by Chris Baldwin

@##=#<4,r>@##=#Four-time Olympic medalist, three-time Tour de France stage winner, two-time stage winner at the Dauphine Libere, winner of the Tour Down Under, the Herald Sun Tour, the Australian National Championships and the HEW Cyclassics Cup in Germany, Stuart O’Grady is one freckly dude.

Whole portions of his legs and arms are given over to beds of rusty brown and flaming whorls of skin. His head is shaved nearly to the scalp, but one gets the sense standing up close that his hair is as orange as his name is Irish.

O’Grady is a designated sprinter on Team CSC, a Danish-based squad that last year was the number one ranked professional cycling team in the world. He joined them this Fall after a much-ballyhooed and brand new Italian team sponsored by none other than Sony failed to materialize and left O’Grady, along with more than a few of cycling’s top stars, teamless in the off-season and scrambling for jobs.

A sprinter’s job is rather straightforward. Hide in the wheels of your teammates until the end of the race, then barge up to the front and ride faster than everybody else until you win. Over his career O’Grady has transcended that duty and become more of an all-rounder, witnessed perhaps most spectacularly when he came around a small breakaway led by Axel Merckx, Jan Ullrich, Paolo Bettini and Igor Astarloa in the 2004 HEW-Classic with less than five kilometers to go and stormed to victory on the streets of Hamburg.

Also of note was the argy-bargy head butt he received from fellow Aussie Robbie McEwen in a drunken punch up at a wedding.

No, wait. That’s the Radiohead album playing in the background. O’Grady and McEwen made like Brokeback Mountainbikers in the third stage of last year’s Tour de France, nestling up into each others’ arms in the final 100 meters of a straight-away sprint and wishing not to quit one another until after the finish. Judges saw it otherwise and relegated McEwen to the back of the line, while Stuey, as those who have only met him once but are otherwise desperate for a pronoun instead of ‘he’ sometimes call the man, took third.

@##=#<6,L>@##=#The sunshine of California might have played a part in splotching his skin, but judging from the huge cupboards aboard the rented motorhome Team CSC was using on the road from San Francisco to Los Angeles, there was no shortage of sunscreen. Neither was there a lack of espresso, food or pointy helmets, but O’Grady was not once seen riding his time trial bike on the warm-up trainer drinking coffee and eating crunchy peanut butter clif bars all while fully helmeted. His nameless teammate, initials Dave Zabriskie, was.

NY Velocity sat down with O’Grady in the spacious and spaciously decorated hotel lobby of the LAX Marriott, complete with its own Starbuck’s and free apples at check-in, and asked him about the future of bike racing in America.

NYV: What did you think of racing in America for the first time on the road? Does it sit better with you than slogging it out in cold and snowy Belgium?

@##=#<5,r>@##=#SO’G: “I’d personally much prefer to race here. It’s much better preparation; the weather’s a lot better. The racing in Europe is good, it’s hard and everything, but it’s just all tradition. For the sport to evolve it needs more races like this, like what we’ve had here this week. I think this is a better platform for the Classics than doing one-day races in Belgium”

NYV: As much as everyone is declaiming the success of this week’s Tour of California, do you foresee rapid growth in American professional racing? Does that ultimately mean that domestic American pros are as good as in Europe, or that races in America can have the same kind of quality as over there?

SO’G: “It’s still kind of difficult. The American level this week has proven that it’s good, but you can’t quite find the quality like there is in Europe. But there’s definitely no reason why there can’t be more of a world tour, I think they just have to coincide the dates well. Why not? The sport is becoming more global, with races in Australia and Malaysia. We’ve been here for three weeks as it is, so I’m sure European teams can manage to come here for a month and do a couple of tours. As long as the dates fall into place and don’t conflict too much with the B-classics.”

NYV: Does that mean that the Americans are by default one level down from the Europeans, or is it that the racing is simply different and impossible to compare?

@##=#<1,L>@##=#SO’G: “Well most of the European guys here haven’t done too much racing this year. To be honest, I think the Americans are probably a lot better prepared than the European guys, like myself. We’ve just done training camps. Obviously this is a big deal for the American teams, racing on their home turf. This is a pretty big event for them, they’ve come out with all guns blazing. Hopefully we can see more races like this in the future.”

NYV: When you went to the kick-off gala party the Friday before the prologue and they gave all the riders a gift bag, there was a T-shirt, some cookies from the Ghirardelli chocolate factory, a bag of organic sandwich wraps and an iPod. Did you ever get gifts like that at other races around the world?

SO’G: “Definitely don’t get iPods. That’s the coolest present I ever got at a bike race. It’s the little things like that that count. The riders remember, and everybody goes home with a prize.”

NYV: Finally, what is cycling going to look like in 10 years, after you’ve retired and the ProTour is (or isn’t) in full swing and the very character of the sport is fundamentally changed. Where will the emphasis be for a young professional who has yet to enter the big leagues of cycling?

SO’G: “I think what we’re seeing now, especially with the ProTour, is the smaller races in Europe are becoming smaller, they are becoming less and less important. There’s so much emphasis on the ProTour events and the big classics now. Me for example, I don’t’ want to go race those small races in Europe because there’s really no point. It’s better to stay home and train properly for the big events. Unfortunately, Europe’s got a lot of tradition and that can be good and that can be bad. I think races like the Tour of California make the sport evolve in a positive direction.”