My parents-in-law (like many families in Finland) own a small lake house. Their wooden cottage sits in splendid isolation a few metres from the shore of one of Finland’s many hundreds of small lakes, nestled in a forest of tall, silent pines. In winter, deep snow makes the small track from the road through the forest completely impassable. The weight of the snow makes the trees susceptible to falling down, and each spring, when my parents-in-law return, there is a great deal of path clearing to be done to be able to reach the house.
In summer, though, the house is a sanctuary. Then, the seemingly endless hours of daylight (which fade only into a prolonged twilight) pass by with blissful simplicity. I loved the house from the moment I first saw it. It was the place Camilla and I had chosen to spend our wedding night, and three wonderful days alone together in the summer of 2009. There was no mobile-phone signal, and once there there was no way that anyone in the world could get hold of me. I could live the simplest life I could imagine. I would chop wood to heat the sauna, swim in the lake, row out into the silence that hung over the middle of the water, and walk the dogs. My favourite thing of all, though, was to lie on the wooden decking on the veranda of the house, looking up at the sky, listening to the most beautiful silence imaginable.
This was exactly what I found myself doing on 17 July 2010; but it wasn’t, however, what I was supposed to be doing. Two days previously I had been a part of the Tour de France peloton. But, in my fourteenth Grand Tour, things had gone very wrong. Now, as I lay there on the decking listening to the sound of the pines creaking and the lake lapping at the shore, I knew I was a sick and exhausted man. I was broken, but I could see that my abandon in the Tour was the inevitable conclusion – one Tour too far.
Ironically, I had actually gone into the 2010 Tour with hopes of having a good race. After the disappointments of 2009 with Cadel and Silence-Lotto I needed change to keep me hungry enough. With all the troubles of late selection, 2009 had been a struggle, and I had been forced to really start to question what I was doing. Marriage had changed me. After I had come home from the disastrous Vuelta I realised that I had spent the better part of my adult life with my head buried in the sand, simply doing what I was told. Meeting Camilla had made my life so much fuller and made me adopt a more objective view – of myself, and of my career choices.
For example, it had long ceased to occur to me that I could be a professional cyclist anywhere other than Italy. But when I looked at it in late 2009 I no longer rode for an Italian team, and I had teammates who lived all over Europe and flew in to races, so why on earth did I have to live in Italy? What had kept me there was the same desire to brand myself with legitimacy that had stopped me making the two-hour flight to England when I had time off in my early years. I’d felt that would be too easy, that I would be ‘cheating’. But now my attitude had changed; now my priority was to make my life easier, not harder. Punishing myself no longer came into it. I had already branded myself as a cyclist deeply enough.
After that first disappointing year at Silence-Lotto, Camilla and I realised that we needed to make a change. We had been living together in Italy for three years and it was wearing us both down. The tiniest little things seemed to thwart me. No matter how well I grasped the culture and the language, I still didn’t truly understand the place. It would take me an entire afternoon to get even the simplest errand done because things that I needed were never where I expected them to be, and every single business and bank in Italy seemed to have different opening hours. It didn’t bother me so much when I was single because I never did anything. But when I started living with Camilla I really needed things to work. I had a different kind of life, and getting my head around all of Italy’s idiosyncrasies became hard work all over again.
One day, in the winter of 2009, the axe just fell. As we were making coffee in the morning, I turned to Camilla and said, ‘What do you think about selling this place and moving somewhere else?’ I could see the same thought rushing through Camilla’s mind: ‘We no longer have to be here?’ It was a tipping point; once I had vocalised the idea I knew there was no going back. I was tired of not being truly settled. In Italy I was still bagai – the boy. I didn’t want to be ‘the boy’ any more. I wanted to be a man, and I wanted to live somewhere where I could be that man. We both wanted a home, and that was in Finland. Over the past few seasons we had been spending more and more time there, and I felt that was the place that I would find the life I had been craving.
