The Long Road to Paris

"My mind took control of my body. I had nothing left in the legs but as a cyclist, you just keep going until the finish. I kept reminding myself that I had to get to the finish..." Filled with never-before-seen pictures and revealing insights into the thoughts of the champion, this book celebrates in words and photographs Cadel Evans's indomitable will and champion's heart. Cadel Evans's hard-fought triumphs and equally challenging disappointments - in the bicycle races that are thought to be the most grueling endurance test in sports - are a tribute to his strength of the human spirit. His heroic battle to be the first Australian to win the biggest cycling race in the world, the Tour de France, has been an inspiration. A rare and fascinating look at the way a top rider races both mentally and physically.

Cadel Evans is arguably Australia's greatest cyclist but he is no typical sporting hero. A master of one of the most solitary sports, Evans has contested the most sophisticated cycling team sport in the world, finishing second by less than a minute in the 2007 and 2008 editions of the Tour de France. Uncomfortable with media attention throughout his extraordinary career, Evans nevertheless became an ambassador for his sport and helped inspire the new popularity of cycling in Australia, a long way from Europe, the cycling continent, where the sport is lost and won. Evans was born with an incredible gift: a physiology, an aerobic capacity, that from youth, set him apart from the rest. This is a story of someone who climbs mountains in agony, for the bliss of the release at the top - in a sport of great ascents and descents, and Evans knows them all. Cadel talks candidly and philosophically about his sport, with love and respect and frustration too - that it is not perfect. His drive and focus and frustrations are as candid as his love of his sport.