PROFILE
MIKE TORCKLER I’m a civil designer. I model the roads you drive on, and the water pipes under them - stormwater, wastewater. I size it all up, do all the calculations, then model it to make sure it’ll all fit where it needs to go, then send that to the contractors. I got into this in my late twenties after spending some time as a professional cyclist. I did a bit of triathlon at high school and road cycling was my strength so I went with that and joined a New Zealand development team based in France. I spent two years riding for that team in stints of three or four months at a time, returning to New Plymouth in the off-times and picking up other work. Then I got a ride in Pamplona, Spain, through a guy I met in Wellington, and spent two years there. I also lived and raced in Malaysia, Canada and California. I loved it, loved the cycling and the time off and the travel. It’s similar to going to uni after school - it’s eye-opening, your horizons expand. The highlights were living in France and Spain. In France eight or ten of us guys lived and raced together. The riding there was pretty amazing, and also we just spent a lot of time in the rivers that ran through the town we were in: swimming, building dams, fishing. Probably one of my most fun years was the year I managed to get a couple of Kiwi guys on to the team in Spain, including my brotherin-law Josh. He has a lot of stories from that year that I just 07
SAMUEL HARRIS
don’t remember now, as a result of a serious crash I had a few years later, but I do remember doing a lot of walking around the town - there’s so much history there, castles and so on, and we had time to burn. I never ran with the bulls though - I just watched; I saw too many people get clobbered in that to risk doing it myself. As far as race highlights go, my best achievement on a big stage was probably winning King of the Mountain in the Tour of Utah in 2013. As a 60-kilo ex-runner, hill climbing was my strength. It got to a point, around 2014/15, where new cycling contracts weren’t forthcoming - at the level I was at, you’d go from one contract to the next as new teams were formed then folded - and it was a bit daunting. I thought it was the end of the world in a way - I had bills to pay, and you can only live with your in-laws for so long, eh - but I had a rough idea of what sort of work I wanted to do, so I got in touch with a friend who was in the engineering field, and he lined me up with a cadetship doing civil draughting, and I’m still at the same place. It was part-time to begin with, which was good. I had a big crash in 2012 which