The only way that I could really describe the feeling of being ‘at home’ was the feeling of being safe. It was a feeling that had been absent since my mother and I had turned up to the Vendée U training camp in France all those years before. In the meantime I had lived for so many years abroad, I’d mastered languages and tried to understand cultures. I had even become a homeowner in Italy. But I’d never felt safe. I had always felt exposed, on the line; my life felt like it was constructed on a temporary platform which at any moment could be pulled away from under me. The annual undercurrent of worry about whether or not I would have a decent contract for the following season, and what would happen to my mortgage if I crashed badly and could no longer earn the wage I was used to, rumbled within me, and I wanted to be rid of it all.
In some ways I felt like a person who’d been misdiagnosed by a doctor and wrongly condemned to suffering for their whole life. Suddenly I saw there was another way that I could go about life without the pain. But what I couldn’t have known until I finally tried to alleviate these anxieties, pains and insecurities was that the discomfort of it all was the very thing that had been making me push myself so hard to achieve on my bike – and that the happier I was at home, the slower I would ride.
• • •
We rented our Italian house to Matt Lloyd while it was on the market and moved out of Italy for good. The 2010 season got underway and slowly, as we established our foundations in Helsinki, my thoughts once again began to stray from the comforts of home life, and back to my job of being a professional bike rider. Many things had changed in the interim: as well as the team being renamed Omega Pharma-Lotto, over the winter Cadel Evans had left. Despite my finding him difficult to work for, this wasn’t in itself all wonderful news. Like him or not, Cadel was the man that I had been employed to help, and now that he had gone I was a spare part in a team that didn’t really know what to do with me. Fortunately, my saving grace came that year in one of Omega Pharma-Lotto’s new signings – Adam Blythe. Adam was a young British neo-pro, and his appearance in the team really breathed some life into me. In my ten years in the peloton I had come across countless young riders who had ascended through the Italian system and were simply spoilt brats, who felt they knew everything and had no time for a rider who was ‘just’ a domestique. Adam, however, was very different. I could tell instantly that he wanted to learn: he really made an effort to listen when I told him things. And, crucially, he was actually fun to be around.
Now that I had the ‘old man’ tag foisted upon me, I was keen to help Adam. Ten years worth of disappointment and hardship had formed a crust over how I viewed bike racing; I had forgotten why I even enjoyed cycling in the first place. As we went through the training camps and the early-season races I felt that Adam’s enthusiasm was influencing me, encouraging me to embrace riding my bike again.
Adam’s pleasure was infectious, but the flames of hope really began flickering with Matt Lloyd’s performance at the Giro d’Italia. Matt had been with the team since 2007 and he really came of age that May.
Matt’s breakthrough stage win on stage six, combined with some inspired riding to keep hold of the green jersey for best climber, took the whole team through the Giro. It was a buoyant performance and things really fell into place for us. The team clicked in the race and Matt took a stage and a small lead in the King of the Mountains competition – something we had great fun defending on the road to Milan. My own ride was positively influenced by the camaraderie and spirit amongst the group of riders in the team, and ironically, just before what came to be my last ever Grand Tour, I produced one of my best-ever performances in a three-week race. I finished 27th in the Giro, despite losing an enormous amount of time on stage seven when the race took in the strade bianche (gravel roads) in the pouring rain, that I simply didn’t have the nerve to go tearing down.
The good feeling that bubbled up at that Giro did come as a surprise to me, given my internal struggle in the run-up. I left the race and came bounding back home on a high. It felt like I had rediscovered cycling, and I was coming home to tell Camilla about this really exciting new hobby that I’d started. It was one of the few times that I ever came home from a three-week race and retained the desire to ride my bike. After only a couple of days’ rest I was back out on the road, first with some gentle recovery riding, and then soon into the full flow of training. The Tour was on my programme and I wanted to be good for it. I would be there with a big team again, but this time without the negative baggage. I leapt at the opportunity to go with the team to a training camp in Sierra Nevada and spent eight days at altitude, training hard and trying to capitalise on the momentum.
