Rupert Guinness follows the long road from Australia’s first Tour de France competitors in 1914 to the nation’s first professional team to compete in the race almost a century on.
Winning might not always come easy to a team in its infancy but in 2012 Orica-GreenEdge have blazed quite a trail and will look to improve further in 2013.
Can they better their YouTube video though?
WHEN THE ORICA-GREENEDGE team made their Tour de France debut in 2012, they readily revealed their intention: to win a stage and compete for – if not win – the green points jersey. By the time the 3,497-kilometre Tour had finished, however, both objectives remained unfulfilled.
Before the start of the race, the Australian team’s general manager, Shayne Bannan, stated: ‘It would be good if we can win a stage or two. If we can at least show people that we can be competitive… To not be placed in stages would be disappointing.’
To that end, the team ticked the box: Matt Goss – the squad’s big hope for a stage win and the green jersey – took second place three times and added another handful of top 10 places.
He was also relegated from sixth to seventh on stage 12 for his illegal sprint against Peter Sagan of Liquigas, which cost him 30 points in the race for the green jersey.
Goss’s Swiss team-mate, Michael Albasini, clinched his best result – fifth – on stage three, after appearing in several breaks, while South African Daryl Impey took fifth place on stage 13.
But considering their lofty ambitions and early-season successes, their debut Tour could be deemed a disappointment, especially when you consider that their pre-race hopes, Simon Gerrans and Dutchman Pieter Weening, failed to fire in the hillier stages.
What the results really highlight is not so much any major failing, but the difficulties a new team – both the riders and staff – faces when trying to gel at an optimal level for the world’s biggest race, where every rival is at his peak and riders and teams are exposed for the slightest of their vulnerabilities.
Looking back at Orica-GreenEdge’s Tour debut, it’s hard to criticise what in its basic form was such a significant chapter of Australian cycling history without sounding like the Grinch ruining Christmas. Australian cycling fans could be rightly proud of the first Australian team to take part in the Tour.
It had been an unfulfilled dream for many years. The seed was planted in 1914 when Don Kirkham and Snowy Munro became the first two Australians to ride the Tour. And the dream grew as other Australian riders followed the daring duo in the years that followed. They included the celebrated Sir Hubert Opperman, Ernie Bainbridge and Percy Osborne, who raced the Tour in 1928, then Frankie Thomas, Richard ‘Fatty’ Lamb and Ossie Nicholson, teaming up with Opperman in 1931. John Beasley followed in 1952 and 1955, Russell Mockridge in 1953, Bill Lawrie in 1967 and Don Allan in 1974 and 1975 before Phil Anderson really blazed a trail.
Anderson was the first Australian to wear the race leader’s jersey in 1981, before going on to place in the top 10 overall five times, including two fifth place finishes, during a 14-year career.
After Anderson, a stream of Aussies forged careers in Europe as ‘super domestiques’, stage winners, points and overall classification contenders, culminating in Robbie McEwen winning the first of his green jerseys in 2002 and Cadel Evans claiming the ultimate prize – overall Tour de France victory – in 2011.
When GreenEdge said in 2011 that it would become the latest party to try to start an Australian team, it was seen as a natural progression.
But while Orica-GreenEdge said all along they would not have a rider vying for the overall classification, they knew there was pressure to get results – for their main sponsor, the mining explosives giant Orica, which signed for three years just before the 2012 Giro d’Italia, for Australian cycling and for their fans.
And despite a successful start to their first season – matched by a similar sparkle at the back end of the year – there was some disappointment following a Tour without a stage win. Their biggest flaw appeared to be that they placed so much early emphasis on trying to win the green jersey rather than get a stage win.
When McEwen won his three green jerseys in 2002, 2004 and 2006, he always made claiming that first stage win his first priority. It’s easy to see why he did. After Goss lost his 30 points on stage 12, he and the team just didn’t have the energy left to pull off the stage win they so wanted. They were spent from chasing points and watching Sagan dance round them.
