Adam Hansen interview- Bahamontes

Gap, July 21st. 20 Avenue du Commandant Dumont. Hotel Le Clos, a dilapidated building where the faded and glamour peels along with the paint on the walls. In the uninviting hotel bar stand rickety barstools in front of a pathetic wooden bar, the toys in the garden are rusted. Here, in the shadow of the mythic alpine peaks, Lotto-Soudal get a rest from the Tour. It's stupidly warm, 37 degrees in the shade, and the bedrooms have no air con, but we see nothing but smiling scenes of riders and staff. Marc Sergeant, also grinning from ear to ear, says "Three stage wins. That's the difference. If we hadn't won anything yet you would see everybody all doom and gloom, complaining and walking around with their lip on the ground."

The reason for the collective good humour walks past us nonchalantly. Andre Greipal. German by birth. Winner by trade. In his slippers. His bronzed legs are like Doric columns protruding from his shorts and with his cap he looks more like a sun-seeking, coolbox-carrying tourist in Blankenberge than the top sprinter in the Tour after three trips to the party, and a couple of days later he'll stand on the podium on the Champs Elysees. Greipel has a busy rest day: German TV, Sporza, German, French and Belgian papers. Team mate Adam Hansen has it a lot easier. Eat, massage, lots of rest and an interview with Bahamontes. The lack of media attention is slightly surprising, because the Australian stands on the point of writing his name on a record. If he finishes this Tour, he has finished twelve grand tours in a row. Nobody ever did better. Or, maybe, nobody was ever crazier.

Aussie Without a Home

Whilst photographer Jelle and I order a cold beer, Hansen sips at a steaming coffee. For Hansen, heat isn't a problem. "In Australia, where my mother lives. it's even hotter than this. I don't find it so bad that there's no aircon in the room here. I'm used to these temperatures." Hansen was born in Australi, lived there for a couple of years, but moved around constantly after that, along with his parents jobs- she helped Chinese emigrating to Australia. As a child he lived for a year each in Hong Kong and Taiwan. "It was like living in the future. If I was going to school, I took the metro from underneath our apartment block. I left school in the evening and it was the same ritual but in teh other direction. I lived only underground and didn't know there was anything going on above my head. Sport? THe bike? That had no impact on my life."

As a teenager, he moved back to Australia and started cycling. "I was good, but not with the best. I was never Australian champion in the youth categories, didn't win any big races. If you looked at my results, you would never know I was going to be a pro. So I went and studied and rode for pleasure and did triathlons. I never gave up and improved step by step."

With results: Hansen turned pro at 26. A late bloomer. He started with a small Austrian team. An adventure. "I've never had a home, a place where, whatever happens, I can always go back to. But I don't think that's so bad. Because I have no home, I dare to take risks." A lot of people advised me against taking a tiny contract with that Austrian team. But what was I risking? It could have been a sh!t year, yeah. But what's a year in a person's life?"

Meanwhile, Adam has a house. Not in Australia, not in Austria, nor in Taiwan or Hong Kong. "I live in the Czech Republic all year round. I've stayed there longer than anywhere else. I moved there for love, what else? SInce then, she's become my ex, but I stayed in her country. As a cyclist I had a couple of conditions for a house and Czech met them: an airport nearby, hills I can train on and a good climate. For me that means either summer all year round or the four seasons in their purest form." A rider that loves the extreme winter? Hansen nods. "If it's really wintery, not just raining, you don't get wet. SO you don't get cold. So you don't get sick. SO you can keep training. Although not on the bike, but in other ways. cross country skiing, crosstraining, skiing... I love all of those. Another advantage of the Czech winters is that the snowfall stays for weeks. I can use virgin snow that nobody has stepped on." Hansen sighs. "You know, I really look forward to the first snow of the year. Skiing weather"

Whiz Kid
It's time for a massage. The table stands in a modest room where there's barely room for the soigneur. The window is open and the muggy heat is blowing in. Hansen takes off his trousers and T Shirt and lays down. The smell of massage oil and men's sweat fills the room. While his calves get a skilled kneading, he talks about his craft. "I truly love cycling" he says. A requirement for a cyclist, you'd think but it's not so. "I know riders who don't like cycling, they just do it for money. These are the riders who never win anything. They hardly ever attack. Those riders, thats... Peloton-filling" He shakes his head "The problem with that sort of guy is that they've never had a real job so they don't know how lucky they are with their cycling career."

Adam Hansen had a real job himself, for a couple of years. "I worked in IT as a programmer. I sat for hours every day in front of a computer screen fighting against a deadline. Managers who can't write a letter of code gave us impossible tasks. Once we had to make a program that would calculate the worth of real-estate based on more than a hundred parameters. 'It must be ready in 3 months' they said, whilst we actually needed half a year.The whole team ended up working 14 hour days for 3 months we stayed at the office, slept and drank thousands of litres of coffee. But the project was ready on time." Hansen looks me straight in the eyes "You can imagine how happy I was when was able to get paid to go cycling."

And still programming remains a passion for Hansen. "Programming and solving puzzles: I can spend hours on those. I take a couple of Rubik cubes with me everywhere, my weapon of choice to clear my head. I have a sleeping problem, because i think too much. I can't switch my brain off. But give me a Rubik cube and I stop thinking. That little toy brings my brain total rest."

The Australian has also brought his programming knowledge to the service of his team. He wrote a program to make the logistics within the team easier. "In that program sits all the info for riders and staff: contact details, data, race programmes, transport, flight details... There's also a messenger system where we can communicate internally with each other." Hansen wrote the programme for free "I wanted to give something back to the team. PLus I also saw an opportunity. IAM and MTN are starting to use the program now and there's another couple of teams interested. They have to pay, of course. The investment has paid off."