Australia won its first gold medal of the 1984 LA Olympics by beating the big spending, blood doping Yanks on a ‘bumpy heap of crap’ track at California State University. 

But the victory was born in Brisbane, Grafton, Sydney, Adelaide, Launceston, Canberra, Zurich, a West German hospital, Czechoslovakia, and in the cycling town of Wangaratta — home to a boy named Dean Woods.

Like most children of the 70s, Dean rode his first bike to school and to roam everywhere. At 10, he started racing for his local club, having been inspired by his older brother, Paul, and top notch riders at the annual sports carnival.

Back then, those clear sky carnivals were bigger than Christmas. Everyone went to the Wangaratta Showgrounds to watch the wood chopping, running and cycling. The bike races, fast and dangerous, were most thrilling.

Woods was born to compete. He could imagine himself in the mayhem, hovering over the seat, legs whirring, riding waves of sound all the way to the podium.

His parents, who were textile workers in the Wangaratta Mills, began dedicating themselves to driving him many thousands of kilometres for weekend and holiday racing.

On a second-hand bike he was impressive from the start. Soon he had a brand new track bike, and a schoolboy championship prize.

“He hated coming second,” close friend and current mayor of Wangaratta Dean Rees says. 

“And he was tough. His mental ability was the probably the thing I most enjoyed about him.”

Throughout adolescence, Dean was a student of the sport, reading magazines with coloured pictures of famous riders like Belgian Eddy Merckx.

He had a go at athletics and swimming, and he weight trained at home. His racing body — broad shoulders, big quads — took shape.

By 1981, aged 15, he was experimenting in training, doing 60km rides into the surrounding hills made famous by tales of 19th century bushrangers, accelerating for stretches, and noting his times.

Even after he left school and began a plumbing apprenticeship, Dean was a dedicated athlete, and he became a junior national champion at 16 and junior world champion at 17 in 1983.

He thought over the possibilities of one day competing at the Olympic Games, although not by 1984 in Los Angeles. That wasn’t all that far away, and international cycling could be a lonely world of nefarious schemes and grinding pressure — and who would send a boy into that arena?

The Charlie Walsh-era of Australian cycling begins

A good rule of sport to keep in mind is that a team can only become the best, or reach its potential at least, after it gets sick to the stomach of losing — when the thought of another near miss makes you train harder than you ever thought possible.

Australia had never won the 4000m team pursuit at the Olympic Games, nor had Australia won any cycling gold medal since 1956.

The team pursuit, a spectacular four-rider track event that requires a torturous balance of power and endurance, was traditionally won by Italy, France or Denmark.

The Aussies’ best result was fourth in 1964 at Tokyo.

By the 1970s, as performance enhancing drugs became more popular in sport, Eastern Bloc countries started turning out fast teams.

The podium at the 1980 Moscow Olympics for team pursuit was Soviet Union, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia.

Australia, overseen by first-time volunteer coach ‘Charlie’ Walsh, finished sixth.

“Straight after Moscow,” Walsh, 83, says. 

“I tried to reformulate how we did it in Australia. I thought, well, whatever we’re doing isn’t good enough.”

In 1980, the retired cyclist (born David Walsh but renamed by his father on returning from World War II) was a 38-year-old TAFE lecturer in computer studies and metrology, among other subjects, who had taken up coaching in South Australia.

His ascent to the unpaid national position, neither celebrated nor heralded, prompted a search for better race preparations.

“I started reading books in physiology,” he says. 

He collected and presented data using graphs, and encouraged his athletes to give him feedback so he could modify their programs. The cornerstone of his coaching was “good planning and organisation”.

“They all called me mad and everything else, but that’s the way that we went,” he says.

“That process never stopped. You never ever stay the same. You will modify or implement, you keep measuring, you keep listening, and trying to build that package better and better and better and better.”

The cyclist most familiar with Walsh’s intensive training was young South Australian Michael Turtur.

“When he came along and started to do what he did here in South Australia with a group of us young blokes, we said yeah let’s do it,” Turtur, 65, says. 

“Charlie is a really intelligent person, understands bike riding in and out, understands the requirements but also is a great judge of an athlete.

“Charlie Walsh changed the face of Australian cycling forever.”

Cheating death in Europe

The campaign for success at the Los Angeles Olympics gathered momentum in 1982, when Australia hosted the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane.

Walsh coached a talented gold medal-winning team pursuit squad of Turtur, Michael Grenda, Kevin Nichols and Gary West. Turtur also won the individual pursuit. At 23, he seemed destined to become a leader of Walsh’s new regime.

Knowing the team needed to go overseas for experience against the world’s best nations, Walsh travelled cap-in-hand to Canberra’s Australian Institute of Sport for a meeting with director Don Talbot.

The AIS, created in 1981, had not yet included cycling, but Talbot saw sense in Walsh’s plans and gave the cycling program $10,000.

The cash went to hiring a van so the athletes could train and race their way around Europe before the 1983 World Championships in Zurich.

The money did not cover the cost of a coach, so Walsh was not in West Germany when Tasmanian Michael Grenda fell off his bike and hit his head.

Michael Turtur remembers watching his teammate crash.

“His head hit a pedal on the way down,” he says. 

“I thought he was dead.”

Grenda said he wasn’t in a good place.