“Well fellas, who’s up for a dip?”
These are not words that one usually hears in my line of work. They were spoken by Svein Tuft, then a professional cyclist. I was stood in the Pyrenees and in front of me was a small pool that Svein had created by using boulders to dam a stream running down from the mountains.
I had travelled to Andorra to interview him for a feature in the magazine and on a warm summer day this would have been a lovely way to cool down. However, this was not a warm summer day. It was mid-November and summer could hardly have felt further off. Nevertheless, in the pursuit of journalistic inquiry, I took the plunge. I later wrote:
‘We will never be here again,’ reads Tuft’s right forearm, a tattoo he got during his twenties. It is the sort of motto that advocates stripping off and slipping into freezing cold water to soak up the Tuft philosophy, an alluring, exhilarating and addictive, if frequently uncomfortable, way of experiencing the world. Small flakes of snow, whipped up off the mountain peaks, begin to fall.
It was one of the most extraordinary features I had the pleasure of researching and writing, and unlike anything I had done before. Over the course of about seven hours, Rouleur photographer Michael Blann and I were treated to stories from Svein’s life as we hiked up and down the mountains surrounding his home. There were stories of boxcar hopping, bike touring, Giro snowstorms, jiu jitsu, altitude camps on a nearby mountain tops, barefoot hiking, scandalous South American racing, and more. I crammed as many as I could into 3,000 words but left Andorra feeling like I had barely scratched the surface.
I then spoke to a few people involved with Svein and heard how his stories – both about his life before cycling and his holistic philosophy during his cycling career – had impacted them. According to Luke Durbridge, his frequent roommate on what was then Mitchelton-Scott, “pretty much every night was story time and I was mesmerised.”
However, I wasn’t looking for a big project and I never considered myself a ghost-writer, although I had done a lot of it before in shorter form. I think I probably just had a selfish curiosity. At some point in the next year or so I got back in touch to ask Svein if he had ever considered writing a book. The answer was that he would mull it over. “In a lot of ways, writing a book is not me, but when I share these stories with people and I see how much they get out of them, that’s the motivating factor,” he later said.
The idea got knocked back and forth for a while. Life got in the way for both of us. One day in October 2019, Svein sent me a text to say he was up for it. As it happened, that text landed on my phone on the same day that I myself landed in New Zealand with a two-year visa. Of course we didn’t know how world events would soon transpire and that soon enough he would have all the time in the world to tell his stories, and I would have all the time in the world to listen. Funny how things work out.
By the time we were done recording I had half a million words transcribed on my laptop (enough in theory for five books). The following Christmas I found myself living in my van parked on a friend’s field. Ten days later, without internet or distractions save for a few mountains and swimming holes of my own, I had the first draft.
Of course, it’s all more complicated than all that. But, long story short, the book is here and it is called “We Will Never Be Here Again”. The working title was “How the fuck did I end up here?” but that would definitely have caused us problems (the phrase lives on in the book, just not on the front cover).
The stories Svein shared and the issues that we explored together were as good as I had hoped they would be, and also brought a depth and context to the clichés that had accompanied Svein’s career (i.e. that picture of him pedalling to Alaska with a huge dog on a homemade trailer, which admittedly did take place). With 300 pages of book to play with, we could simply let the stories speak for themselves.
A lot of the book is about cycling, though it’s about cycling in a way that you’ve probably never read before. Equally a lot of the book is not really about cycling at all. It’s just a book about life.
As Svein writes, without giving too much more away: “It comes back to how you can create yourself a cage, or an open mountain range. It’s kinda your choice. That’s my biggest point. When I think back to that life I lived as a younger man, I was truly free. I was free of any trappings. I didn’t have stuff. All I wanted to do was go and live stuff. That’s the biggest thing I want to hit home with. You have the choice in this life.”
We Will Never Be Here Again: Adventures in cycling from the wilderness to the Tour de France by Svein Tuft and Richard Abraham is available to pre-order here.
