“Well fellas, who’s up for a dip?”
These are not words that one usually hears in my line of work. They were spoken by Svein Tuft, then a professional cyclist. I was stood in the Pyrenees and in front of me was a small pool that Svein had created by using boulders to dam a stream running down from the mountains.
I had travelled to Andorra to interview him for a feature in the magazine and on a warm summer day this would have been a lovely way to cool down. However, this was not a warm summer day. It was mid-November and summer could hardly have felt further off. Nevertheless, in the pursuit of journalistic inquiry, I took the plunge. I later wrote:
‘We will never be here again,’ reads Tuft’s right forearm, a tattoo he got during his twenties. It is the sort of motto that advocates stripping off and slipping into freezing cold water to soak up the Tuft philosophy, an alluring, exhilarating and addictive, if frequently uncomfortable, way of experiencing the world. Small flakes of snow, whipped up off the mountain peaks, begin to fall.
It was one of the most extraordinary features I had the pleasure of researching and writing, and unlike anything I had done before. Over the course of about seven hours, Rouleur photographer Michael Blann and I were treated to stories from Svein’s life as we hiked up and down the mountains surrounding his home. There were stories of boxcar hopping, bike touring, Giro snowstorms, jiu jitsu, altitude camps on a nearby mountain tops, barefoot hiking, scandalous South American racing, and more. I crammed as many as I could into 3,000 words but left Andorra feeling like I had barely scratched the surface.
I then spoke to a few people involved with Svein and heard how his stories – both about his life before cycling and his holistic philosophy during his cycling career – had impacted them. According to Luke Durbridge, his frequent roommate on what was then Mitchelton-Scott, “pretty much every night was story time and I was mesmerised.”
However, I wasn’t looking for a big project and I never considered myself a ghost-writer, although I had done a lot of it before in shorter form. I think I probably just had a selfish curiosity. At some point in the next year or so I got back in touch to ask Svein if he had ever considered writing a book. The answer was that he would mull it over. “In a lot of ways, writing a book is not me, but when I share these stories with people and I see how…