Tour de France champion Cadel Evans’ huge heart still beats for cycling
SEVEN years after winning the Tour de France by suffering ‘better and longer than anyone’ Cadel Evans tells Jessica Halloran how his life has changed since he claimed cycling’s ultimate prize.
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CADEL Evans’ heart used to beat so hard it would cause his body to jolt. He remembers resting on a rickety hotel bed in the French Alps, feeling his heartbeat flying, unable to wind down from the latest Tour de France climb.
“It would keep you awake because it would go ‘boom, boom, boom, boom’,” Evans says.
“If you had a shaky, rickety, old bed in the hotel it would move the bed. It jolts your body. Your metabolism is going so fast.”
Evans nailed the art of suffering for his sport. One of his strengths was to race with his heartbeat at 175 bpm for more than an hour, at times peaking at 188.
This incredible trait stood out to teammates such as Chris Horner.
“Mate, you are a good rider and all, but you can just suffer better and longer than anyone,” Horner told him.
When I meet him at an inner-city cafe, it’s almost seven years to the day since his resilience paid off with victory in the Tour de France.
We spend an hour talking about life — then and now.
Evans’ daily life is no longer just about heart rate, watts, consuming 10,000 calories a day, his weight, goals met and kilometres clocked.
Yet Evans looks as fit as he did when he stood victorious on the podium in front of the Arc de Triomphe in 2011. He’s taken up trail running. A few days ago, when home at his Barwon Heads base, he ran 12km, past the golf course, along the brush of 13th Beach, down to the sand and through the forest.
Along the way a few locals noticed him and yelled, “where’s your bike”. The bike? He still loves it.
“I often just ride for the solitude,” he says. “Being on your bike, it is very peaceful.”
If he does find himself riding into a world of pain these days — he’s turning away from it rather than pushing into it like he used to.
He did just that three weeks ago, throwing himself into a Tour de France training ride up l’Alpe d’Huez with Richie Porte, Simon Gerrans and four other BMC riders.
The BMC boys, distracted by what their heart rate was doing and clocking enough kilometres so their coach would be happy, took a wrong turn up the climb.
“I rode with them for 10 minutes up this wrong climb and then I thought, ‘you know what, I don’t race anymore. I don’t have to hurt myself this much’,” Evans says, laughing.
Back when he raced the Tour, he’d sit on his hotel bed at the end of a stage in a catatonic state.
Exhaustion would cause him to forget what room he was staying in.
“It forces you into a primal state, where you only care about eating, resting and racing,” Evans says.
As we talk, around us office workers don’t seem to notice the Tour de France champ.
Evans doesn’t mind a bit.
He is a self-confessed introvert (he used to lock himself in the bathroom after stages of the Tour and use noise-cancelling headphones to escape the suffocating atmosphere).
He’s a quiet character and humility is an overwhelming characteristic.
It is most evident when he talks about what brings him most joy from his Tour de France victory.
He tells me about the many times, moments I can see still visibly move him, when people have thanked him for winning the 3500km-plus race he contested nine times.
“They will say, ‘I have never watched sport in my life but I watched every stage of your Tour de France, thank you for never giving up’,” Evans says.
Evans’ immense gratitude to the sport made him create the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road race, a UCI WorldTour event that runs every January in Victoria.
There’s a recreational ride for the non-professionals. The champion hopes the race will inspire the next generation to take up the sport.
“My dream with the race now, is that some young girl or boy will come and watch the race, be inspired by cycling and come back one day and win the race. That to me would mean we had ticked all the boxes.”
“As a sportsperson, we are always judged by how many races we win or lose, or how much prizemoney we earn or don’t earn. At the end of the day, that someone so far from my sport can thank me like this, it fills me with satisfaction and pride on a personal level.’’
Cycling needs clean heroes such as Evans promoting the sport as it struggles to recover from the EPO era. From 1998 to 2013, Evans was one of four confirmed clean winners in 16 years.
News leaked last December that four-time Tour de France champion Chris Froome had tested positive for excessively high amounts of the asthma drug salbutamol. Froome has since been cleared.
Evans says “cycling is doing as much if not more than other professions in the fight against drugs in sport”. He says it was a shame Froome’s results were leaked and played out in the public arena.
“But the fact he went and raced and was so motivated to me said, that indicated, he hadn’t done anything wrong, and that’s what they came to two days before the Tour de France started,” he says.
“Nothing slips through the cracks anymore like say 10, 20 years ago.”
Today, Evans’ heart can still sit at a maximum 175 bpm for an hour or so. He hasn’t lost his hunger for competition and races in both mountain biking and trail running. And, a few weeks ago, his son Robel, 7, had his first mountain bike race.
“I don’t push him into it … I am really not the dad trying to fulfil his dreams through his son,” Evans says, laughing again.
“I am not that dad at all … I am actually pretty calm.”
To join Cadel at the Swisse People’s Ride on Australia Day, visit www.cadelevansgreatoceanroadrace.com.au