Exposed: Andrew Rule’s history of elite Aussie cyclists who made headlines for the wrong reasons
Some of the country’s biggest elite cycling names have made headlines for more than winning world championships and Olympic medals when they took a wrong turn towards drugs, violence, lies and cheating.
Police & Courts
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BY the time the first responders reached Melissa Hosking on Saturday night she was still alive but not for long. Police charged her husband as soon as she died in Royal Adelaide Hospital.
His name is Rohan Dennis and until then he was known as a dual world champion cyclist for Australia before retiring last year.
Now he will always be known for being at the wheel of the vehicle that killed his young wife, mother of two, in a quiet street in the leafy Adelaide suburb of Medindie.
A court will decide if Dennis is guilty of a crime or not. Many details of his past that might be relevant cannot be published until that happens.
But one thing is sure: the black cloud that has fallen over Dennis this week is not new in elite cycling.
In the modern era, two Australian world champions, an Olympic medallist and a junior star of huge promise ended their careers in disgrace and in jail, the latter eventually shot dead in an outlaw motorcycle club ambush three years ago.
For at least two of those three men, reckless use of steroids and other illicit performance and bodybuilding drugs is part of what went so catastrophically wrong.
One of Dennis’s high-profile contemporaries, Jack Bobridge, has a hospital ward named after him for charity work done while he was excelling in the sport that took him to a silver medal at the Rio Olympics.
But Bobridge also had a big cocaine habit and a lifestyle he couldn’t support once retired. He was jailed for four years after being arrested for drug dealing in Perth in 2017 with another ex-cyclist, Alex McGregor.
Then there was Stephen Pate, seen as a thug on wheels well before he was disqualified for steroid use after winning an international sprint medal in 1991.
Pate took 50 international titles and records in a controversial career that led one admirer to call him the Bradman of bike racing. But his other nickname fitted better: “the mad bull”.
Sports writer Jeff Wells wrote of the already notorious Pate in 1996: “The incredible hulk turns out to be a squat, little, short-legged, freckled guy in a t-shirt, and sunglasses perched in the middle of an unruly ginger haircut. So this is big bad Steve Pate, druggie, bad boy of cycling, mad bull on wheels.
“He could be any other tourist escaping Melbourne until you spot the quadriceps under the baggy shorts. They are like bags of cement hanging over his knees.”
Olympic officials are wary of selecting potential embarrassments in national teams, especially anyone nearing the end of elite careers.
It was no great surprise that Pate was dropped for the Sydney Olympics — or that the snub triggered his fall into violence and alcoholism.
A Melbourne court heard in 2003 how a devastated Pate brooded over the perceived injustice. After he quit cycling in 2000, his life fell apart when he suffered a workplace injury and marriage breakdown.
The father of three assaulted his wife, Joanne, in late 2002 at their Bentleigh home: punching, pulling her hair and kicking her. He was arrested and bailed but returned the next day, running a knife across her throat and refusing to let her leave. He spat in her face and threatened to kill her.
Released on bail three weeks later, Pate ignored court orders forbidding him to approach his wife. He assaulted her a third time in February 2003. This time he was sentenced to 20 months, with a minimum of eight.
By then another Australian world beater who’d overtaken Pate on the track was also falling fast. This was Gary Neiwand who, at his peak, could spin bike wheels faster than anyone alive.
The story broke in May, 2005: the Olympian and former world champion had been bailed for $10,000 for breaching an intervention order taken out by his estranged wife, Cathy, after they separated in 2001.
In practice, the couple had soon agreed to tacitly ignore the order so the two children could see both parents. But, after three years, the amicable separation turned sour when Cathy befriended another man.
Despite Neiwand’s admitted failings as a husband, he was jealous.
It would have been just another “domestic”, except that Neiwand made a high-profile scalp. Camera crews and reporters were waiting at St Kilda police station when he was charged.
One bizarre aspect pumped up the story. Police had leaked the fact that, weeks earlier, an agitated Neiwand had telephoned Cathy to claim he had entered the backyard and urinated in her champagne glass as she hung out washing.
At other times he had abused her for smoking in the house and had yelled at her at their children’s school.
It was ugly and mortifying rather than violent. Police would drop all but three of 17 charges laid and Neiwand insisted in court he had not urinated in the glass at all. But the damage was done.