It was also clear that Orica-GreenEdge had underestimated the potential of the Slovakian Sagan. Earlier in the season, at the three-week Giro d’Italia, head sports director Matt White declared that the Tour’s battle for the green jersey would be a two-rider race between Goss and defending champion Mark Cavendish of Sky. White’s confidence was buoyed by Orica-GreenEdge’s showing at the Giro where a potentially formidable sprint train emerged.
Orica-GreenEdge will no doubt continue to work on perfecting that train, which is primarily focused on getting Goss, the 2011 World Championship silver medallist behind Briton Cavendish, across the line first. And the commitment to that goal is totally justified.
Goss, also the 2011 Milan-San Remo winner, is an exceptional sprinter. Cavendish has repeatedly said of all the sprinters in the peloton, his former team-mate is the one he fears most.
The Australian team may be one reputed for sniffing out winning chances. They are openly opportunists. But the team is also heavily focused on trying to clinch wins in bunch sprints, even if it became clear by the end of their first year that they still have some way to go to hone their sprint train’s strength.
It helped that at the Giro, in the 190-kilometre third stage out and back from Horsens, in Denmark, Orica-GreenEdge nabbed their first grand tour stage win with Goss.
However, while its value was perhaps lessened by Cavendish crashing with 125 metres to go, what many did not know was that the Australian team had put into practice a plan aimed at beating Cavendish that, at the time of his crash, looked to be working perfectly.
The self-belief that they could beat Cavendish counted for a lot: many teams go into a sprint thinking that if Cavendish is there he can’t be beaten. But not Orica-GreenEdge, as I discovered on the team meeting in their bus that day as White outlined the blueprint for their ‘mission impossible’ – so called due to Cavendish’s speed and the sheer strength of his British Sky team.
Standing in the back room of the $450,000 custom-made bus, White’s calm three-and-a-half minute address impressed.
He empathised with Goss for the weight of frustration on him, having succumbed to five second places in his previous eight races.
But White also knew that for Goss to break the run – especially against Cavendish – it was imperative that his pep talk focused not on the negatives of the previous day, but on the positives.
First up for White on the last of the Giro’s three days in Denmark, as he addressed his eclectic mix of riders, hailing from Australia, Slovenia, Japan, Belgium, South Africa and Canada, was to revisit the previous day’s racing in stage two in Herning, where Goss was second by a bike’s length.
‘It was a good ride by Gossy,’ White told his riders in the meeting. ‘He gave it every chance yesterday. In the finale… it was a very hectic sprint. I was happy with [having] guys up there. It wasn’t as co-ordinated as we would have liked. No teams really nailed that finish yesterday. But the pleasing thing is that you guys have got legs, you’ve got balls to get in there and have a go. But today, on a much tighter circuit, we want to really nail the finish, especially from the two-kilometres-to-go mark.’
Then came cycling’s ‘C’ word: Cavendish.
‘We know that, with Cavendish, we can count the times on one hand that he has had to come over other riders,’ White said. ‘In all his sprints, he is the first guy when he starts the sprint. There are only a couple of sprints he has ever done where he has been passed. So, for us to beat Cavendish, we have got to deliver Gossy in front of Mark. Nine times out of 10, Cav is going to beat Gossy if Gossy starts from behind.
‘That’s the best way,’ White continued, ‘the only way, really, to beat him. He has shown he is the fastest guy in the world, so we have to force Sky to make mistakes, or we have to nail it better.
‘To do that, we can’t get caught out on a tight circuit with two kilometres to go. We want to deliver our train to that corner, then the last four guys can take care of the rest.’
White went on to talk about the final lead-out for Goss by South Africa’s Daryl Impey, Lithuanian Tomas Vaitkus, and Australian Brett Lancaster, and the all-important need for patience, especially from the less experienced riders such as Jack Bobridge, who was taking part in his first road race since the track World Championships track a month earlier.
‘Like yesterday, if there is any chasing that needs to be done, Christian [Meier] will do the chasing. But everyone else… just look after yourself,’ White said.
‘Jack, you just stay in the bunch – we don’t want to see you all day until we get to the [finishing] circuits. Then, we all have to hit the circuits very far in front. We want to be the first team with numbers into that tight corner. All right?’
