Procycling Colin Sturgess

coming full circle
Today, Colin Sturgess is back in Leicester living in
the same house, just around the corner from the
now demolished Saffron Lane Velodrome where
his career fired into life and for a while had looked
so lustrous. Throughout it all, Alan and Ann have
stood firm while their son has wrestled his demons.
Following another wave crash in 2012 in Australia
which left him homeless, they bought him a ticket
back to the UK and a few steps back from the edge.
Slowly, he’s been learning to master the
condition. He’s riding competitively again – his
third comeback – and last year he won the League
of Veteran Racing Cyclists championships after a
14-year lay-off, proving there was life and drive in
the old dog yet. The result also brought a wave of
congratulations and support from the wider British
cycling fraternity, which proved what a popular
athlete he had been. He was supposed to race for
the domestic SportGrub-Kuota team in 2015, but
a stubborn back injury kept him from training
and sent him into a long bout of depression that
lasted most of the summer.
“I’m in a better position than I was six weeks
ago,” he tells Procycling on a soggy August Friday.
“I was in a darkened room, curled up in a foetal
position and I’d been there for days, weeks on end
in a pretty bad place. Now it’s far more positive, I’m
back on the bike, averaging about 40km a day. It’s
small steps,” he says.
He’s not in the physical condition he’d like – he’s
well-padded from not riding – but he’s busy. He
works two jobs: one as a coach for Dig Deep
Coaching and the other in the shop of local bike
clothing maker, Velobici. He’s saving for a trip back
to Australia this winter to see Jesper, who’s now 10.
He’s not quite sure he ever will ever be in total
control of the wave but what he hopes is that he can
keep the peaks and troughs within manageable
parameters. His prescriptions help the most, he
Going to extremes
“From a physical and athletic perspective,
Colin was an incredible human being, but I
think he perhaps missed out on application.
We rode in an era when we were caught
between tradition and the incoming ideas that
science was bringing to the sport,” recalls
Sturgess’s GB team-mate Simon Lillistone.
“That fourth place at the Seoul Olympics was
sensational for a 19-year-old. Colin winning
the worlds in 1989, it wasn’t just that he won
against Dean Woods, it was that he decimated
him in that final. Every time I come across the
race on YouTube I think it’s unbelievable.
“That’s not the most efficient way to ride the
pursuit, but that was the Colin way: he played
with his opponents for a few laps and then
went for the jugular in the last two laps.
“I’m not sure how muddied this has got with
time, but I remember being in Colin’s room
before the final and he ate a whole packet of
chocolate biscuits. He’s always been a
character of extremes, whether it’s his
practical joking or his celebration after the
games in Seoul. He always went to extremes.”
says, but cycling through Leicestershire’s country
lanes also plays an important part in his gradual
convalescence. What would help even more, he
says, would be access to talking therapies. He’s on
the NHS waiting list but it’s six months long.
the unknown victims
This is a version of the Sturgess story. Did bipolar
disorder almost kill him? Possibly. Did it wreck his
career? Certainly. Had he got the help much earlier,
maybe his palmarès would include a Flanders or a
Roubaix. He’s adamant that even as late on as 1998,
had he recognised and managed his condition, he’d
have stuck with the British squad and made the
Olympic team pursuit line-up.
Now, looking back over what might have been,
he wants to add his voice to a chorus of athletes and
ex-athletes from other sports who have spoken of
their experience of battling mental illness, hoping
to encourage other sufferers to get help.
In cycling, depression or one of its shades has
often been found stalking its athletes: Mauro
Santambrogio’s ‘goodnight world’ tweets in 2013,
Graeme Obree’s two suicide attempts or Jesús
Manzano’s addiction to anti-depressants are three
examples amid many.
They’re the lucky ones. Many haven’t made it
out of the mire. Whatever was written on the death
certificates of Frank Vandenbroucke (died aged
34, in 2009), Marco Pantani (34, 2004), José María
Jiménez (32, 2003), Dimitri De Fauw (28, 2009),
Thierry Claveyrolat (40, 1999), Valentino Fois (34,
2008) and Luca Gelfi (42, 2009), some mental
fissure played its part in their sad ends.
From his experience of living with undiagnosed
bipolar disorder for 15 years and the macho culture
of bike racing, Sturgess often ponders how many
professionals of his era suffered in silence and
might still be carrying the burden – and heaven
knows what the consequences might be. Tales that
a young Sturgess heard at dinner tables in race
hotels about so-and-so’s bender were hilarious at
the time. But they are now tinged with the queasy
feeling that they may have suggested a flaw that,
given the wrong circumstances or accentuated by
taking the wrong chemical at the wrong time, may
well have tipped that rider over the abyss.
“[I wish] I’d had more insight into the downs and
not taken the ups for granted, which is what I did,”
he says. “When you’re winning it blocks everything
out and when you’re down in the dumps you can’t
actually see how far you’ve gone down.
“I don’t tell people I’m
bipolar but I make no secret
of it either,” Sturgess says
simply. “If I can make people
aware that a high-class athlete
can suffer the same as anyone
else, then brilliant.”
104 Procycling november 2015