However, on my return home I started to feel unsettled. I was sleeping but I wasn’t waking up in the mornings feeling rested. Something in me wasn’t quite right. At first I told myself that it was the sudden return from altitude. As an athlete you can always find a reason to ignore the fact you are feeling a little off-colour. You spend your life thinking about nothing but your physical condition, to the point that you can always find something that is not 100 per cent right – a sore knee or an aching back. I knew that I usually felt a little odd in the weeks building up to a big race because I would break my routine to rest up for the event. I told myself that because I was doing so much resting I was probably over-thinking, and that when I joined up with the team things would improve.
But when I arrived at the team hotel in Rotterdam the Wednesday before the start, things didn’t improve. On the Thursday morning we did the pre-race blood tests and the doctor told me in a very off-hand way that my body showed a sign of infection, but it was ‘hardly life threatening’. I wanted to brush it off. Deep down I knew there was a lot was riding on this race, and I couldn’t face going back now.
I gambled on things getting better, but they didn’t. As soon as the racing began I knew I wasn’t feeling well on the bike, and as the days passed I seemed to get worse and worse. I had been forced to abandon a Grand Tour through sickness only once before, and I remembered all too vividly the fever that hit me at the top of the Zoncolan, which had struck through me so quickly and so obviously that there was no time to suffer in the saddle. This time, though, things were different; this was a creeping illness that was building within me, and each day became more and more of a struggle.
I focused my mind on the intermediate target of making it to the first rest day. After an uncomfortable week I made it there, but I had slipped from being near the back of the race to right at the end of its ragged tail. There were times when I was in trouble even when other riders were casually rolling along and stopping to pee. I was still playing the usual athlete’s game of denial, though; I told myself that if I had a day off to rest then I would be OK. I just wanted to keep going.
But after the rest day things worsened still. Even my sleep, the holy grail of a stage race, began to be aggravated and fitful. I woke in the morning of the ninth stage feeling even more tired than the night before, dreading the day to come and the pain that I knew was awaiting me. My (usually insatiable) appetite was gone. At breakfast it was all I could do just to sit and stare at my food while my stomach craved water. No matter how much I drank I couldn’t rid myself of the hellish thirst that parched my lips and tormented me through the nights. There was no more room for denying that things were going very wrong.
Still, I tried to keep quiet. I had suffered in races before and I knew that suffering was something that I could certainly endure … to a point. Many times before I felt I had become so used to the pain that I had revelled in it, toyed with it, pushed its boundaries. But now pain was exacting its revenge on me. I felt so empty and weak that every little thing found a way to hurt me: every bump in the road, every gust of wind, even the road itself with its seemingly unending gradients. No matter how hard I tried I felt like I was never more than a pedal stroke away from being ejected out the back. I clung on out of desperation and sheer will, but at some stage it was all going to have to stop.
I went to bed early on the night of the tenth stage to Gap. I was completely drained, desperate for the embrace of restful, comforting sleep. My body ached and I slipped into the covers, but my over-sensitive skin was greeted not by the soft fresh sheets that I longed for, but the sandpaper-like linen of a cheap hotel, atop a mattress that might as well have been made of a slab of rusting iron. I couldn’t find the strength to stretch out my body to feel the tingling comfort of blood flowing to my limbs, so I curled up tight and closed my eyes, hoping sleep would find me.