White’s riders didn’t say a word. Their answer came hours later with the sight of them, strength in numbers at the front, with Goss over the line first.
Still, the Orica-GreenEdge sprint train remains a work in progress. The Lotto-Belisol squad, working for the German powerhouse André Greipel, has taken time to be as strong as it is.
Despite the Giro stage win, White’s opinion that the Tour green jersey battle would be between Cavendish and Goss, and not Sagan, surprised many considering Sagan had won five stages at the Tour of California in May. White cited Sagan’s age (then 22), inexperience and suspect ability to last three weeks.
By the end of the Tour, White conceded that Sagan had proved him wrong, although in mitigation it could be said that the race for the green jersey was not a conventional scrap between the sprinters.
* * *
Orica-GreenEdge should arrive at the 2013 Tour older and wiser. When all was said and done, their 2012 season was a resounding success, with 31 victories by October – the latest being Svein Tuft and Luke Durbridge’s win at the Duo Normand two-man time trial in northern France.
It was a haul that a number of more established teams would have happily ended the season with.
Besides Goss’s Giro stage win, those victories included wins by Gerrans in the Australian road race championships, the Tour Down Under, Milan-San Remo and the Grand Prix de Quebec; Albasini with two stages and the overall classification at the Volta a Catalunya in Spain and a stage at the Tour of Switzerland; wins for Impey at the Tour of the Basque Country and Tour of Slovenia; a stage and the overall for Australian Luke Durbridge at the Circuit de la Sarthe, victory in the prologue of the Critérium du Dauphiné, as well as a stage and overall honours in the Tour du Poitou Charentes, and with it the best young rider’s jersey.
At the same race, Lithuanian Aidis Kruopis also won a stage and the points jersey competition, as well as a stage of the Tour of Poland, and then Australian Simon Clarke took a stage and the king of the mountains title at the Vuelta a España.
There was also success for the women’s team, which raced as Orica-AIS under sport directors Martin Barras and former pro Dave McPartland. Their season included domination of the Bay Criteriums series, the national titles and the Tour of Oman, a string of top results in Classics and stage races, and a silver medal in the trade team time trial at the World Championships in the Netherlands where a retiring Judith Arndt also won the individual time trial.
* * *
Following the team’s inaugural season, some concerns have emerged, even if they’ve not been openly spoken of. It was not lost on some observers that the squad’s main sponsor, Orica, has a track record of controversy.
GreenEdge, the team’s management company, promoted am environmental image in its infancy, but that image appeared challenged when Orica was named as a headline sponsor shortly before the Giro. GreenEdge countered the critics by saying that the sponsorship was a commitment by Orica to work on its environmental standing. But in September, nearing the season’s end, the mining explosives company was prosecuted for the fifth time in 2012 after breaching a pollution licence at its plant in Botany, Sydney.
The Environmental Protection Agency said it was related to the emission of mercury vapour near a residential area in September 2011.
Of course, that was outside of the cycling team’s control, but even before the season had ended, the seeds of several considerable concerns began to emerge. First up was the loss of one of up-and-coming star Jack Bobridge to Dutch team Rabobank, even though he had a year left on his contract.
Bobridge, a key member of Australia’s 2012 Olympic Games silver-medal team pursuit line-up, and the reigning world record holder over 4,000 metres, had long been touted as a star in the making, blessed as he is with an incredible engine.
However, soon after the Giro d’Italia, where a foot injury had forced him to abandon with a day to go, the South Australian ran foul of the law in Spain, where he lives in Girona, for a drink driving incident at Lloret de Mar, also involving Australian squad team-mate and soon-to-be Orica-GreenEdge recruit Michael Hepburn.
Bobridge later made a ‘full disclosure’ to the Australian Olympic team chef de mission Nick Green that saved his selection for the London Olympics. But in the Spanish courts he was fined and lost his licence for eight months. Cycling Australia also put him on a 12-month good behaviour bond, fined him $2,500, and put an indefinite drinking ban on him for whenever he’s on the national team. Hepburn, meanwhile, was placed on a 12-month good behaviour bond and fined $1,000.
