BREAKING THE CHAIN
He was relentlessly pursued by his own demons. Now, after three suicide attempts and a battle with alcohol, Graeme Obree has finally found his age of calm...
SCOTLAND’s greatest cyclist takes a seat in a supermarket café, oblivious to the squeals of kids in the adjacent play area and the incessant beeps of tills. Graeme Obree has figuratively pushed his bike firmly up against the wall of any scottish hall of fame. Today, it is parked outside a Kilmarnock store. He is fit, fresh and lucid as he states his views without rancour. Any argument, incidentally, about his pre-eminence should be addressed to sir Chris Hoy who places his countryman at the very top of the Caledonian mountain of success.
Obree’s take on his career is somewhat at odds to the tributes and praise that accompany a cyclist who held the world hour record twice, in 1993 and 1994, and was world pursuit champion over 4,000 metres in 1993 and 1995.
‘What I achieved was meaningless. An alien would look down and see someone riding around in a wooden bowl in a strange contraption. It is about as significant as being the world cherry spitting champion,’ he insists.
But he says this with a smile and a languid stretch of his frame. The demeanour is significant. Obree was once pursued by demons. They almost caught him. He has survived three suicide attempts and a debilitating relationship with alcohol that has now been severed completely. He has been perilously close to the ditch. He is still on the road.
‘You have to find a new perspective,’ he says. ‘Then you don’t have to find somewhere where you can hide. I will put bike racing in the same category as alcohol, suicide, self-harm. They are all mechanisms for an obsessive escaping from the moment.’
He is, at 52, in an age of personal calm. ‘I have my troubles and things I have to deal with,’ he says. ‘I have my issues. But happiness, sadness, whatever, they are like the weather: they come and go. But I have a contentment.’
His life has been both chronicled and dramatised in the feature film The Flying Scotsman and in the documentary,
Battle Mountain. Both capture the athlete fuelled by obsession, dogged by doubt, driven by interior forces to the very edge of the abyss.
‘You could argue that the moment someone declares: “I must be world champion” they should be submitted for a psychological assessment for displaying a sign of mental illness,’ he says. ‘Medals, records, sporting achievements…they don’t mean anything except what has come out of them in personal understanding.’
He adds quickly: ‘I reached the top of the ladder and there were no steps left. I was left with me.’
This individual now is a leading speaker and writer. His training manual for cyclists has been reprinted with a new afterword and he is completing a more rounded, reflective work that he intends to call Enough. The proposed title shouts the importance of giving up on old ways.
‘Most of my behaviour was about escape,’ says Obree. ‘The cycling was certainly about finding a way out. There is effort, extreme effort, when you are stretching yourself physically. But no pain. The pain of pushing the limits in the bike was less than the perceived pain of not achieving.
‘That really hurt at a deeply emotional level. I bought into the idea that human beings had worth and I didn’t feel I had enough of it. Cycling was there to give me worth.’
When it repeatedly failed to provide that, despite the baubles and the praise, Obree slumped into despair. ‘suicide is the ultimate escapism,’ he says.
His greatest triumph is to have analysed the character who needed to win and then retooled himself as a personality who holds empathy and the imperative to help others in need as the most important principles in his life.
‘I just don’t want to hurt people close to me anymore,’ he says.
His relationship with his children and former wife is strong. Crucially, his relationship with the past is at peace, too.
‘It was always about more,’ he says of life on a bike. The pursuit was of a feeling rather than a time or a fellow competitor. This fleeting sense of accomplishment would evaporate quickly, leaving a desperate down.
‘I know athletes who have smashed records in long-distance events and before they get to the finish line they are thinking: “What next?”. I have been world champion twice and held world records, but that sense of wellbeing these gave did not last long. All you are left with is the sense of depression and the need to do more, be faster, be more successful. It is about emotional survival for some.’
Obree famously and loudly refused to take performanceenhancing drugs, a stance that contributed significantly to his short-lived career as a team road racer. ‘I am still against drugs in competitive sport,’ he says.
‘For me, I took my stance because I wanted no future regret. It would have compromised my sense of achievement. It was about beating other people. I didn’t want to feel I had achieved that with drugs.’
He is reasonable and considered on the debate surrounding Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, British winners of the Tour de France. Wiggins has been assailed by questions over the ethics of his therapeutic use exemptions and Froome has registered an abnormally high reading for salbutamol after using an inhaler to treat asthma.
‘There is something I will defend to the very end,’ says Obree. ‘It is the principle of the Magna Carta. A man will be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law by his peers. Has that happened with them? I will not condemn them. I will not judge them until that occurs.’
He is similarly forgiving on Lance Armstrong, a winner of seven successive Tours de France before all were wiped from the records because of doping defences.
‘The lesson of Lance Armstrong? There is never enough. If he had stopped after six Tour wins, he would most likely not have been caught. But he had to come back. He could not stop,’ adds Obree.
‘I feel sorry for him. I see his restlessness, his discontent. He is now on the starting lines of triathlons. That feeling of achievement has gone and he is chasing it again.’
Obree has declared himself a non-runner in any field of competitive sport. ‘I love riding my bike. But it is an unconditional love,’ he says. ‘I can do 80 miles a day or just ride until I see a nice spot to lie down and relax. I don’t need to accomplish anything.’
This would seem an odd message for a speaker charged with enthusing students, business people or sporting aspirants.
Obree chuckles at this observation, adding: ‘I stood up the other week in front of business people from all over the world and I sensed they were bracing themselves for the usual stuff… dig deep, you can overcome anything, use your strength of will, believe and it will happen.
‘But I say: “Let’s talk about the real stuff’’. I know exactly what you will do for the rest of your life. You will make the next decision and have the next reaction. That’s it. Life is about making a decision and then feeling the emotion. The quality of the decision depends on perspective. Mental illness is where I had very little perspective or even a perspective that was wrong.
‘I have learned through experience to find another perspective. I value empathy. I live simply and in the moment. Embrace your feelings or you will be destroyed by them.’
This message is proving both educational and alluring to his disparate groups of listeners, but its biggest beneficiary is Obree.
He has suffered awfully in the past, so has he no fear of the return of the impulses and behaviours that tempted death?
‘Adversity? I have had much of it but I know now when it comes along it is a gift. It tests your resolve and you are better for that,’ he says.
The once compulsive chaser of times and other cyclists adds: ‘I need nothing, want nothing, I am searching for nothing.’
The last is a minor inaccuracy. ‘I need to buy some apples, so I will have to find the fruit aisle,’ he says, an all-time great disappearing into the anonymity of a supermarket on a Friday afternoon.