I started to sweat, and I felt a hotness grip my neck. It was still early, so there was time to get to sleep. The television flickered silently and the light made patterns inside my eyelids as Matt Lloyd casually went about his evening routine. As long as he was still up it was OK, because it was still early. I kept repeating these words – ‘still early, still early’ – to assuage my feverish panic. I forced my eyes closed tight against the low light, and felt sweat drip down the ridge of my nose. Then the lights went out and I heard the muffled sounds of Matt climbing into bed, beginning his night’s rest. I rolled over in the dark. It was OK still, because if Matt had just gone to bed then it wasn’t too late yet: he wasn’t asleep either. There was still enough time to rest. Still early, still early … My head pounded so hard. Matt was asleep now, and time was slipping away. I tried to force my eyes closed but they sprang open. Darkness, not the soothing darkness that I loved but a lonely, hurried darkness, taunted me for being wide awake. My mind spun in furious circles, and I turned over in the bed, twisting the sheets into a damp corrugated mess beneath me. I flipped my pillow neither side was cool and dry, and the sound of Matt’s slow, relaxed breathing enraged me. It felt like the whole race, the whole world was resting and recovering, getting ready to open fresh eyes the next day, and mine were being squeezed tight. I became stricken with panic and desperation as time danced away from me. It was fucked, I was fucked, everything felt fucked. My head was a bloated, burning mess of activity. I stared angrily across the room at the curtains, and then I saw it. As if it had just reached the top of the ladder it had been climbing all night to get to my window, the grinning light of dawn arrived at the curtains and crept across the room to me. The light yelled in my face: ‘Better luck tomorrow!’ I heard the sound of the mechanics opening the trucks and vans and beginning their work. I had been awake the entire night.
Matt was still happily dozing, oblivious to the torment I had been going through on the other side of the room. I knew there was nothing I could do now, so I stood up and walked to the bathroom. What I saw in the bathroom mirror shocked me to my core: there in front of me was a hollow-faced old man.
It was time to do something that I had never done before. I slowly dressed myself in my horrible team-issue black and red tracksuit and shuffled down the corridor to find Marc Sergeant, the team manager. I walked out of the hotel to the bus where I knew the staff would be having a coffee, and there he was. It was immediately obvious to everyone that something was very wrong. As soon as I saw him I blurted out that I simply couldn’t go on. Marc looked at me and didn’t even attempt to talk me out of it. He just said, ‘If you really don’t think you can do it, then you can’t do it.’ Once he had spoken those words I knew it was all over. I still went through the formality of talking to the doctor, but his response seemed so typical of the Belgian doctors that I had worked with: ‘Can’t you just try to race?’ I had been trying my damnedest for nearly ten days of the Tour de France; there was no trying left in me.
Word gets around a team quickly when a rider is sick or quits. Suddenly no one really knew how to treat me. It was as if someone had died. After breakfast, the riders filed out towards the bus where I was hovering, wishing I could disappear. But I couldn’t. I was stuck with the team until someone could take me to an airport, and that meant hanging around at the race. Some of the guys seemed genuinely sorry for me and offered me a kind word and a pat on the back, but others avoided me like the plague (I literally was). I understood them, I knew what they were thinking: they were worried that I would infect them, not only with my virus but with my failure. A sick cyclist becomes toxic in the eyes of his teammates so quickly that it dehumanises him immediately.
We arrived at the départ and my teammates stepped off the bus and began talking to the press and fans. The whole excited circus of the Tour was carrying on without me as if nothing had ever happened. I tried not to look out of the mirrored glass at a group of excited Australian fans, wrapped in flags and carrying inflatable kangaroos. I felt the weight of guilt and shame pushing down on my shoulders. Guilt suppressed my feelings of illness. I forgot the state I was in, and I started to question just how ill I really was. Perhaps the doctor was right? Perhaps I should have just tried harder? To me, in reality it didn’t matter how sick I was. Leaving like this was a disgrace. I was a quitter, a failure, and a hoax. I wanted to crawl into a hole in the ground as far away from the Tour de France as possible.
• • •
By the time I made it back to Finland and found myself lying on my back watching the clouds pass over the tops of the trees that July afternoon, I could feel that things had changed permanently. As I lay there I felt like my body was telling me something that my mind had been hinting at for a while. I was tired of exploiting myself physically; I felt like my body was a planet and I’d gorged all the crude oil out of it. I had mined my resources dry. It wasn’t just the sickness, or even the monumental effort of riding three-week races, but it was the day-to-day of being a cyclist that had finally caught up with me.