Orica-GreenEdge, too, was understood to have placed severe restrictions on Bobridge that were not to his liking, leading to his exit. That Bobridge’s move to Rabobank was granted by Orica-GreenEdge indicated that the feeling was mutual.
Another concern that one can only hope remains as such and does not prove to be problematic is the effectiveness of the leadership pathway in place for the team’s current and up-and-coming stars with such an abundance of former Australian riders in management and staff positions.
Neil Stephens is an experienced former professionals from a good generation or two before most of the team’s riders. But with strong characters like Robbie McEwen and Matt Wilson, who began the team’s first year as riders but have since retired to take staff positions, and with whispers of the evergreen Stuart O’Grady destined to be offered a director’s role, Orica-GreenEdge may find their young riders suffocated by the strong minds of those recently retired riders now in consultancy or sports director roles, and unable to naturally develop their leadership skills through trial and error.
* * *
By the time the 2012 Tour de France got under way in Liège, the journey travelled had been a lot more successful than Orica-GreenEdge general manager Shayne Bannan had expected when presented with the opportunity to set up Australia’s first top-tier team back in July 2010.
Bannan, then Cycling Australia’s high performance director, was behind the wheel of his car on an Italian autostrada, driving a group of Australian junior riders to a race in Bergamo, when his mobile phone rang.
It was Gerry Ryan – a Melbourne businessman who owns the Jayco caravan company with his son Andrew, and whose wealth in 2010 was estimated at $180 million. Ryan is also the majority owner of Global Creatures, the production company behind the animatronics arena production Walking With Dinosaurs, which grossed more than $350 million worldwide between its 2007 launch and 2010.
A long-time supporter of Australian cycling, having sponsored Cycling Australia, the Victorian Institute of Sport and a number of races, Ryan has become a public figure within Australian sport – especially in Melbourne.
In recent years, he has also sponsored the Melbourne Storm National Rugby League team, the St Kilda AFL club, cricket, horse racing, basketball and lawn bowls.
Bannan readily recalled Ryan’s call on that July day in 2010: ‘He said, “I’d like to talk to you about something. Can you come to Paris?”’
Ryan was in France, following the Tour in the Pyrenees, three days away from the finish on the Champs-Élysées in the French capital.
The call and invitation from Ryan to meet in Paris – brief and short of detail though it was – concerned Bannan at first.
‘I was worried that Gerry was going to withdraw his funding from the national programme,’ Bannan said. ‘I hung up, and then started wondering, what are we going to do now?’
Fortunately for Bannan – and the young Australian cyclists in his car, and others like them whose futures he feared were on the line – Ryan called back and said: ‘Shayne, I should have been more specific. I’m still at the Tour and I’m wondering how we can get an Australian team here.’
In that moment, the seed was planted in Bannan’s mind for a plan that would rapidly grow into what first became known as the GreenEdge project and then developed into the Orica-GreenEdge team making its historic Tour debut in 2012.
To say Bannan was relieved Ryan spoke nothing of pulling funds from the national programme would be an understatement. But that Ryan spoke of creating a UCI WorldTour team that would need 30 riders, 37 staff and be ranked in the top 18 in the world to make the 2012 Tour, requiring an estimated annual budget of $10-12 million to keep it going, according to UCI licensing laws, left Bannan ‘shaking like a leaf in excitement’, he said.
‘But I knew straight away that with that dream comes a lot of processes, and that there was a heap of work to be done,’ said Bannan, who had long dreamed of setting up an Australian pro team.
As Bannan drove on, with the Australian junior riders in his car chatting among themselves, the ‘must do’ list began mounting. After dropping the riders off for their race, Bannan continued driving to Brescia, where he met up with Neil Stephens, who was Cycling Australia’s professional co-ordinator, and was working with another pro team at the time.
Stephens would join Bannan on the GreenEdge project, and the two men worked on a rough blueprint to put to Ryan in Paris two days later.
