensity for injuries. ‘I think maybe one of his problems was that he had too big an engine for his chassis. But on the plane he looked at me and said, “I’m going to do a good Worlds.”
‘Once we got to the Worlds, I was looking at him and I realised he was going really well,’ continues Horrillo. ‘But that final attack – that was a stroke of genius. The funny thing is, you ask him, “How did you do it?” and he still doesn’t know. It just came out of him.’
‘If I hadn’t won the Worlds that year [1999], I’d have won it another year,’ is how Freire sees it. ‘Before the race that year, I didn’t think I would win but I had the mentality of a winner. And I’d learn quickly. When I was a junior they took me to a race and we were put in the same competition as the under-23s, and for the first time in my life I raced in crosswinds and echelons. That day I was in the back group. But I learned how they’d done it, how the breaks had gone, and so on. The next time there was an echelon in a race I was in, I was a pro, and I was at the front. I learned from my mistakes. Others could be strong as hell but they wouldn’t learn.
‘Some riders would suffer simply to get through a race, even to finish it,’ he continues. ‘That wasn’t my case – winning was, logically enough, the hard part. But you can see that I’ve always been a very consistent rider – never riding much above my usual level but never much below it.’
In 2012, even though he only won three races – two stages in Andalusia and one at the Tour Down Under – Freire had a long string of top-10 results. Second in the E3 Harelbeke, second in Flèche Brabançonne (a race he won four times – an all-time record), fourth at Ghent-Wevelgem and Amstel Gold (which he was on the point of winning with a spectacular late, lone break), seventh in Milan-San Remo and – most painfully of all – 10th in the most emblematic of all ‘his’ races, the Worlds.
‘The move to Katusha for the 2012 season did him a power of good and, combined with those results, I thought it might make him change his mind about retiring,’ said Horrillo. ‘But crashing in the Tour didn’t help.’ After that, Horrillo thought his friend was likely to call it a day.
Then, at the World Championships when the one chance of delaying his departure went up in smoke, Freire was gone.
Freire’s success at the World Championships – three titles in six years – almost undermined him. Remember, until Abraham Olano in 1995 Spain had never won the men’s road race title at the Worlds.
Olano’s victory owed everything to a rigid team policy with the entire squad – even Miguel Indurain – working for him.
In 2001 and, most spectacularly, in 2004, Freire was the undisputed head of the team, with lead-out efforts from Luis Perez and Valverde in Verona giving him the launchpad he needed for his third World Championships victory.
‘Oscar’s 2004 title was a real team victory,’ says Horrillo, ‘right down to the celebration afterwards. I was rooming with Oscar and, after I’d worked in the first part of the race and abandoned, I went up to the room and pretended to be asleep when he got in after winning, in the mood to celebrate. He didn’t know that the entire team was in the bathroom with 10 bottles of champagne, waiting to surprise him.’
However, since then, as Freire sees it, ‘the Worlds has got more and more popular, and more and more riders want to win it. That ends up with your rivals, as it were, being on your own team, just as happened in the Italian squad for many years.’
In 2012, on a course reminiscent of the Amstel Gold Race, Freire discovered to his cost the hidden division in the team when Valverde jumped away.
‘In Spain we’ve got lots of riders who can win, because they come out of the Vuelta with good form,’ he says. ‘We did well right up until the last lap, but then what made me a bit angry was that we didn’t race the way we had agreed. But those are things that you can’t do anything about.’
He is philosophical about his lack of celebrity status or hullabaloo surrounding his retirement.
‘The only homage I’m going to get is the one my wife is organising, bringing together my friends and the people who have been with me during my career. The kind of cyclist I am hasn’t had much of an appeal,’ he admits. ‘It doesn’t bother me too much. I don’t expect anything from anyone.’
Yet if Freire disappears off the map in Spain, at least his results will remain. He came from fertile ground and conquered land hitherto uncharted by his compatriots. As he puts it, ‘Everybody remembers those three World Championships, but I think I’ve done a lot more than that.’
It would be hard to disagree.
Alasdair Fotheringham is Spanish correspondent for The Independent and The Independent on Sunday, and covers cycling for both papers as well as www.cyclingnews.com, Reuters, procycling and the Daily Express. He has covered 21 Tours de France and the Beijing and London Olympics. His first book, a biography of climbing great and Tour de France 1959 winner Federico Martin Bahamontes, was published in 2012.