Former Irish international rider Daniel Stewart announced last month that he was walking away from cycling with no immediate plans to race again. He said the response to his blog where he speaks about his battle with depression was huge and he's determined to discover new challenges in life.
By Brian Canty
Daniel Stewart has said he has no plans to race the bike any time soon as he goes about plotting a new course in life after deciding to walk away from professional cycling at the age of 21 years.
The former An Post Chainreaction team rider recently published a really honest article on his blog where he talked about the depression that affected every aspect of his life.
“It took me about 15 attempts to do the blog,” he said.
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“Every time I got to the end I felt it was too depressing and I felt you wouldn’t want to read it.
“I think it was quite difficult to write something where it was about a different thing (walking away from cycling as opposed to depression) but you still had to keep it uplifting to get people to read it.
“That was the real challenge. It was more for me and for my own closure why I wrote it.
“I felt if I posted something on social media, people would be asking me questions like why am I not in Belgium racing.
"So I thought a blog opened everything up for me and it was a real relief to get it out in the open.”
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The post has since been retweeted by the head of British Cycling as well as a number of well-known publications and a few weeks on, Stewart is now more at ease with himself.
“It got a really good response and it was really reassuring to hear a lot of other people’s stories regarding depression and hard times in sport.
“It was unexpected, I didn’t expect it would have the impact its’ had.
“I think of all the blogs I’ve written it was the only one where I didn’t care how many people looked at it but ironically, it was the one with the most amount of views.”
For now, Stewart is enjoying being a normal 21-year old; working a normal 9-5 and visiting his other half in the UK.
He’s ridden the bike since he was three years old and won’t stop now – though racing has been knocked on the head.
“I’m always going to ride my bike but as far as racing is concerned it all depends on how much training I can do.
"I plan to move to London for a college course but I know it can be quite hard to train there.
“I can see myself maybe doing open races next year but it all depends. I’m doing a lot of running now so that’s more likely.”
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