Rohan Dennis has said while he had issues with his former team, Bahrain Merida, and it broke promises that were made to him, his fear that his relationship with his wife would end was the main reason he suddenly abandoned the Tour de France last year.
The two-time world TT champion said he ultimately feared
he would end up divorced and living alone less than a year after his first
child was born.
He has told the Home Roads podcast, with Matt Barbet, that his wife had a very frank conversation with him before the Tour and had said some things that were not easy for him to hear.
He explained that had he continued with his approach to cycling at that time, rather than re-set his career, he feared the break-up for his marriage, to former pro rider Melissa Hoskins.
Advertisement
And so he pulled into the side of the road the day before the Tour TT in Pau, which he was favourite to win, and abandoned the race.
However, his wife's approach resulted in a badly-needed reset and since then Dennis has won his second world title and been snapped up by Team Ineos.
The emotion of what had been going on in his personal life was obvious in the footage of Dennis, his wife and their child, together just after he crossed the line in Yorkshire, below.
At the time he abandoned the Tour last July some of his colleagues in the peloton said he was unhappy with the clothing and bike being supplied for his TTs and Dennis has now confirmed in a roundabout way this was true, but added they were a smaller part of the reason he left the Tour.
“There was a whole range of things,” Dennis told Barbet when asked what was behind his Tour withdrawal.
“Yes, there were a lot of details that were overlooked
(by the team). There were things that were promised that never eventuated. But
they were the small things to be honest with you. The little detailed things
were the small things.
“There were things going on behind the scenes for months
that just eventually… that one little drop of water started spilling over the
top of the glass.
“So I’d had a pretty frank conversation with my wife not
too long before the Tour. It wasn’t a good one for me to hear, to be honest. It
made me really think about the person I was becoming.
Related News
“And that one little drop that tipped me over the edge… I could see myself basically going down a road that I knew if I didn’t pull the anchors down, basically pull the handbrake, and just go ‘no, I’m not going down this road’ and just change route, it was going to end badly; maybe not in the next week or two at that point but I couldn’t turn back from it.
“So I was, like, ‘it’s not worth it, cycling isn’t the be
all and end all of living and there’s a lot more to life that this’. I want to
be happy, I don’t want to be a miserable person, really let’s be honest,
potentially living by myself, another statistic of a professional athlete whose
gone through a divorce with a kid that’s less than a year old.
“I thought ‘there’s more to life that that, I’m not going down that road, I’m out’. And I just pulled into the feed zone,” he said of his abandoning the Tour on stage 12.
Dennis said because he was paid well and had money behind
him, he could choose to stop and he believed “a lot of people envied me and
they hated me for it”. He suggested many other people couldn’t make that sudden
decision because they had a mortgage to pay and other commitments.
And he believed he became “unstuck” with the general
public at the time because he was in that position and he exercised the freedom
his financial position brought him.
Dennis said in the eight week period after he left the Tour,
he had endured some of the hardest times of his life.
“I was struggling more than I let on during that period and I was lucky I had some very good people around me,” he said.
Dennis added his sports psychologist was living with him
in the run-up to the worlds to ensure he wouldn’t “break”, saying he read a lot
of things about himself in the media and it came to “consume” him.
After his withdrawal from the Tour on stage 12 he never raced for Bahrain Merida again but trained on his own and came back to racing, riding for Australia, at the World Championships in Yorkshire last September where he retained his TT crown.
Dennis caught Primoz Roglic for three minutes and he said that 16km into the 54km TT he knew he had won the title, he was going so well.
Dennis (29) has since been snapped up by Team Ineos and
he is aiming to win the world TT title for the next two years, which would make
for four TT crowns in a row; something that has never been done before.
He also said he wanted to win the Olympic TT and if he won it and the world title in the same year, that would be another first in male cycling.
The Home Roads podcast has just released a bunch of quality interviews, including Dennis, Tom Pidcock, Ian Boswell, Lachlan Morton and Alex Howes and can be accessed by following this link.
Topics