On a balmy Saturday afternoon – the day before the 2010 Tour finished on the Champs-Élysées, where Spaniard Alberto Contador claimed a third win that he would later lose for doping – Bannan sat with Ryan at a small café in the Opera district. He presented his blueprint to Ryan, who in turn expanded on his reasons for wanting to support it and revealed that his vision was not confined to a men’s team, but a top women’s team, too.
* * *
On Sunday, January 16, 2011, several hours before the Cancer Council Classic criterium in Adelaide – two days before the Tour Down Under – the GreenEdge project was officially launched by Bannan.
By December that year, GreenEdge had morphed into a real top-tier team, awarded with one of 18 prized UCI licences, allowing it to race in all World-Tour events, including the grand tours of Italy, France and Spain.
And Bannan said that the person to thank the most was Ryan who guaranteed the estimated $20 million start costs and $10-12 million annual budget to the end of 2013.
‘With Gerry and the Ryan family, it has not been a two-minute involvement… They’ve been involved for years. He is a man with vision,’ he said.
The creation of the team was far from straightforward, though. Almost as soon as the GreenEdge project had been launched, Bannan and Stephens set about planning and secretly recruiting riders and staff – despite the UCI’s controversial deadline which means that riders are unable to negotiate with potential new employers until August 1, officially at least.
Possible locations were also scouted out for the team’s service course – a headquarters in which to house the squad’s equipment – while cars, trucks and buses were also required.
However, with Ryan’s backing for three years guaranteed, there was no rush to sign a principal sponsor. The thinking was that the team could start as GreenEdge, allowing the squad time to raise its value with results, and in the meantime promote its brand. ‘Green’ signified the green of Australia’s green and gold colours, as well as an environmentally friendly touch. ‘Edge’ reinforced the constant search for a winning advantage.
‘We don’t even know what our product is worth now,’ Bannan said at the time. ‘If we under-sell now, we will be locked in for two to three years.’
The priority for GreenEdge was to secure sponsors for equipment and vehicles. First to confirm that they were on board were Scott bikes, Santini clothing and Subaru cars, while other potential suppliers were courted at the Eurobike trade show in Germany in August 2011.
The overriding aim was for the GreenEdge name to be promoted nationwide, and to become as keenly supported in Australia as other national teams like the Wallabies rugby union side.
Signing riders was a must, yet not so easy for a new team – nor cheap.
GreenEdge initially aimed at a 28-rider roster, but ended up recruiting the maximum allowed of 30 with 75 per cent being Australian. Between them, the signed riders had enough world ranking points to secure their UCI ProTeam licence.
GreenEdge made no secret of their plans not to sign a grand tour contender, which would have set them back somewhere between $1.4 million a year to the estimated $5.5 million that a Tour de France winner might command.
Instead, they targeted young Australian prospects like Cameron Meyer, then 23, and Jack Bobridge, 22, as well as proven stage and Classic winners such as Australians Simon Gerrans and Stuart O’Grady, and Dutchmen Pieter Weening and Sebastian Langeveld.
While Bannan knew general classification riders would not come cheap, he cited state-of-the-art facilities such as the Australian Institute of Sport’s European Training Centre in Varese, in northern Italy, which was opened in March 2011, as a lure to the riders he was targeting.
The ETC was a unique element GreenEdge could offer potential recruits that other teams could not, having come to a commercial arrangement with the centre to have its administrative and athletes’ headquarters there, allowing its riders access to all training, rehabilitation and sport science facilities.
Accommodation and full restaurant services are also available for riders visiting for medical attention, or to undergo rehabilitation programmes, to meet GreenEdge management for consultation on training and racing programmes, or contract negotiations. It is also a team base for training camps for riders not racing at any one period during the season.
The team’s service course ended up being a 2,200 square metre building in Brunello, about a kilometre-and-a-half from the Cycling Australia national team base at nearby Castronno, where the Australian men’s under-23 Jayco-AIS and national women’s teams are based. Having everything so close together meant it was like a little bit of Australia in Varese.
That November, GreenEdge were to learn if they would get a ProTeam licence, and there was still much to do to convince the UCI that they deserved the golden ticket to the world’s biggest races. The next option for the Australian team would have been to obtain a ‘second division’ ProContinental licence, but that would have left their chances of racing in the top races hinging on ‘wildcard’ invitations.
