You spent the first half of the conversation thinking about your own story.
The friend you went to school with who couldn't stop. The cousin who came back from rehab three times before it took. The uncle who you only ever saw at funerals because he could never stay clean long enough for the weddings.
And maybe — quietly, in the back of the head — the fortnight last winter when you didn't ride at all and didn't want to and didn't know why. The way three pints quietly became a habit on Tuesday nights. The little voice that said something is off and the bigger voice that told it to be quiet.
Owen Vermeulen's conversation with Anthony on the Roadman Cycling Podcast is not a comfortable listen. It is also one of the most important episodes the podcast has put out, and it deserves a quiet hour of your attention even if — especially if — addiction is not the obvious frame for your own life.
The headline is simple. Vermeulen went from heroin at fifteen, to skateboarding fame, to opioids after injuries, to homelessness, through five years of failed attempts to get clean, into detox, and out the other side as a professional gravel cyclist. The longer story has more in it for a serious cycling audience than the headline suggests.
Listen to the full conversation with Owen Vermeulen →
The Path Down
Vermeulen's account of how addiction began is unsensational. He left home at fifteen. He landed in Vancouver alone with no guidance, no responsibility, no path being modelled for him. The drugs were already around. He was already exposed. The only thing that was inevitable about his trajectory was that nothing was going to break the trajectory unless something did.
Heroin came first. Then a stint in treatment at eighteen. Then skateboarding, which became a career — and then another set of injuries that pulled in opioids alongside the casual party use that came with the touring scene. Cocaine and alcohol on the road. Prescription painkillers from the injuries. And underneath it all, the brain chemistry he is open about — the addict's wiring that turns recreational use into a compulsion when the same use slides off the next person at the same bar.
The detail that lingers from his telling is the future tense. He is asked what the brain looks like inside addiction. The only future you can see, he says, is the next morning's withdrawal sickness. Not next week. Not next year. The next sunrise. Everything you do in the day funds the avoidance of that one specific feeling. There is no plan. There is no horizon. There is only the next dose required to not feel sick at 7 a.m.
That description — and it lands hard if you have ever felt the milder version of it during burnout, depression, or grief — is what makes the recovery story interesting. The mechanism that pulled him out had to do exactly what addiction had been doing. It had to give the brain a forward-looking, repeatable, immediate-feedback reward signal to organise around.
The Bike Shop Owner In Detox
Cycling came in through a side door. Vermeulen was in detox. One of the other people in the centre owned a bike shop. The man set him up with a bike. They watched the Tour together in the day room. They went out and rode.
Vermeulen comes from a family of pro athletes — his father played pro hockey, his sister became an Olympian, his uncle was a European pro cyclist, his cousin made the World Tour. The endurance capacity was in the genes before he ever found the sport that matched it. Once he started riding he was very fast very quickly. His first race he led from the gun, didn't know what he was doing, and won by three minutes.
That moment is where the structural argument the episode quietly makes begins.
The Feedback Loop The Brain Was Built For
Anthony catches the structural piece in the conversation and the two of them spend several minutes on it. It is the most generalisable insight in the episode for anyone trying to understand why cycling — competitive cycling specifically — works for so many people in recovery, returning from a long break, or trying to rebuild a life around a new identity.
Cycling's category system is unusually well-designed for the addict's brain.
Cat 4 to Cat 3 to Cat 2 to Cat 1. Visible progression. Ranked results. Repeatable feedback after every race. You put in effort. You collect points. You get bumped to the next category. There is no negotiation, no committee, no waiting for someone to decide you have made it. The architecture is designed to incentivise progression and it delivers a clean, immediate reward signal every time you turn up and do the work.
For a brain that has spent years organising itself around the next dose at the next sunrise, the substitution is structural. Same circuit. Different stimulus. Effort produces a visible, repeatable, progressively rewarded outcome. That is the loop the addict's brain was already wired to chase. Cycling lets it chase a clean version of it.
This is not just relevant to addiction. The same architecture is what makes cycling so powerful for the comeback cyclist returning after years off, for the masters rider rebuilding identity after a career change, for anyone who needs the next twelve months to look like progress and not just maintenance. The category ladder is not the only way the sport delivers this — power numbers, segment times, sportive finishes all do versions of the same thing — but the categories are the cleanest version. They are designed for it.
For the parallel comeback story from a different starting point, see our Ger Redmond piece, where the same psychological architecture pulled a different rider through a similarly broken patch.
The Pro Athlete Opioid Crisis
The middle section of the episode is the part most cycling listeners do not expect.
Vermeulen describes the wave of pro athletes he met in treatment centres — hockey players, football players, others. The shape of their addictions was not the family-trauma path he had walked. It was the prescribed-opioid path. They had been given oxycontin for an injury, often without a clear taper protocol, and at some point the prescription had stopped while the addiction had not. The street drugs were the consequence, not the cause.
