BACK UP TO SPEED
It was six in the morning when Christophe Sercu’s phone rang. “Walter?” the Lotto-Adecco manager wearily queried from his bed in Belgium to his director sportif Walter Planckaert. “Morning. Robbie won today.”
The same phone call repeated itself two days later. And the day after. Oh, and two days after that. Robbie McEwen’s first week riding with his new team had yielded a quartet of victories at the 2002 Tour Down Under in just six stages. “Walter rang me every morning from Australia saying that he won again,” Sercu says. “Every time it was so very early. So early. But he was having an impact already.”
Indeed. Before McEwen raced in the red of the Belgian team with his new team-mates, he had already won four times: twice at the Geelong Bay Crits and in becoming Australian national road and criterium champion. “I hadn’t lost in the Lotto jersey before I raced with my new team. I was in red hot form. I felt so incredible,” he recalls.
Remarkably, just a few weeks prior to his domination in his home country, McEwen was preparing to spend Christmas unemployed, the lowest nadir of a “terrible” first two years of the new century. Despite winning a few times in 2000 riding for Farm Frites, the season “was a blowout – a disaster for everyone. Badly managed.” In 2001 with Domo-Farm Frites he was “treated like a second-class citizen” and his management couldn’t find him a team for the