For a licence, teams must fulfil criteria in such areas as sporting value (a team’s roster), ethical policy (anti-doping and code of conduct), financial viability (sponsorship, marketing and business structure) and development plans (men’s under-23 and women’s teams, talent identification).
Besides riders, GreenEdge also had to recruit staff, and by early 2011 Bannan was already receiving about 10 emails a day from all over the world – from soigneurs [masseurs], mechanics, sports directors, and even chefs wanting jobs, Bannan said.
He said that 85 per cent of applications for the full-time positions were from people already working for ProTeam squads, which offered the team vast experience straight away.
‘If we started with too many novices, there would be the potential of not having enough experience for pressured situations,’ he pointed out.
By August, 90 per cent of the staff positions had been filled.
Heading the line-up alongside director Andrew Ryan, Bannan, technical director Neil Stephens and chief medical and welfare director Peter Barnes would be Matt White as head sports director.
There would be two more sports directors, plus six to eight soigneurs, six to eight mechanics, two more doctors, two to three physiotherapists, two physiologists and office staff.
By November, everything was in place, and all that was needed was the UCI to anoint GreenEdge with ProTeam status.
That call came in December, in a year when interest in cycling in Australia soared after Cadel Evans’s Tour de France win. The Australian might have been contracted to the American BMC outfit, but Evans was openly a supporter of the GreenEdge project. Prior to the ProTeam licence announcement, Ryan remained quietly confident.
That calm was evident when I spoke with Ryan at a civic reception in Melbourne held for Evans after his Tour victory parade. The timing of Evans’s Tour win in the pointy end of their 18-month campaign to get up and running was not lost on Ryan.
As for the lack of a main sponsor, it wasn’t a concern for Ryan.
‘It’s about building the brand – the GreenEdge army,’ he said. ‘We want to appeal to Australians, but not only Australians… Since signing Pieter Weening, Dutch interest, in terms of hits on the team website, has been running at about 24 per cent. In Australia, the interest is only about 48 per cent. The rest of it is international.’
He felt the build-up to their wait for the UCI license was virtually trouble free. One hiccup that did not go unnoticed, however, was the sudden decision to let GreenEdge’s first chief executive, Mike McKay, a former member of the ‘Oarsome Foursome’ coxless four Olympic rowing champions, go.
Melbourne-based McKay’s tenure was short-lived, and it was clear during a GreenEdge public relations trip to the Giro d’Italia that year, attended by journalists – including me – that there was a difference in philosophy between McKay and the GreenEdge management structure in place.
Ryan would not elaborate on McKay’s departure that came soon after the Giro, other than to say that the Australian-based position would not be filled.
‘It’s forgotten, to be honest,’ Ryan said. ‘There hasn’t been any change. It never had any impact on GreenEdge, and the role of CEO won’t be replaced. Pending the sponsor, we are going to put the right people in to deliver the requirements of the sponsor. A manager rather than a CEO.’
Ryan also revealed an insight into what he was expecting from GreenEdge in its first year, and in the seasons to follow, from the young riders signed.
Asked, as a businessman, what would determine whether GreenEdge’s first season would be deemed a success, Ryan replied: ‘It depends on your expectations. If you want to talk business-speak, it’s in terms of your KPIs [key performance indicators]: to be accepted into the ProTeam circuit is our number one priority. Number two is to have developed the right culture and to be getting the right riders. We are not expecting to win a grand tour, although we would like to be in that position five years from now. If we have the right riders, we want to be competitive. We have gone after youth and are prepared to have patience to develop those kids and bring enough experience in so they have that leadership.
‘For the younger guys, the [2012] Olympic Games are the priority over riding the Tour or the Giro d’Italia,’ he continued. ‘Their programme will be based around the Olympic Games. They are stepping up and maturing and will be ready to go in 2013.’
Ryan’s vision wasn’t just focused on a men’s team, either. As Bannan learned when he spoke with Ryan in Paris in July 2010, Ryan’s conviction for women’s cycling was just as deep rooted.
