SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Svein Tuft didn’t fidget in his seat, but you could tell he wasn’t comfortable. He seemed out of place, kind of like a grizzly bear in a wine bar.
He sat in the airy, woody restaurant of Team Garmin-Slipstream’s posh DoubleTree Hotel headquarters at the start of the Tour of California. The Boulder- based team has long since gone big-time. They travel to Australia and Qatar. And travel first class.
To Tuft, first class meant water that won’t give him dysentery and a tent that doesn’t collapse.
Tuft, 31, has done many things since he dropped out of school in Langley, British Columbia, at 15. Cycled off on a $40 bike with a trailer hauling 200 pounds of food and a dog for 1,200 miles. Hitchhiked to climb B.C.’s tallest peaks. Snow camped for a month at a time. Train hopped.
Now he’s in a restaurant with big-screen TVs and a wine list doing an interview.
“I struggle with that because I never feel in place in these kinds of environments,” Tuft said. “I never have. Even with bike racing in general, I don’t feel like I’m part of it.”
Garmin-Slipstream is making him part of it. Underneath his seemingly perpetual two-day grizzle and Paul Bunyan lifestyle lies one of the most talented bike racers in the world.
Team director Jonathan Vaughters, his teammate six years ago on a continental club called Prime Alliance, signed him in September and is trying to tap this raw commodity, like a baseball scout who finds a can’t-miss shortstop in a remote Dominican village.
With hardly any international experience, Tuft took second in last year’s World Championships time trial, seventh in the Olympics and first in the Pan Ams. Tuft was in 20th place overall here Saturday when he crashed and suffered a concussion in Stage 7 of the Tour of California. His next race is Tirreno-Adriatico March 11-17 in Italy.
“I remember in 2003 I thought, ‘If this guy ever gets serious and loses that spare tire, he’s going to fly,’ ” Vaughters said. “I just didn’t think he would because, looking at his personality, he was just doing it for fun.”
Which kind of explains why he and friends would hitchhike all over Vancouver Island, climbing such peaks as the 14,400-foot Mount Waddington. They’d find rides in logging camps, climb a mountain, then bushwhack all the way home.
Then one day at 18, he just packed up a makeshift trailer with food and his 80-pound dog, Bear, and started biking north into the Canadian Rockies.
“One of my problems with school was I just didn’t feel like I was learning anything,” he said. “I felt like I was in jail.”
He wound up earning a makeshift masters in survival skills. He rode up to Bella Coola, where grizzlies eye pleasure craft plying the waterways north of the Coast Mountains. He’d spend his days hiking for water, shoveling his tent out of the snow and getting in a few snowboard runs if all went well.
Twice he rode his bike, this time a respectable mountain bike, 2,000 miles to Alaska. He still gets dreamy-eyed thinking of that one Kodak moment. He was coming out of a pass heading toward B.C.’s Frazier River, and a warm wind came down the valley, enveloping him like an old comfy sweater.
“That’s what sold me,” he said. “That was it: This is the greatest time. It was surreal.”
Then again, so was this: One time the jacket he had tied to his trailer fell off, along with $60 in the pocket. That can buy a lot of jerky. He was 360 miles from home. He cycled for 20 hours his last day and had one can of beans all day.
“I showed up at my dad’s place,” he said. “I walked right past him and went to the fridge.”
His father didn’t cross-check him back to school. Arne Tuft was an adventurer himself. He left his native Norway for Canada when he was 24 after reading “The Call of the Wild” and went into the forestry service. He and his now ex-wife, Lesly, a fitness instructor, would take Svein and his older brother up to a ski hill for days on end in their motor home.
They were in full support, sort of.
“I was thinking what any other mother would think. It was pretty frightening,” Lesly said. “I was worried about him. But he got what he was looking for. He was always a level-headed person, and we trusted what he was doing.”
Such as, oh . . . train-hopping. No, he wasn’t a bum. He was a hobo — and proud of it. Tuft and a friend, a veteran who had ridden rails all the way to Mexico, would crisscross B.C. during summer months sitting atop a grain car.
“If you have a real outgoing, good outlook on life, it’s a lot easier to do that stuff,” Tuft said. “I ran into people who were like, ‘Oh, my God. Why are you doing this?’ They would talk only about the hardships or what they believed to be the hardships. That was totally not apparent to me. I didn’t see any of the stuff they were talking about.”
Train-hopping and bike-touring might be fun, but the pay stinks. During these mad dashes of freedom, however, Tuft reignited a competitiveness with roots dating back to his snowboarding races against his brother as a kid.
He remembers one time laboring up a mountain, dragging a trailer, food and a German shepherd mix that felt more like a rhino. Another cyclist on a tricked-out touring bike came alongside.
“I was pretty much dropping this guy,” Tuft said. “It was my mentality. That’s when I kind of knew.”
One thing he would also know: He didn’t like pro cycling. It wasn’t the training regimen. It wasn’t the structure. It was the constant stories of doping in the sport. Also, he wasn’t very good.
So at about the same time Vaughters retired from Prime Alliance at age 30, Tuft did at 25. However, he kept training. He was amazed at how fast and how far he could cycle when not hauling a month’s worth of food and an 80-pound dog.
He needed to give it another try, and he found the perfect outlet with Symmetrics, a Canadian team full of young, hungry Canadians.
“In life, you have so little time to do something like this,” he said. “You have many years after to go and do all the backcountry ski touring and the trips I want to do. The great things of this sport outweigh everything else for me.”
That’s when he began tearing it up internationally, made a splash in Beijing, and when Symmetrics began to tilt financially, he came back onto Vaughters’ radar. Today, Tuft is one of the key support riders in getting Christian Vande Velde upon the podium at the Tour de France this July.
“Now that he’s decided this is what he wants to do, you can tell he has turned the work ethic he was using being an outdoorsman and he’s kind of turned that into cycling,” Vaughters said.
And the best thing about Tuft?
Said Vaughters: “He doesn’t complain when travel days are long.”
John Henderson: 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com
Svein Tuft bio
Team: Garmin-Slipstream
Home: Langley, British Columbia
Dimensions: 5-feet-9, 170 pounds
Strength: Time trials
Turned pro: 2001
Career highlights:
2008 — Second place, World Time Trial Championships
2007 — First overall, UCI American Pro Tour points standings
2004 — First, Canadian Elite Time Trial Championships; first, BC Time Trial Championships; second, Canadian National Road Race Championships; third, Canadian National Criterium Championships
2001 — Third, Pan American Time Trial Championships