I knew then that the drive that had sustained my career had ebbed. Throughout the summer that followed, I felt nervous. The pressurised engine that had propelled me forward in the world of cycling was now slowly spluttering to an end. It was as if throughout my entire life there had been a clock ticking loudly in the background: it drove me to go out training in the rain, it pushed me to do another interval on a climb because I knew I could squeeze one more effort out of myself; it ticked relentlessly while I suffered in training … suffered at home … suffered in Italy. And then, suddenly, it stopped. The silence was deafening.
Throughout that summer I would continually return to the lake house. I needed to rebuild myself and it was the only way I knew how. I saw doctors and specialists about why I was so tired all the time, and no one could diagnose a specific problem. It felt like a period of limbo. I was stopping and starting – never knowing if anything was really wrong. I was desperate to be fixed, but I couldn’t see what needed fixing. My mood swung with the amount of optimism I could muster. My day-to-day life was so calm and relaxed that I could often forget about my problems and start to feel better. But as soon as I started to train, the clouds formed on the horizon in my mind, as if my body knew that if I got fit I would have to leave the sanctuary of home again. I tried to go training but it was impossible; my body simply wouldn’t allow it. I had to take so much food and so many energy gels with me because my body just couldn’t deal with exercising. Food felt like it went straight through me without a single kilojoule of energy being absorbed from it. While diagnosis of my actual physical problem wasn’t forthcoming, I decided that I had to work on my mental health. Going to the lake house seemed to me the ideal fix; it was energising to feel so alone that no one could come and get me.
At races the problem with noise had been obvious: it interfered with my sleep. A tired bike rider needs sleep to recover and I cherished my precious hours of rest, but hotels are noisy places; rarely are they exclusively filled with bike riders and considerate hushed guests. There always seemed to be weddings going on, or nightclubs next door, or parties of drunk and rowdy masseurs and race officials yabbering away by the team vehicles out in the car park. In the mornings doors in the corridor would slam and soon the unmistakable sound of tyres being inflated by a compressor would mark the dawning of a new day, full of the sounds of cars, helicopters, sirens, klaxons, questions, cheering and shouting.
But even away from the racing I felt I couldn’t escape the noise. Italians lived their lives at such a volume that, instead of being bothered by it and asking someone to quieten down, they would just throw their own noise in to drown out the other sounds. The whole country dealt with noise the same way that they went about conversation – they just got louder and louder. In recent years I had noticed that the noise levels around my apartment were off the scale. There were screaming neighbours, dogs, car alarms, babies and even a fucking turkey that seemed so delighted to have survived being eaten on several successive Easters that she felt the need to gobble her head off with joy day and night.
One summer’s day in 2009 the noise made me crack. I had come home from the Tour in my usual fragile state of mind and body, and in my exhausted state I was trying to catch up with some sleep in the afternoon, only to be awoken from my slumber by the infuriating buzzing of a hedge trimmer. I looked at my watch and saw that it was just after 3 p.m. I pulled back the blinds to see who the culprit was. I recognised the neighbour, who kept three hunting dogs in his backyard that yapped incessantly through the night. It was too much. I stormed out on to the balcony in my underwear and yelled as loud as I could: ‘PORCO DIO!’ My neighbour spun around to catch sight of an emaciated man, with strangely defined tan lines all over his body, glaring right at him. He was so taken aback that all he could think to say as he looked at me nervously was, ‘Me?’
‘Yeah. YOU!’ I replied, before realising quite how strange I must have looked and abruptly turned to go back inside. For whatever reason the escaped-lunatic look must have worked, because he was really friendly to me after that, and while the noise pollution continued his personal contribution was significantly lower from then on.
In Finland, though, it was all very different. Outside the lake house I took great pleasure in lying there and counting the seconds until I heard the sound of another human being doing something. I could count seemingly for hours and not hear a single trace of human activity.
I knew it wasn’t just Italy, or any geographical location, it was the whole cycling world. Cycling was a cacophonous noise to me: the noise of my own gnawing ambition, perhaps, and the confusion of the life that I was leading had seemed to manifest itself in this unending din. Finally, in Finland, and in my home with Camilla, I had found a way to make the noise stop.
