Svein Tuft’s (left) story about becoming a cyclist is not unlike the story of many avid, recreational cyclists.

You start riding, you really like it, you ride some more, you really, really like it and, before you know it, you’re taking epic rides, riding farther and longer than noncyclists understand, and spending more and more time in the saddle.

In short, you’re hooked.

Tuft’s story is like that, only to the extreme; he became a professional bike racer, and an elite-level one at that. He enters the fifth stage of the Tour of Missouri in third place, 43 seconds behind race leader Christian VandeVelde of Garmin-Chipotle. If he avoids trouble and stays in VandeVelde’s group in the remaining stages, he should be standing on the podium Sunday in St. Louis.

His breakthrough in the race was finishing third in the 18-mile uphill time trial in Branson on Wednesday. He finished behind only VandeVelde and three-time world time trial champ Michael Rogers of Columbia, and ahead of Columbia’s Big George Hincapie, four-time U.S. TT champ David Zabriskie, three-time Italian TT champ Marco Pinotti and Tour du Suisse winner Roman Krueziger of the Liquigas boys.

Not bad company for a guy who didn’t enter his first race until he was 23 years old.

“I started as a touring cyclist,” said Tufts, standing next to the Symmetrics’ team car before the start of Stage 4 on Thursday in Lebanon. “I took bike tours to Alaska and Mexico.”

Tuft, who hails from Langley, British Columbia (near Vancouver), was 18 at the time of his great touring adventure.

“I became addicted to riding every day,” he said. “so then I decided to try a road bike.”

Touring bicycles have the same geometry as traditional steel frame road bikes, with drop handlebars like road bikes, too. But touring bike frames and wheels are much beefier and heavier to handle the loads of the camping gear, clothing and other necessities needed for a self-contained bike tour.

“A road bike has a much different feel than a big, heavy touring bike,” he said. “I really liked that, so I started to race.”

That was nine years ago. In the interim, he has won four Canadian national TT titles and last year he was the UCI Americas Tour champio and the U.S. Open Champion. He also competed in the Olympics in Beijing and placed seventh in the TT.

Despite Tuft’s run of success, his team is at something of a crossroads after this season. Symmetrics is dropping the sponsorship of his team at the end of the season, and the all-Canadian team is having difficulty securing a sponsor for next season and beyond.

“We’re trying to get a Canadian sponsor, but the Olympics are in Vancouver in 2010, and all the large companies are putting all of their money to that, so there’s been no real interest.”

The team has scraped and scrimped by this season “on a shoestring budget,” according to Tuft, who credits team manager Kevin Field and fellow rider Jake Erker for their planning skills in getting the most bang for Symmetrics limited bucks.

“We wouldn’t have made it this far this year without them,” said Tuft, who marveled at Erker’s work on and off the bike. “He did all that extra stuff for the team, and he was still rock solid as a rider.”

While Tuft personally has options beyond this year as a rider, he’d rather the all-Canadian Symmetrics team stay together.

“It’d be a real shame to lose what this team has built over the past five years,” he said. “It took a lot of hard work to get to this point. It’d be a shame to lose that.”

You can read more about Tuft, including Twitter-like updates, on his Biker Bros blog.

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