With a couple of stupid outbursts, a triple world champion and four-time Olympian who’d won gold at three Commonwealth Games had become a despised stalker.
Whereas no-one in cycling was surprised that the thuggish Pate was jailed, there was lingering affection for Neiwand. But that faded with his increasingly deranged behaviour.
When the charges were heard in late 2005, Neiwand came to court unshaven and badly-dressed and pleaded guilty to two counts of breaching an intervention order and one of criminal damage.
His barrister told the court Neiwand had fallen into a dark period at the end of a career and of a relationship. After being at the pinnacle of his profession, he was back living with his parents, broke and heartbroken.
He got a four-month suspended prison term, meaning he would be jailed if he offended again within 18 months.
Neiwand was remorseful but his impetuous streak soon sunk him again. He tried to kill himself, rescued from an overdose by a quick-thinking friend. Even that scare did not halt his decline.
He would later be sentenced to 18 months jail, serving nine, for stalking a former girlfriend and others in 2006. Six years later, he was convicted and given a bond for flashing.
Last June, at 56, Neiwand pleaded guilty to using a carriage service to menace, harass or cause offence after bombarding a woman with dozens of phone calls, emails and text messages.
The question remains: was Neiwand unstable from the beginning, or was his behaviour the legacy of a training regimen imposed by others on the principle of “whatever it takes to win”?
He has never pleaded the effects of drugs to explain his disgrace, but there could be good reasons for that. No champion wants to be accused of cheating, even in a sport notorious for decades of drug use and abuse.
A century before Lance Armstrong finally admitted being one of pro sport’s biggest cheats, bicycle racing was rife with drug abuse.
The suspicious deaths of early champions before the turn of the 19th century sparked stories of “doping” with cocktails of dangerous substances.
The first real drug scandal was documented in 1924. That was when famed French cyclists, the Pelissier brothers, admitted using strychnine, cocaine, chloroform, aspirin and “horse ointment.”
One Pelissier told a reporter: “Do you know how we keep going? Look, this is cocaine, chloroform, too. And pills? You want to see pills? Here are three boxes. We run on dynamite.”
The title of that 1924 newspaper expose was “The Convicts of the Road.” A century on, bike riding is still throwing up its share of convicts. None more dangerous, maybe, than the late Shane Bowden, who went from racing bikes to rumbling Harley Davidsons after being a gun junior cyclist.
Bowden dominated Adelaide cycling as a teenager but got into trouble with the law and switched to bodybuilding gyms where he expanded his taste for steroids and other illicit drugs. Musclebound and aggressive, he hung with local Hells Angels and was later recruited as a Finks enforcer before switching to the Mongols.
It wasn’t a great career move. Bowden would spend most of the next 20 years in jail, notably for shooting Hells Angel Christopher Wayne Hudson in the neck at the infamous Ballroom Blitz bikie battle on the Gold Coast in 2006.
If Hudson had died that night, it would have saved the life of the heroic Brendan Keilar — the man Hudson shot the following year when Keilar and another brave passerby tried to stop the hulking Hells Angel bashing a woman outside a Melbourne strip club.
The main reason Bowden survived to age 47 was that he’d spent so much time in jail, safe from repercussions of his unhinged steroid and amphetamine-fuelled violence outside.
His past caught up with him at the Gold Coast in late 2020. He was hit with 21 shots in a midnight ambush after arriving home from pumping iron in a gym.
It was hard to believe that Bowden had once been a star prospect with the Australian Institute of Sport. Or was it? The institute’s longtime cyclist training base at Adelaide’s Henley Beach sparked a national scandal after a cache of used syringes was found there in 2003.
Only a few cyclists were officially named in connection with injecting themselves, and only three were publicly linked to illicit steroids — when one cyclist claimed that elite international riders Sean Eadie and Shane Kelly had introduced him to a banned drug. But they weren’t the worst casualties.
Brilliant young track racer Jobie Dajka was dumped from the 2004 Athens Olympics team for lying to the drug inquiry. He lashed out at what he called a “corrupt” and “drug-ridden” sport, was later convicted of assaulting head coach Martin Barrass and banned from competing for three years.
When Djaka was found dead in his Adelaide home in 2009, his family blamed cycling administrators for driving him to suicide and banned them from the funeral, where his father delivered an angry eulogy.
The authorities have always insisted that very few elite Australian cyclists have been exposed to illicit drugs. But they would say that, wouldn’t they?
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