‘We will have a women’s team [run under] the same philosophy as the men’s,’ Ryan said firmly, adding: ‘Women have been neglected. We want the women’s team to be part of the scene as per Australian women’s basketball, where a major sponsor is there to give women the opportunity to participate and grow by having that international competition.’
Ryan also saw a broader raison d’etre for the creation of the GreenEdge organisation.
‘It’s an opportunity for Australians on the team, and not just its riders. The management, doctors, physios and sports scientists will have a stepping stone to the world stage,’ said Ryan. ‘That’s how we become better. In all my businesses, we benchmark ourselves off international companies. Australia is such a small market. You limit your thinking, your growth, by not being international.’
However, Ryan was less direct about his view on internal discipline – an area that was a key element in their application to the UCI for a ProTeam licence, other than to say: ‘We have a strong code in place. But we want to develop a strong culture and that culture comes from the top.’
When pressed as to whether a breach of that code – whether it concerned doping or any other form of ill-discipline – would mean him withdrawing his support for GreenEdge, Ryan replied: ‘No… If an individual breaks it, why should one individual affect the rest of the team?’
This led to Ryan being asked if he was concerned about Neil Stephens, employed as technical director, having been implicated in the 1998 Festina doping scandal as a rider at the Tour, and Matt White, who then had yet to join GreenEdge but had been named in the investigation into the US Postal Service team he once rode for following doping allegations against Lance Armstrong, by Floyd Landis in 2010.
‘No,’ Ryan replied. ‘Both of them have coached in Australia. Obviously the Australian Sports Commission and Cycling Australia have done their homework and research and have gone through the process.’
Had he spoken to them about it?
‘No – never,’ Ryan said.
* * *
The team debuted as GreenEdge at the Jayco Bay Cycling Classic Series in Victoria in January 2012. A few days later, Simon Gerrans won the Australian road race championship in a temporary team strip, helping to boost anticipation ahead of their World-Tour debut at the Tour Down Under in Adelaide in mid-January, where they unveiled their first official jersey. The team later unveiled another jersey at the Giro after Orica had signed as their sponsor, and then a revised fourth version at the Tour de France.
The team’s debut didn’t enjoy the fairytale start they had hoped for, however. Before a pedal had even been turned in anger, the team became embroiled in a controversy when O’Grady found his name and face in the media following a car chauffeur’s allegations of drunken behaviour during the drive back to his home in Adelaide after a function.
While it soon became clear that there was conjecture about the veracity of the claims against O’Grady, for which no charges were laid, the episode highlighted the new level of scrutiny that he and the team would find themselves under as the first top-tier Australian cycling team to join the UCI WorldTour.
The team soon corrected any misconceptions about their commitment by setting up Gerrans for overall victory at the Tour Down Under. The finish of the penultimate stage on Old Willunga Hill – the first hill-top finish in the Australian stage race’s history – was as spectacular as anyone could have hoped, with Gerrans being pipped for the stage win by Spaniard Alejandro Valvderde.
The Spaniard was taking part in his first race since returning from a doping suspension, but it was Gerrans who claimed the ochre leader’s jersey.
Gerrans’s eventual overall win carried extra weight after his national title in Ballarat the week before, and set him up as one of the key riders to watch once the WorldTour peloton returned to Europe for the build-up to the first major Classic, Milan-San Remo.
It also helped boost the value of GreenEdge to potential sponsors. As the first WorldTour event of the season, every team wanted to leave Australia with something to show for their efforts. For GreenEdge, the best way to justify their presence in the peloton and earn the respect of their rivals was with a winning ride. Doing so in front of a home crowd and a worldwide television audience also repaid the faith of existing sponsors, and would help convince other sponsors to come on board.
Not that the second Tour Down Under win of Gerrans’s career was all laced with smiles and bonhomie. A rival sports director, Sean Yates of Team Sky, questioned the condition of most of the GreenEdge riders, bar Gerrans and Cameron Meyer, on the final day of the race, raising the ire of the Australian team.
