How the Detour Was Born – A Very Accidental Beginning

People often ask me how the Detour started. They expect a grand plan or some clever strategy. The truth is far more chaotic and far more fun.

In 2004 I took a group of characters to the Tour de France. One of them was Ian Jones, better known as Emu, who brought along his home movie camera and filmed the whole circus. When he got home, he handed the tapes to his son Dan, who was an aspiring film student. Dan stitched it all together. It was rough, it was shaky, it was full of laughs, but there was something there. A spark.

The following year Dan came to me with the idea of making a documentary about travelling with me at the Tour. I told him I would look into it, but realistically it was never going to happen. The licensing was a nightmare and SBS held the Australian rights. It was a non-starter.

Then fate stepped in.

I got a call from Mike Tomalaris, the face of SBS cycling. SBS were going live every day for the first time, but budget cuts meant they only had one crew. They could not be at both the start and the finish. Mike was lamenting the situation and I mentioned that a young filmmaker had approached me about shooting a documentary. If SBS could get him accreditation he could cover the starts.

Mike perked up immediately. “Does he have a Betacam” he asked. “Yes” I said, without the slightest idea what Dan actually had.

I rang Dan straight away. “Mate, you are a chance to come to the Tour. Do you have a Betacam” He laughed. “No chance. That thing costs eighty grand.” “Well” I said, “you had better find out how to rent one.”

Next thing we knew we were on a plane to Paris. Dan was trying to work out how to use the camera and I was wondering what on earth I had just unleashed.

And just like that, the Detour was born.

Why the Tour Meant So Much

A prominent Melbourne newspaper editor once told his sports staff that no matter what happened at the Tour de France he could not sell a single extra paper because of it. In other words, nobody cared.

I wonder what he thought in 2011 when thirty five thousand people packed into the centre of Melbourne to welcome home Cadel Evans. Or the following year when one hundred and fifty thousand fans lined the streets of Geelong for the World Championships. That is half as many again as the AFL Grand Final.

Australians cared. They cared deeply. And I had known that long before the crowds proved it.

I had raced briefly as a professional in Europe in the late seventies and early eighties. I had always been obsessed with the big races. The Giro. The Classics. And of course the Tour. I never made it to the Tour as a rider, although I did have one crack at the Giro d Italia. The Tour remained the dream.

So in 1991 I decided to revisit those days. I convinced my old mate Simon Townley, a brilliant sports journalist and former editor of the Melbourne Sun, to tackle the Tour with me. We had no plan, which to be fair has remained a theme of every Detour trip since.

We got accredited, hired a car and set off. Each night we would knock on the doors of tiny hotels and bed and breakfasts until we found a bed. It was surprisingly easy back then. These days you would have more luck finding a unicorn.

It was not glamorous. It was not organised. But it was magic.

Word got out and soon other cycling mates wanted in. Before long I was running a full blown touring operation with a dozen mates at a time, all chasing the race and all living the Detour life. They would get media accreditation too, which astonished the occasional real journalist who joined us. Ron Reed, the great Olympic writer, just shook his head at how easily we slipped into the media pack.

The Detour Spirit

One of my regular travellers was Gerry Ryan. He loved the Tour so much he eventually decided Australia needed its own team. Some people say Gerry’s greatest achievement is surviving five Tours with me. He is a great bloke and Australian cycling is lucky to have him.

His passion led to the creation of GreenEDGE, a team that was proudly Australian but wonderfully cosmopolitan. When Daryl Impey wore the yellow jersey in the one hundredth Tour it felt like the whole country was riding with him.

And the Detour kept growing. More characters. More stories. More chaos. More laughs.

We would tell people the best way to experience the Tour was simple. Pick a town, buy a bottle of rosé and join the locals. You did not need to speak the language. You just needed a smile.

The advertising caravan would roll through first with loud music, wild floats and people throwing lollies and hats into the crowd. Then the helicopters would appear on the horizon, signalling the race was close. The breakaway might be half an hour up the road. The peloton would thunder past. The stragglers would fight the time cut. Then you would jump in the car, take the off race route and do it all again in the next village.

The mountains were something else entirely. The Alps and Pyrenees turned into tent cities with hundreds of thousands of fans camping for days, partying all night and creating an atmosphere unlike anything else in sport. No barriers. No fences. Just humanity spilling onto the road.

It is a miracle there are not more accidents.

But standing on top of an Hors Category climb, looking down at the twisting roads below, you realise what an extraordinary sport this is. The suffering. The beauty. The madness. The theatre.

The Detour Today

The Tour has changed. The world has changed. But the Detour spirit remains the same. Storytelling, characters, chaos and the joy of being part of something bigger than yourself.

What started with a dodgy home movie camera, a rented Betacam and a young filmmaker trying to figure out which button did what became a cultural touchstone for Australian cycling fans.

And to think it all began because Emu Jones brought a camcorder to France and his son Dan knew how to turn chaos into a story.

That is the Detour. Always has been. Always will be.