The People’s Choice

Could there be a more deserving winner of the 2011 Scody’s People Choice award? No way, Jose, writes a sobered-up Anthony Tan.

He said it in jest but perhaps there was a skerrick of truth when Cadel Evans, the Sir Hubert Opperman Trophy winner at the 2011 Australian Cyclist of the Year Awards, jokingly said at the start of his acceptance speech: "People's Choice [award] – that's the one [you want] to win… no disrespect to Sir Hubert Opperman."

For Anna Meares to have trumped the first Australian winner of the Tour de France and take out the Scody's People Choice award – the public's vote for their favourite cyclist – your) vote – was, for me, as big a deal as Evans taking his fourth 'Oppy Medal', which, let's face it, was a fait accompli. "When you have an Australian win the Tour de France, there can be no other winner," Klaus Mueller, the president of Cycling Australia and one of the three-member voting panel, told the sell-out audience Friday night.

For the public to vote this way is an affirmation of not just Meares' results, which were spectacular in themselves, but the Queenslander's transcendental qualities as Australian cycling's greatest living ambassador.

Humble as always, Anna looked genuinely surprised as she received what amounts to unbridled verification of public sentiment towards her: "I was gobsmacked and I haven't been speechless for quite a while – I seriously thought Cadel's name was written all over that.

"Geez, I would have even voted for him. I honestly thought that Cadel would win [the People's Choice award]. In that respect, it makes me realise the incredible following that I have and the amazing support network of the Australian public. It's very special."

As the audience inside The Ivy Room, one of bar mogul Justin Hemmes' salubrious Sydney establishments, sat captivated, Rob Arnold, publishing editor of RIDE magazine, leaned over and said to me: "She's the best. She's just the best."

"I feel like I did exceed my own expectations," Meares said of her season that culminated in a hat-trick of gold medals at the 2011 track world championships in Apeldoorn, Holland, winning the match sprint, keirin, and team sprint with her partner Kaarle McCulloch.

"I had a very successful season, and in the debrief I had with [national track coach] Gary West, we realised I had 17 starts at the national level and above, and 15 of those races were won with gold medals."

Her comeback from the horrific accident sustained at the Los Angeles round of the Track World Cup in January 2008 was nothing short of miraculous. Back home in Adelaide though wheelchair-bound, she told journalists the day after André Greipel won the 2008 Tour Down Under: "I realise that I'm pretty lucky with the injuries I've come away with. The C2 vertebra, so I've been told, is the one that controls your breathing, and if that goes, so too does your life."

Two millimetres more, her doctors told her, and she would have been a quadriplegic.

Following a murderous period of rehabilitation, her first session back on the bike lasted all of one or two minutes. "I felt so uplifted after that first session on the bike and it just made me want to get back on it again and again," she said, unperturbed.

Weeks later she was holding her own against the blokes on the bike and in the gym, lifting more iron than some of her male counterparts. By July Meares went close to setting a personal best for the 200-metre sprint, comfortably qualifying for that year's Olympic Games in Beijing, where she finished second to Britain's Victoria Pendleton in the match sprint.

After Apeldoorn, she now has the edge on 'Queen Vicky', the sobriquet the Poms admiringly grant her.

However whatever happens from now till the London Games is largely irrelevant in the grander scheme of things, for Anna has already won. She is alive, healthy, and happy – what more do you want in life?

We find ourselves mesmerised by her tenacity, enamoured by her charm whenever she speaks, and wishing – willing – her to soar to even greater heights, but always mindful and perhaps a little anxious of the clear and present danger Anna places herself in every time she races.

Like Cadel, though, the latter is not a source of unease for her; the way they see it, a live lived in fear is life half-lived.

Her challenge leading into London, however, will be arguably more mental than physical.

"I've never gone into an Olympic Games with the aura of being one of the favourites. So that's a mental challenge for me," said Meares, "and I'm looking to learn some new skills and acquire some new strategies to deal with that. And I think that the team that I have around me will help me do it."

Quite clearly, her "team" around her also includes the rest of Australia.

Twitter: @anthony_tan