Heinrich Haussler celebrates the greatest moment of his cycling career; winning a stage of the 2009 Tour de France, solo. Less than 12 months later he was held in a German prison cell after being arrested for drunk driving, an incident that he looks back on with deep regret.
By Brian Canty
Heinrich Haussler has opened up about the alcohol addiction that threatened to derail his career when he turned professional over 10 years ago.
In a warts and all interview with Rouleur, the Australian international described how he drank the night before races, treated his body like “shit”, crashed his car while drunk and in his own words was “a dickhead”.
The Tour de France and Vuelta A Espana stage winner will race for Team Bahrain Merida in 2017 and has his life very much back on track – but it was not always so.
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“I was just wishing, please wake up. Please wake up now, this is a bad dream, this is a bad dream,” he recalls of the time he sat in a Berlin prison cell after being arrested for drunk driving in May 2010.
He blacked out having consumed so much alcohol and the drove his car, hitting another vehicle at a junction.
“If something had happened to anybody, I don’t think that’s something I would have been able to live with,” he said of that incident.
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At the time, as a young man in his 20s the temptation to go out and party like many of his friends was too great for him to resist. So he just gave into it.
It didn’t even seem to affect him as he won his one and only stage of the Vuelta in 2005 having been boozing until 4am that morning with a teammate.
“I didn’t feel fine, but when you’re younger, you can do stuff like that," he said of winning a Grand Tour stage after a late night.
“Now, firstly, I don’t want to do it, it’s bad for your body. Secondly, it’s just not possible. It’s stupid."
That drunk-driving ban proved the tipping point as he sought help from a psychiatrist.
“In the beginning, I didn’t open up whatsoever. I was like ‘I don’t have an alcohol problem.’
“But then you go more often, you open up and then they tell you how the body works.
“When you’re at a younger age and drink that much, you’ve got this thing in your brain where you switch out, that stays like that forever.
“That’s why you get these blackouts. You numb your brain. That’s why you don’t spew, why you can reach those levels. Because the brain doesn’t function, it can’t say ‘enough’.”
The full interview can be read here.
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