John Tomac, an audience with the GOAT

John Tomac was quite possibly the greatest mountain bike racer of all time, and was more than capable of mixing it on the road too - ohh, and he was also a BMX bandit of the finest order.

A while back we had a very long chat. Here’s a glimpse into his experiences of road racing,

ST; When you joined the 7-11 pro road racing team in Europe how different was that?

JT; That was completely different than the mountainbike culture at that time. The original mountainbike culture was pretty hippie and free living, free spirit based. It evolved pretty quickly and got more serious.

Road cycling was always pretty regimental and strict, it was team orientated and very much a disciplined team action. I enjoyed that aspect of road cycling and so it didn’t necessarily bother me.

When I came into mountainbiking I was pretty much an outlier; I was a hard working grinding kind of a guy who wanted to win. Back in the mid 80’s it was more about the hippies going out and churning their cruisers. 

It was definitely different, but I didn’t have a problem with the transition

ST; What are your lasting impressions of your pro road career and riding the big European races?

JT; I loved it, it was a super cool experience, but very, very hard. It was in a very tough era. I feel like at that time the guys were going pretty wide open on EPO, and with a lot of other doping, and I didn’t participate in that.

For somebody to try and ride clean at that time, it was exceptionally hard. I remember doing the Giro, and I was at the back of the race. The race was completely strung out and I was about to get dropped. I looked over and Greg Lemond was with me, at the back. He looked at me and said; “It was never this hard, it didn’t used to be like this.” For me, that was so disappointing, for him to say that to me at that time and at that point. I didn’t know if I could be competitive without playing the game they were playing at that time. It was a bummer, because I wanted to do it, I loved the sport and wanted to be at that high level – but…

Luckily for me I had mountainbiking, and could slip back into that pretty seamlessly.

ST; The road side of racing has become far more money heavy these days, and riders are now untouchable and unapproachable compared to 20 years or so back, and although it’s progressed mountain biking is still less elitist.

When you look in from the outside now would it be a sport that a 19 year Jonny T would get into?

JT; I don’t know. I used to be so passionate about the sport, and I guess that ‘ve grown away from it. To say that I’d go back and be 19 again try it again, I don’t know – it’s hard to say.

The road, the thing I don’t like about the road now is that they are pretty isolated. They have the big busses now, and like you said – they’re pretty untouchable, and the radios, I absolutely hate them. I feel that they’ve ruined road cycling in so far that having guys on the road, having team leaders who have to make decisions on the road – there’s none of that anymore. There’s no tactics from the riders perspective, they’re just doing exactly what they’re told.

I see all of the crashes in Tour and, and people ask why – because everybody is yelling in their ear to get to the front. It never used to be that way because nobody was yelling in your ear. If your team captain came back and told you to get your arse on the front then you did that, but you didn’t have a director yelling at you to do that.