Source : ABC NEWS
Stuart O’Grady has achieved a huge amount over the course of his career.
But it is telling that, among the Tour de France stage wins, wearing the yellow jersey in 1998, the Paris-Roubaix crown, the gold medals at Olympic, World and Commonwealth level, O’Grady counts his current role as director of the Tour Down Under as one that makes him proudest.
“It remains one of my proudest moments, being at the airport and welcoming everyone in to Adelaide for the Tour Down Under,” O’Grady told ABC Sport.
“They’re genuinely happy to come down … it’s just great to have them racing on our roads again.”
The Tour Down Under, which got underway on Friday with the three-stage women’s race and the Villawood Classic for the men on Saturday, is in its 25th year this year.
Aside from two years of COVID-enforced absence, the Tour has been a key part of the Australian sporting calendar.
“It’s the number one national sporting event in South Australia,” O’Grady said.
“We don’t have a Formula One Grand Prix or MotoGP. This is big for us.”
And so it should be, now more than ever.
Australian cycling is on a massive high, with the nation’s top riders regularly competing for the biggest prizes in the sport.
Jai Hindley is not far removed from winning the pink jersey as Giro d’Italia winner in 2022.
Then there was the astonishing achievement at last year’s Vuelta a España, where Ben O’Connor finished second, Jay Vine won the king of the mountains prize and Kaden Groves won the points jersey.
O’Connor backed up to finish second in one of the most astonishing men’s World Championship road races of all time, after Australia won gold in the mixed team relay.
And, of course, Grace Brown won the Olympic time trial, world time trial and Liège-Bastogne-Liège in one glorious swan song year.
You could say Australian cycling has rarely been in as rude health.
It was a similar high that helped spark the Tour Down Under into life, with O’Grady’s nabbing of the yellow jersey at the 1998 Tour de France the trigger to start a road stage race Down Under.
“The Tour Down Under started as a bit of a pipe dream, I guess, from Mick Turtur,” O’Grady said.
“Mick was one of my coaches at the South Australian Sports Institute so we had a very close relationship.
“Coming home and throwing that [yellow jersey] on his desk probably helped throw a bit of fuel on the fire.
“But when you look back on it, it was really important timing, as he’s doing his sales pitch, trying to get an international race in Australia, we finally had the spotlight again on cycling — it was the perfect ingredient.”
As the first Australian to wear the yellow jersey since Phil Anderson did so at the 1981 and 1982 Tours, O’Grady played a vital role in getting that initial Tour Down Under off the ground as ambassador for the race.
O’Grady convinced his Crédit Agricole (GAN) team boss Roger Legeay to send his team Down Under “as a bit of a payback, as a favour” for his Aussie star.
“It certainly wasn’t the usual conversation,” O’Grady said.
“Team GAN had training camps, even though it was winter, in Po in the south of France, riding around in all sorts of wintry conditions.
“But they’ve been doing that since Roger Legeay had been part of the team.
“For them to even contemplate coming to Australia was a pretty weak point of discussion.
“Obviously Roger Legeay being my boss and the couple of years I’d had, he saw it as a bit of a payback, as a favour. ‘OK, we’ll come down and do this race.’
“I was an ambassador for the event, so I was, as I’m riding around Europe, I’m telling everyone how good Australia is and how good the training is and the weather.
“Obviously the results that I was showing at the classics and the Tour, they showed I must be doing something OK down here, and a couple of teams were willing to come and explore it.”
O’Grady noted that the ability to put in long days of training in pleasant weather was a huge appeal — as was the offer of first class accommodation and business class flights, a “dangling of the carrot” to encourage a positive memory.
“I don’t actually know how we did it,” O’Grady said.
“It’s funny, looking back over that first start list, but yeah, [12-time Tour de France stage winner] Erik Zabel and quite a few guys from his Telekom Team came down and based themselves in Adelaide for a month before the race.
“They saw the benefit in just getting those base kilometres in.
“At the same time, Erik was winning Milan-San Remo every year [he won the spring classic in 1997, 1998, 2000 and 2001] so it didn’t take long for people to go, ‘Hang on, he’s doing seven-, eight-hour rides’ and in Europe, they’re maybe doing two or three, so certainly the results that Zabel and co. were achieving helped attract people to Adelaide.’
“Once we had a couple of teams on board, the sales pitch got a lot easier because everyone was just basically riding around the peloton going, ‘How good was Australia?'”
That being said, the extreme heat of that first Tour Down Under had its own challenges.
“There’s a great story of Mick Tutur having to go down to the airport and get getting Zabel to turn back around because it was 40 degrees and he was absolutely cooked with the heat,” O’Grady said.
“He thought it was ridiculous … so it could have swung either way, ” O’Grady admits.
“But then, once the race was up and going, it wasn’t a hard sell.”
Selling the race is far from a problem these days, with all the major UCI World Tour teams sending squads of various experience down to Adelaide, including Ineos Grenadiers’ Tour de France winner Geraint Thomas and former world champion Michał Kwiatkowski heading out, to name but two.
The nature of the World Tour means that the huge names, such as Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard Hansen and Remco Evenepoel were never going to travel — Team UAE’s Pogačar is not even doing the UAE Tour — with two of the other biggest names in the men’s peloton Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert honing their fitness on the cyclocross circuit.
“We’ve had a grand tour winner here every year since I’ve been at the helm,” O’Grady said.
“We’ve been lucky enough to have Chris Froome, Geraint Thomas, Simon Yates. Jai Hindley, you’re still able to bring those big names.
“But it’s not the Tour de France and we’re not trying to be the Tour de France.
“We’ve got our place in the calendar, we get to see the whole world tour peloton fresh, kicking off in their new kit, on their new bikes, everyone’s happy and excited.
“It brings a real buzz to our city and our state and our country. It’s a big deal now, the Tour Down Under.”
And it’s a big deal for O’Grady himself.
O’Grady won the race twice in its nascent years, in 1999 and 2001, and finished on the podium a handful more times.
“It was the only time, personally, you got to race in front of your family and friends and show them what you actually did for a living,” O’Grady said.
“The Tour de France wasn’t even live on TV then … So it was great to be able to show off your own state to your fellow professionals, showing them where I lived and be a bit proud of all that.
“But then it was also nice to be able to race in front of your friends and family.”
That’s part of the appeal for O’Grady,
“It’s full cycle for me,” O’Grady said.
“To be able to start my career here, to race around the world as a proud South Australian and to be able to race the World Tour event in my own backyard, and now to be a part of the organisation
“Cycling is my life, so it’s nice to be a part of it and still be able to give back to it.”