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As Cadel Evans well knows, you can race 30,000km in a year yet be remembered – at least on YouTube – for a swat at a reporter’s microphone.
Whether he likes it or not, Australia’s two-time Tour de France runner-up has developed a reputation for finishing his race stages on an emotional knife’s edge.
It’s provided the internet’s DIY video site with plenty of content.
There was the headbutt on a camera, the angry gesture at a motorcycle cop and that microphone swat.
When a reporter stuck it too close to the shoulder he injured in a crash during stage nine of the Tour, Evans yelled: “Don’t touch me.”
After the same painful stage, he handed his battered helmet to a reporter saying: “Here’s your interview.”
There was the outburst after stage 15 as the pressure, pain and fatigue of one of the world’s toughest sporting events again took their toll.
“Don’t stand on my dog or I’ll cut your head off,” Evans snapped.
The 31-year-old is back home for some hard-earned relaxation before beginning his training regime in Barwon Heads, the Victorian town made famous by ABC TV’s SeaChange and where he and his Italian wife Chiara live when they’re in Australia.
And he has an explanation for those outbursts.
“Football players, they run off the field, they go into their dressing room and they throw whatever around in their locker room,” a cool, calm and collected Evans says in his Sydney hotel.
“Whereas, for us, we’re right there and so if anything happens everyone’s standing there ready to put it on YouTube.”
That, he says, is part of the beauty of the road race, where competitors and spectators almost blur into one.
“It’s good to be able to know that people are seeing everything that goes on,” he says.
“I think I had a problem this year because I had so many injuries on me from the crash.
“I had skin off every part of the left side of my body and I was being pushed and shoved a bit.
“I was already in pain without getting people poking their fingers in my hip or my back or my shoulder or whatever and that sometimes just got a little bit too much for me.
“And people also need to have a little bit of respect when you’ve got blood coming out through your shorts.”
It certainly has been a painful year for the former mountain bike champ from Katherine in the Noerthern Territory.
As well as losing skin, he ruptured the anterior cruciate ligament in his knee at his team’s post-Tour funtion.
Twelve days later he managed to saddle up at the Beijing Olympics but was left regreting another huge opportunity for glory which eluded him.
“Within 13 seconds of bronze (medal in the time trial) considering I was three or four days on crutches 10 days before wasn’t a bad effort,” he says.
“It was a great course for me, it was a really good opportunity for me, possibly my best opportunity at the Olympics to win a medal, and it didn’t happen so maybe it will never happen for me.”
It came after he’d started favourite in the Tour de France in the absence of 2007 winner Alberto Contador but finished runner-up for the second straight year.
“Considering (the crash) I was really happy to finish the Tour and get on the podium,” he says.
“I think I rode a really good Tour, all things considered.
“But of course we went there with the goal to win and it was a bit of an opportunity lost as well. It was a great opportunity to win.”
How great an opportunity is becoming clearer as the factors begin to stack up against Evans in 2009.
His Belgian team, Silence-Lotto, is in crisis after their star signing, Bernhard Kohl, admitted to doping and was sacked.
Kohl, the 2008 Tour de France’s best climber who finished third overall for the Gerolsteiner team, was to have provided much of the vital support Evans needs to win the race.
The team has also lost Yaroslav Popovych, a rider Evans insisted must stay as a condition of him re-signing, to powerful rivals Astana.
Then there’s the X-factor of seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong, still deciding whether his comeback after a three-year “retirement” will include Le Tour.
He’s joined the Astana team that also includes Contador.
Evans, though, is taking a wait-and-see attitude to Armstrong and focusing on himself.
He says he is in his peak, which began when he turned 30 and will last until he is 35.
“I certainly hope to ride at least three but possibly four or five good Tours,” he says.
“My best years are here 30, second at the Tour, 31 – second at the Tour. So hopefully at 32, 33 I can improve on that and that wouldn’t be a bad career.
“Going in getting eighth in my first Tour I could plan from there on.
“We have this project yellow – it will either be two, four or maybe six years but the project is Cadel Evans win the Tour de France.
“We’re second year in and, for me, I look at it as a minimum four-year project and you have to keep that burning desire over four or six years.”
Off the bike, Evans continues his support of the Free Tibet movement, and is hopeful the spotlight on the issue during the Beijing Games will have helped.
“I’m only a bike rider, I’m not a politician, I can’t go and negotiate on the Dalai Lama’s behalf, he says.
In Australia, he will have to begin his preparation for another assault on cycling’s most prestigious race differently this time.
“I’m going to focus more on (my) knee recovery and prevention in the future … stability and physio,” he says.
“It’s not always the most exciting training to do, I prefer riding out in the sunshine on the coast, but we do what we have to do.”
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