Sydney - His Belgian sponsors, his Italian wife Chiara, his faithful dog, the German Telekom team that spurred him on by not picking him for the 2004 Tour de France: if Australian cyclist Cadel Evans tops the podium in Paris next weekend he could also thank a cranky horse that kicked him in the head when he was a schoolboy. "I had four or five years of splitting headaches, which taught me a thing or two about suffering," the race favourite said.
Withstanding pain is what Evans does best.
He doesn't have the turbocharged legs of Lance Armstrong, a seven-time tour winner who seemingly could power away from the peloton and take a mountain stage win whenever he wanted.
He's not a brilliant climber, the world's best rider against the clock, or the type of rider who flies off the front of the pack for a brilliant solo finish.
In a stage races like the tour it's all about who can last the whole three weeks, the 3,554 kilometres of racing, the accidents and the falling ill.
Talk to the fraternity and it's not long before masochism gets a mention.
"Everybody suffered a lot today," CSC team manager and former tour winner Bjarne Riis said after the penultimate Alpine stage. "Everybody made a lot of sacrifices and some will pay for that in their legs tomorrow. But hopefully not us."
Hopefully not Evans, Australian sports fans shout back. The squeaky-voiced 31-year-old missed winning the tour by 23 seconds last year and is the likeliest lad for a win this year.
Armstrong tips Evans, saying victory would be all the more of an achievement because the Australian was the man to beat all year.
"I was never able to have a great spring, a great classics season and then be competitive for the tour," Armstrong said. "It would be super cool if someone could, so if he's able to do that and wins the tour, hey, that's great. I mean, who else is there?"
Australians sniff a new sporting hero. Evans, the first Australian podium finisher, is already the best professional cyclist the country has produced.
There is a stirring of admiration, of adulation, for what they believe the local boy is about to achieve. The way the tabloid newspapers report it, Evans has come from nowhere to be top of his sport.
That's nonsense. Evans was a world-class mountain biker in his teens, and has been on a bike at the last three Olympics. He was eighth in his first tour, fifth in 2006 and runner-up last year.
It is not inevitable that Evans would win what many believe is the world's most gruelling sports event, it's that Evans believes it himself - and has all the personality traits to help make that dream come true.
He knows his strong point: "I can hang in there and suffer for hours longer than the others," Evans said. "You are just there. You know where you have to be, on that wheel."
And that's exactly how it was on that critical 16th stage Riis described where his CSC team did everything it could to hammer Evans into submission.
He kept following that wheel. He didn't give in to pain. He didn't crack.
Early on in his career, when he was a bit of a novice, Armstrong charged to the front; at his peak, when it became the Tour de Lance, he wore down his opponents. Like Evans, his great ability was to outlast the others. "I'm into pain," he once said. "Why? Because it's self-revelatory, that's why. There's a point in every race when a rider encounters his real opponent and understands that it's himself."
If Evans were as eloquent as Armstrong, he would probably say the same thing: as the tour gets close to Paris, the real opponent is himself.
