It’s mid-December, the first preparations for the 2025 season are underway, and Robert Stannard has agreed to be interviewed. He is aware that my interest lies almost exclusively in him opening up what has been a very turbulent past 18 months. Only, he can’t really discuss a lot. “I’d love to,” the Australian says, before pausing. “But practically it’s not something I can control.” But he can speak about the turbulence and trauma he has experienced. “I was sort of lost; I felt like I had lost it all,” he admits.
Last June, Stannard was handed a backdated four-year suspension by the UCI Anti-Doping Tribunal which found that he had committed an anti-doping rule violation (ADRV) for a prohibited substance or method, based on unexplained abnormalities in his blood biological passport in 2018 and 2019 when he was riding for Mitchelton-Scott. All his results from August 17, 2018, to August 16, 202,2 were stripped – including a GC win at the 2022 Tour de Wallonie – and he was fined 70% of his wages from 2018 and 2019.
When news broke of the violation in August 2023, Stannard was riding for Alpecin-Deceuninck, but the Belgian team subsequently suspended him and did not renew his contract. A year later, with the retrospective suspension having passed, Stannard signed for Bahrain-Victorious until the end of 2025, renouncing his right to appeal, despite protesting his innocence by stating that “athletes with ABP violations have not returned positive blood or urine tests for anything”. The 26-year-old added: “They alleged that it could only have been caused by ‘illegal means’, but throughout the entire process, provided no evidence of any wrongdoing. No evidence of doping is collected or required for them to reach this judgement.” That drew a strong rebuttal from the UCI who said that Stannard’s statement was “clearly incorrect and misleading.”
Stannard’s father, Steve, is a professor in exercise physiology, and he worked on his son’s defence. “I don’t even want to think about the money we’ve spent on it all,” Stannard says. Nevertheless, it wasn’t enough: the UCI declared him guilty of breaching anti-doping measures. He has given up the fight – for now. “Even from the beginning, the first thing I realised is that it’s most important that the people closest to me supported me, and that I myself know what I did,” he says. “God knows what I did, and that’s all that matters.”
I point out to him that, especially given cycling’s tainted past, the majority of fans will have little sympathy for him, even if he is adamant that he is not a doper. “I can never change that,” he says. “People think what they want to think. Obviously it’s important in society and in life that there’s a good image of yourself but it’s also… look, I agree with what you said: people could look at my profile and come up with their thoughts and opinions…,” he stops again, gathers his thoughts. Stannard speaks slowly, forming his words before he speaks them. “It’s something that’s out of my control and I’m not going to waste my energy or my time or stress about it. I’m not going to try to sit here or next to anyone [else] and have this conversation and [try to] convince them, try to change their mind if they have this negative perception of me, because then every conversation I have is going to be the same.”
Most doping sanctions are slapped down by the general public, but the story of Lizzy Banks last year awakened many to the anguish athletes are put through when trying to clear their name. Banks, who returned a positive test for a banned asthma medication and a diuretic that she successfully appealed was the result of contamination, admitted that she contemplated suicide.
How did Stannard cope in his year in the shadows, an outcast of the sport? “I had no idea what to expect, how my future would be,” he says. “I didn’t know anything. I believe everything happens for a reason – what would happen, would happen. I took the opportunities in front of me to go on holiday [to Hong Kong and Thailand], to learn things I normally wouldn’t have time to learn, to meet people I otherwise wouldn’t have met, and in some ways I had a great year. I look back at a lot of great memories, but obviously not cycling memories.”
Bike riding, though, was ever-present. “Cycling was my therapy,” he says. “I never rode on my own, every day was a coffee ride. I did what I enjoy about cycling: going into the mountains. That really helped me get through what was a very difficult and stressful period. I’m lucky that cycling helped me. In a way, I hated cycling because of what happened, but I also love cycling for the activity that it is.” It killed him but saved him at the same time, I interject. “I didn’t watch any pro cycling though. I was… not angry, just,” he tails off. “I just didn’t want to watch it, I didn't follow much of what was going on. I was just enjoying cycling for myself and with my friends.”
Stannard, a rider most suited to one-week stage races and lumpy one-day races, raced 18 days for Bahrain in the autumn and is hopeful that his year in exile might turn out to benefit him. “In terms of performance, I was thinking maybe to have this year a bit more chilled, without the intensity of racing, might be a good thing for me,” he says. “Maybe I can come back and be even stronger.”
The process, the waiting, the verdict, the fines and the financial hit have left scars on him that he isn’t ready to fully reveal yet. For now, for fear of further reprisal from the UCI, he’ll not divulge his true thoughts on the case. But he is comfortable in admitting that he has emerged as a changed person. “I have a different perspective now on everything, it allows me to come with a different mindset, a different mentality,” he says. “I think I’m more relaxed, more calm. When you become a pro in cycling, it’s hard to have that perspective if you’re just going through every year the same. I feel like the whole time I knew there had to be something good that would come out of this situation I was in, so I tried to make it that way; I used the time to improve myself and my mindset. I was always trying to find out why this would happen, take the good from it – it’s all we can do from any problem we have in our life. For sure I would love to speak more about it, but now is the time to focus on my career.”
