THEY SAY the difference between an amateur and a professional cyclist is that the professional cyclist never has to ride in the dark. Not so for Fergus Neilson. "I'm always riding in the dark - it's a six o'clock start" he says. That's because Neilson usually cycles between 30 and 40 km around the suburbs of Sydney, three or four mornings a week. "It's the most beautiful time of the day. I enjoy it enormously.

"I wouldn't consider myself an athlete, but I've always liked being active," he says. He'd played rugby, done grass-skiing and mountaineering, and had a stint of serious running, before he took up cycling and swimming. "In late '84, with the help of [triathlete] Bill Riley and a lot of funding support from Tooheys, I started the Forster Iron Man Triathlon, which continues to this day," says Neilson. But after six years of triath Ions he'd had enough of running.

"Cycling is a lot more exciting," he says. "It's more immediately competitive. You ride in a bunch for safety. [But also] riding immediately behind somebody is 20 or 30 per cent easier than riding at the front, so to do long distances at high speed you have to work with each other. It's etiquette. If somebody rolls off the front, you move up. So although it is competitive, you have to be co-operative - until the gloves come off in the final sprint. Then the wise people back off and drift to the back and the crazies lunge for the front.

"What's also interesting about cycling is that while it looks, at base, simply physical, it actually requires a great deal of intelligence and rat cunning to be good at it. [As] in business, you've got to keep your enemies very close, and understand exactly what they're doing.

"I ride with different groups, in different locations, on different days of the week. There's a variety of rides - it depends on the mood of the morning and who's riding?' With the bunch that meets in Kings Cross he might do the "cocktail circuit", with its mix of terrain and environments, or the "real estate ride", a tour of the most exclusive Eastern suburbs. On a weekend, he might ride 90 km to Waterfall and be back in time for breakfast.

"I think you start cycling for rational reasons but keep going for emotional ones," he says. "It's equal parts vanity, adrenalin, camaraderie and psychotherapy. You cycle best - you do any physical activity best - when you listen to your body carefully, and that's therapeutic in focusing the mind. The bunch is about moments of hilarity and frivolity, with everyone coming home together having felt they've had a good ride.

"I'd love to do more travel on a bike. A few years ago I rode from north-western Italy across the Alps and up through France to Paris - on my own, carrying a Visa card and a little bag on the front of the bike ... In the first two days there were three 2,000 metre passes. " There's nothing like the feeling, he says, of "getting to the top of Col de Lotteret and knowing you've got a 60 km downhill to Les Iles ahead of you. Or coming into a small French village, virtually deserted in the mid-afternoon, and discovering a shop selling beautiful big green marzipan cakes - after six hours on a bike this was the perfect moment!

"In cycling, there are moments when you are completely liberated; with swimming, you're always pushing through [the water]; with running you're always carrying your body weight. With cycling you can, on a good day, feel completely like a god

- although there is a fair amount of pain getting to that point. It's the freedom, the exhilaration, the beauty of the early morning. All you want to do is sit up, take off your helmet spread your arms like a set of wings, and fly."