Anthony has a personal anchor for this part of the conversation. He broke his shoulder in a criterium crash in the United States. The doctor prescribed oxycontin. He took the pills for three days, recognised the chemical pull as something he could not safely keep paying with his willpower, and stopped. Three days. He uses the moment in the conversation honestly — not to claim moral credit, but to register how powerful the drug actually is from the inside.
Now scale that to a pro hockey player on a multi-week prescription with a career-threatening injury and a culture that does not encourage the conversation about what the pills are doing to him. Then cut him off cold turkey because the prescription has run its course.
The road from sports prescription to street opioid is shorter than most people realise. Vermeulen says he saw it constantly in treatment. The "Dopesick" comparison Anthony brings up — the limited series that walked through the Purdue Pharma marketing of oxycontin — is not hyperbole. It is documentary.
For a serious masters cycling audience that may have already had one or two surgeries, post-crash painkiller scripts, or chronic injury management — the mental note worth taking from the episode is this. The drug class deserves more respect than the prescription pad usually gives it. If you have ever taken painkillers and felt the chemistry pull harder than you expected it to, you are noticing something real. Vermeulen and Anthony's combined honesty in this segment is rare.
The Cat 1 Ceiling, And Why Gravel Caught Him
The third arc of the episode is the most directly cycling-relevant for the typical Roadman listener. Vermeulen rode his way to Cat 1 and then, like a lot of late-thirties strong amateurs, hit the structural ceiling.
The ceiling is well-known to anyone who has been in serious road racing. You make Cat 1. Then unless a Continental team is actively scouting you and unless you have the genetic top end to keep clawing watts off riders ten years younger than you, the upward path quietly closes. The feedback loop that drove your progression breaks. The races stop being PB hunts and start being defending exercises. Last year you got fourth. This year you might get sixth. The architecture stops rewarding effort the way it used to.
Most strong amateurs who arrive at this point do one of three things. They burn out and quietly stop. They drop down a category and grind around the same calendar with diminishing satisfaction. Or they pivot.
Gravel has become the pivot of choice for an entire generation of strong Cat 1 riders — and the conversation Vermeulen has on this point is one of the better summaries of why. New format. No past comparisons. No team tactics holding you to a role you no longer want. A global calendar with novel events — multi-day stage races like the Trans-Iberica, the eight-day Colombian gravel race Vermeulen rode, Unbound, Badlands — that scratch the explorer itch the road race calendar does not.
The reason gravel works as a Cat 1 outlet is the same reason cycling worked as an addiction outlet. It restores the feedback loop. Effort in produces a new version of progression. The work compounds again. The brain has somewhere to direct itself.
For the conversation about gravel cycling's broader cultural shift and what it offers as a discipline, this is the rider's-eye account of what makes it stick.
What This Episode Is Actually About
The reason this episode matters more than the comeback-story headline suggests is that Vermeulen is not selling you cycling-as-cure. He is describing the architecture of cycling that happened to suit his brain at the moment he needed it to.
The architecture is available to anyone. It does not require addiction to access. The structural wins of the sport — visible progression, immediate feedback, a community that shows up regardless of where you came from, the freedom to pivot disciplines when one ceiling closes and another opens — are sitting there for the cyclist returning from injury, the masters rider rebuilding identity, the comeback athlete who lost five years to work and family and a sense that the window had closed.
Vermeulen's story is the extreme version of the structural truth the rest of the audience can borrow from. The bike does not care what year you started. It does not care which version of yourself you turned up as. It rewards the work from this point on. The category ladder, the segment times, the sportive on the calendar in eighteen weeks — all of it is built to give the brain something concrete to chase.
The cyclists still riding well at fifty-five are usually the ones who never stopped letting the sport hand them a horizon to work toward. Vermeulen happens to need that horizon more than most. The architecture handed it to him anyway. That is the actual lesson.
For the broader mental and structural picture of why cycling works as the spine of an active life, see our cycling mental toughness piece and the comeback cyclist 12-week return plan.
Listen To The Full Conversation
The full episode with Owen Vermeulen is on the Roadman Cycling Podcast, and the longer interview specifically on the pro athlete oxycontin pipeline is in Vermeulen's second appearance. Both deserve the time.
If you have a friend, a family member, or a club mate currently in the early days of a recovery — from addiction, from a long-term injury, from anything — Vermeulen's story is the one to send them. Not as inspiration porn. As a piece of structural honesty about why this sport, of all sports, tends to catch people on the way back up.
If you want help structuring your own next twelve months around the same ride-after-ride consistency that built Vermeulen's recovery and his racing career, the Roadman coaching system is the place to start. For a faster answer on a specific question grounded in the same library, ask the AI coach.
You are not done yet. The category ladder is still there. The ride this Saturday is still on the calendar. The feedback loop is still working exactly the way it was designed to.
