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Before he was a professional cyclist, Svein Tuft lived life as a backcountry explorer and transient.

At age 18, after dropping out of school to spend time biking and mountain climbing, Tuft and his dog, Bear, set out on a journey into the Canadian wilderness on a $40 thrift-store bicycle. He rode 600 miles on that trip and survived the harsh Canadian winter with nothing but a bivouac sack and a blanket.

That journey became one of many bike tours through Alaska and Canada that he took in his teens and twenties. He would disappear for months at a time, happy to be living life the way he wanted - with no rules, no establishment, no boundaries.



“It was by far the most content I’ve ever been,” said Tuft in the New York Times article. “My bike was a piece of junk. I had nowhere to go, no place to be. Didn’t have anyone telling me what to do. If I felt like lying on the side of the road, I did.”

Tuft also began to enter professional cycling races here and there, at first just to prove that he could. He was discouraged, however, by the amount of doping in professional cycling and decided it wasn't for him. But in 2004 he was recruited by a team with strict anti-doping policies and the rest is history.

Now, at age 31, Tuft is riding with one of the world's top professional cycling teams (the Garmin-Slipstream squad). He'll be racing in the Tour de California this month and more than likely, the Tour de France later this year. His age and the fact that he started training so late in life make him an odd man out on both the team and the Tours.

“He’s a late, late bloomer who lived a lifestyle that has been completely incongruent with any professional cyclist out there,” Jonathan Vaughters, the Garmin-Slipstream team’s director, said. “In Europe, you are pressured to succeed by the time you are 18, and if you don’t do it by the time you are 21, then you’re done. But Svein? He’s somebody who has lived life according to how he wanted to live it.”

Read the rest of Tuft's unique story in the New York Times.

Via GoBlog