• • •
In the autumn the team asked me to return to competition at the Trittico Lombardo, a series of three one-day races that I knew well and were close to my old home near Varese. After a month and a half away from competition I had started to feel better. I was eating a little more food, but I still possessed a tiredness in my bones. The trouble for an athlete who has reached that stage is, you often lose perspective and can’t tell what tired is any more: I asked myself every morning how I felt, and I told myself I felt tired. Every day, the same response.
People who have been around cyclists and who know cycling intimately can tell within a second of looking at a rider if they are in form or not – from their gait, their complexion and the colour of the whites around their pupils. When I arrived back in Italy to race my eyes were two tiny empty holes bored into my head, and instead of moving with the latent power of a professional athlete I shuffled about like a homeless man. When I saw Damiani for the first time since the Tour he virtually recoiled at the sight of me. He peered at me and asked, aghast, ‘What’s wrong with you?’
I had no written diagnosis from a doctor but I knew what was wrong with me: ten years of fatigue had walloped me at once; my body wasn’t just tired, it had nearly stopped functioning, and the worse my body felt, the worse my mental state was.
The last of the three races, the Coppa Bernocchi, used to be a local race for me. I had raced it what felt like countless times; I knew it inside out. I used to enjoy riding it, not least because I could be sat back on my couch by late afternoon – some kind of semblance of normality. But as I sat on the back of the bus and we drove through the small towns on the way to the start that August Sunday morning, I looked out of the window and saw a middleaged man walking out of a newsagent’s with a paper under his arm. As we passed I could see him look up at the bus, and a smile of recognition shot across his face. He may not have known anything about who we were exactly, but he recognised the gleaming team bus plastered in stickers and the job that we did. I wondered if, just for a second, he wanted to be on that bus, to break free of the shackles of the mundane life I imagined for him. I had no idea what he might give to be in my place, but I did know one thing: at that moment I would have given anything to be where he was.
The time that I’d had to reflect during my convalescence had shown me something. I was at my lowest ebb physically, and my career had (as a result of my bad Tour de France) started to take an ominously downward trajectory. But what was really important was that I realised it wasn’t the end of the world. The ticking sound of my ambition hadn’t returned, even when I had come back to Italy. Being happy and having made a real home in Finland with Camilla removed the manic need to push myself so hard. I didn’t have a point to prove any more. I looked around at my fellow teammates, the riders that made up the peloton. There was no sign of the good, clean, ‘noble’ desire to achieve sporting excellence that people seemed to imagine was the driving force behind athletes. These finely tuned sportsmen were more often than not just fucked up. They were lost sons looking for their fathers, or desperately seeking acceptance from themselves or elsewhere. It is quite normal to love cycling, and to love racing bikes as a pastime, but to do it for a living was something else. There is nothing normal about a professional cyclist.
It isn’t just the dedication. In a very simple way the amount of pain that a professional cyclist goes through, even on a normal day, far exceeds what most people would experience in their entire lives. As a racing cyclist you learn to live with pain. It isn’t the same pain that someone who rides a bike for fun or for sport would feel, it is much deeper and much more scarring than that. The pain of being a professional isn’t just that of exercising; it is exercising for performance. It is a pain that is branded into you, and you learn to live with pushing yourself physically and mentally to your absolute limits.
In the case of foreigners who weren’t from countries where cycling is a part of the culture, the question as to why was multiplied tenfold. It’s like a Finnish person going to do judo in Japan – why would you do it if everything was OK at home? There is nothing balanced or normal about people who need to achieve at that level.
My bizarre behaviour reflected an erratic life lived on the road: a life filled with pain, discomfort and, what I now realised had long been a feeling of bitterness. I had once laughed at my teammates’ obsessive-compulsive behaviour but now I was obsessed with the room being as comfortable and as close to my home environment as possible. I travelled to races with my own pillow, and a tool kit to make sure that I could make the room as dark as was humanly possible – I always carried with me an array of eye masks and a pair of scissors and electrical tape. The first thing I would do when I walked into a room was to cover every single blinking LED light, every digital alarm clock display or any tiny crack of light behind a curtain or a blind, or even under the door. I had no idea that I had turned into a lunatic. As always, it took Camilla to point out just how strange my behaviour really was. As I packed up my blackout kit to go away to a race one morning, she calmly noted, with a shake of the head, ‘You know, darling … that is not normal.’ I looked back at her and couldn’t help but laugh. It wasn’t normal, but then I didn’t lead a normal life.
