weeks before the event and joined Opperman at a Malvern Star training camp. Together they covered around 1600 kilometres in the weeks leading up to the event.48
The £1000 in prize money for the DPG seemed like a fortune. The 1100 kilometres to be covered around Victoria in four stages appeared truly epic. Ranging from 265 to 300 kilometres, the individual stages were hillier and longer than many of the one-day classics Australian and New Zealand riders were accustomed to. They also had fewer opportunities to rest and recover between each effort.
Modelled on European stage races, the DGP was a veritable Tour of Victoria, linking the major regional centres of Wangaratta, Bendigo, Ballarat and Warrnambool. It passed through many places not on Victoria’s standard one-day race routes. Also for the first time, the riders would start together – en ligne (on line) as the French termed it. The final stage would send the riders off individually (according to their aggregate times for the previous three stages) and would follow the traditional Warrnambool to Melbourne route. The result of the final stage would also decide the Australasian road cycling champion for that year.
The race’s challenging nature, combined with the removal of the handicap system, cruelly exposed the lack of depth in Australian and New Zealand cycling. So few had the capacity to survive, let alone thrive in a multi-day stage race. Seven riders dropped out on the first day. By the end of the tour, over half the original field of fifty-nine had withdrawn. With most riders grimly trying to just complete the event, the only real battles occurred between a handful of men. They included NSW champion Harry Moody, Victorian Percy Osborn, and Harry Watson. None were even close to Opperman.
When the men joined forces they could gain huge chunks of time over the rest of the field. During stage two, an intensely hot day, they got so far in front they had enough time for a swim in a dam. The refreshing delay was momentarily extended when Osborn lost a shoe to the muddy bottom, with Watson finally locating the vital piece of clothing.49
Opperman’s effortless command of the road threatened to turn the race into a bloodless and predictable affair. One wag had already dubbed the race ‘Opperman’s Gift’.50 But nothing could dampen the Victorian public’s embrace of the event. The sight of cyclists battling headwinds, dust storms, hills and hot weather more than made up for what the DGP lacked in competitive tension. Equally impressive was the magnificent spectacle of the race convoy as it rolled along with the riders, transforming each of the towns selected as stage starts and finishes. Trucks carried equipment, provisions and the rider’s belongings. A fleet of cars carried race officials, dignitaries, press representatives, radio staff and camera crews. A police motorcycle escort gave the race a grandeur and authority not seen before in Australian road cycling. Though the DGP did not ‘revolutionise road cycling’ in Australia, as the more bullish of the sporting press had predicted, it proved that Victorians possessed a great appetite for European style stage racing.51
More than anything else the DGP was about Oppy. The mere sight of him sent spectators mad. It was only a matter of time before the more exuberant among them were overcome with excitement. In Geelong, during the final stage, 10,000 lined the road to watch him speed past. Police tackled and held at least four onlookers on the ground to prevent them from being run over by the following cars. One man blocked Opperman’s path in an effort ‘to shake hands with him as he tore down the street at twenty-five miles an hour.’52
Pandemonium erupted when he arrived victorious a few hours later at the Melbourne Showgrounds. Over 20,000 people gave him a standing ovation as he completed the final laps of the race, before hundreds jumped the fence line and mobbed their hero. Troopers, police and race officials tried valiantly to clear a space for the Lord Mayor to make his presentations. The formalities were completed ‘under extreme difficulties’ before Opperman was again swamped by the crowds. He escaped as best he could to the change rooms for a bath.53
Opperman’s win generated further interest from the media, which hoped to discover the recipe for his success. They uncovered few secrets, only an unrelenting, machine-like work ethic. He explained that in preparing for the DGP, he first made sure that he placed his alarm clock in the corner of the room so that he would have to get out of bed to reach it:
I was up every morning as soon as my alarm clock went off at five. In the saddle and away off for a day’s hard riding. Back home and in bed by six o’clock – never later than eight – and up again the next morning for another 120 miles on the roads. And, yet, if it were necessary to do so in preparation for another contest, I would be as eager as ever to start the hard, monotonous training. This is essential in road racing.54
His charming earnestness encouraged sports journalists to transform the quiet, little champion into something else; something that transcended the sport that had made him famous. The more he resisted, the more they heaped praise upon him. Like it or not, he was now an inspiration to his generation and a role model for all men. The Melbourne Herald explained:
Hubert Opperman, who recently created a sensation by his magnificent win in the Dunlop Grand Prix, is one of the most remarkable personalities who has appeared in the athletic world for a generation. His views on the Spartan life he lives for the benefit of himself and the sport he loves can only faintly reveal the fine qualities of the man himself. To meet him is to encounter an astonishing and captivating simplicity and a genuine staggering modesty … He is only twenty-three; he neither drinks nor smokes, but yet demonstrates in his performances a will to achievement that ought to be a lesson to many lesser men.55
A week after the Grand Prix, Opperman was travelling by train from Bendigo to Melbourne. A fellow passenger spotted the champion cyclist and held out a newspaper, pointing to the front page. ‘How do you feel about going to France?’ he said, referring to a report that the Herald and Sporting Globe newspapers had opened a fund to send an Australian team, led by Opperman, to compete in the Tour de France.56 The question, he recalled, was ‘like asking a Muslim if he would accept a pilgrimage to Mecca.’ He claimed it was the first he had heard of the plan, but ‘felt like leaving the train to spill out [his] surprise and delight on [his] pedals.’57
At twenty-three, Opperman had reached the limit of what was possible as a professional cyclist in Australia. Many in the cycling fraternity were touting him as not only the greatest road rider that Australia had produced but as equal to any rider in the world. Sending him to contest the Tour was a ‘project … of national importance’.58 But they, like Opperman, knew almost nothing about what awaited him. They did not know that almost ten years of cycling in Australia could provide only the most basic foundation for racing in Europe. In France he would have to begin again.
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1 Sunday Times (Sydney), 3 February 1924; The Sun (Sydney), 3 February 1924.
2 Sporting Globe, 17 December 1924.
3 Sporting Globe, 17 December 1924.
4 Hubert Opperman, Pedals, Politics and People (Sydney: Haldane Publishing, 1977), pp. 48–9.
5 Mirror (Perth), 20 September 1924.
6 Sporting Globe, 10 December 1924.
7 Sporting Globe, 10 December 1924.
8 Sporting Globe, 17 December 1924.
9 Sporting Globe, 23 December 1924.
10 Opperman, Pedals, p. 63.
11 Daily Telegraph (Launceston), 20 December 1924; Sporting Globe, 23 December 1924.
12 Sporting Globe, 23 December 1924.
13 Bathurst Times, 23 December 1924.
14 Sporting Globe, 23 December 1924.
15 Sporting Globe, 23 December 1924.
16 Sporting Globe, 3 January 1925; Sporting Globe, 7 January 1925; Opperman, Pedals, p. 64.
17 Sporting Globe, 7 January 1925.
18 Sporting Globe, 7 January 1925.
19 Sporting Globe, 21 January 1925.
20 Opperman, Pedals, p. 66; Sporting Globe, 14 October 1925.
21 Recorder (Port Pirie), 27 November 1928;