Looking out of the window, I saw the grinning man disappear back off into his life that Sunday morning. I turned my head and looked back into the bus. I knew what was going to happen next. We’d pull into a car park full of people and I would begin to dread, even more deeply, the inevitability of dragging my exhausted body through the race. I would look back through the window at a group of cycling fans practically masturbating at the sight of the gigantic bus that was advertising snoring medication, and I wished with all my might I could be anywhere but there.
It was a deep feeling that was compounded by the dreadful sense of guilt that I had towards the fans who came to watch races. I knew there wasn’t a soul in that car park who I could take by the arm to a quiet spot around the corner and say, ‘I really hate what I am doing … oh, and everyone on that bus is a fucking lunatic!’ There were grown men in that car park who had successful careers, happy wives and children, and who probably spent more on their cycling holidays than I earned in half a year. They would happily have swapped everything to be able to do what I was doing. How could I communicate how I felt to anybody? In a way, I felt sorry for them: I could shatter their dreams if I explained the truth. But at the same time I was angry and sorry for myself because once upon a time it had been my dream too, and the reality felt so different now. I was so confused that my blood would boil. Was it my responsibility to tell people how it really was? Or should I just keep smiling, keep selling the dream? There was no way these people would ever be in my position anyway. I felt totally and utterly helpless.
I knew too that there was no one in the cycling world I could confide in. As a cyclist you spend so long dressing yourself up in a virtual suit of armour to defend yourself against attacks from all sides that dropping your guard and showing weakness to your colleagues would be unthinkable madness. And then everyone else I knew outside of the sport had seen me work so hard to get to where I was that they didn’t really believe my protestations. I was stuck in a nightmare, with a mob of well-wishers pushing me towards a cliff. The more I protested, the more they thought I was encouraging them to keep going.
My life no longer felt like my own. Instead, it had started to resemble one of those public-service adverts from fifties’ America, where the impossibly happy family presented an unhealthy and unattainable level of perfection. As cyclists we were involved in an incredible amount of advertising; and everything we did promoted us as happy, smiling, shiny examples of human brilliance on two wheels. I knew that to someone outside of that bus I looked the way that Malcolm Elliott had looked to me in 1990. I had become one of those shiny people, but inside it felt nothing like I had imagined.
On days like that, the feelings of helplessness turned to anger, and I was entirely convinced that I hated cycling. I hated cycling because of the gaping disparity between the way the sport looked on the outside, and what I knew to be the truth of it on the inside. I hated it because I had given my youth to it – so much of myself – and the payback was so meagre and fleeting, especially compared to those who took big risks and ignored the consequences. I hated it because I was so tired all the time, so tired that, from the age of 18 onwards, I couldn’t tell when I was sad or just exhausted. And I hated it because I wasn’t sure if I could really live without it.
Cycling defined me as a man, so what could I do after my professional career was over? It is the same for so many sportspeople the world over. No matter the sport and no matter the person, finishing a professional sporting career is a kind of death. Like mortality itself, you see the end coming, after a dwindling demise, but you have no idea what the afterlife will hold. As much as I knew that I wanted to walk the dogs on the weekend and buy the paper, I knew too that I couldn’t just do that. But I wasn’t sure what else there was for me. Cycling had me in its grip; me and my bike still needed each other, and this intricate dependence made me hate the bike and all it symbolised even more. Becoming a professional and doing what I loved for a living had forced me to live with this inevitable and strange contradiction. As I was drawing closer to the end, the balance was tipping. I wasn’t done yet, but I was getting there.