Yates was quoted as saying GreenEdge had ‘not attacked the season in great shape’ adding ‘in general they are not in good enough condition. Obviously, to get in good condition you’ve got to train and be serious. Their state would suggest that’s not been the case.’ It was a bit like the coach of a beaten rugby team criticising the opposition’s fitness only to be told to take a look at the scoreboard, mate.
Asked for his view on the critique after the race finish in Adelaide, GreenEdge sports director Matt White said: ‘He’s entitled to his opinion, but at the end of the day he has the team with the biggest budget in world cycling, and we won the bike race… I don’t know why they are barking up that tree.’
The return to Europe was followed by a lull in the Belgian semi-Classics, including the one-day Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne and Het Nieuwsblad, and the Strade Bianche in Italy, where the sceptics again emerged.
But good fortune soon returned, even though it came not from those who were expected to shine – like Goss, who deliberately started the season below the 2010 form that saw him win in the Bay Classic series and Tour Down Under and later at the Tour of Oman in February – but from other quarters.
Goss may still have enjoyed a three-day spell in the blue leader’s jersey at Tirreno-Adriatico, but that came thanks to victory in the team time trial stage.
At Milan-San Remo, where Goss had taken victory in 2011, it was instead that man Gerrans again, winning La Primavera ahead of Switzerland’s Fabian Cancellara. Gerrans’s victory was initially attributed to opportunism, sitting on Cancellara’s wheel as the pair led the race down the Poggio and into the final two kilometres. But as physiological data of Gerrans released by the team later showed, his power output as he raced to victory indicated that he’d used every ounce of strength to win the day. Fifteen times in the final seven kilometres, the Australian recorded power outputs that exceeded 1,000 watts.
Gerrans’s victory was a huge statement of intent to those who doubted the WorldTour newbies. It meant GreenEdge had two Milan-San Remo champions on the books, the other being Goss, who won for HTC-Columbia in 2010.
The image of Gerrans crossing the finish line with arms aloft in the Australian champion’s jersey symbolised exactly the lofty ambitions of the new team. Gerrans was not just the second Australian to win La Primavera, but the third Australian to win one of cycling’s five ‘monuments’. Milan-San Remo joins the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Tour of Lombardy as the one-day Classics everyone wanted to win.
Gerrans – whose career includes stage wins in the Tour de France (2008), Giro d’Italia (2009) and Vuelta a España (2009) and overall victories in the Tour Down Under (2006, 2012), Tour of Denmark (2011) and the Herald Sun Tour in Australia (2005, 2006) – could not hide his joy if he’d wanted to.
As he drove home to Monte Carlo from San Remo following the podium ceremony and media interviews, Gerrans returned my call after I’d watched the race live in Australia, where it was 3.45am.
‘This is definitely the biggest win of my career,’ he told me. ‘But to win it racing for an Australian team, and in the Australian champion’s jersey, is perfect. There’s nothing better you can do… It doesn’t matter what happens to us now in the [European] spring because after winning one of the monuments, anything else will be a bonus. We have won one of the biggest races you can win, but we’ll still be doing our best.’
But ‘our best’ clearly wasn’t good enough to calm the doubters when a lull in success followed. GreenEdge repeatedly said during their formative months that the spring Classics in April would be a major focus. However, they all came and went with GreenEdge missing from the results, with the situation made all the worse when their in-form rider, Dutchman Sebastian Langeveld, broke his collar bone in a crash at the Tour of Flanders – a race in which he’d finished fifth the year before.
Arguably the most poignant result in 2012 for a GreenEdge team with one eye on the future was in the Circuit de la Sarthe stage race in France, where rookie Australian pro Luke Durbridge won the time trial and the overall classification.
In his first road race in Europe for GreenEdge since withdrawing from the Australian track endurance squad preparing for the London Olympics, Durbridge’s victory in a race previously won by Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond, with only two team-mates in Weening and Eritrean rookie Daniel Teklehaimanot after Matt Wilson and Baden Cooke had dropped out, was a true measure of his potential and an example of the team’s ability to win against the odds.
Their victory showed that Orica-GreenEdge had plenty to offer for the long term with its younger and developing riders.
And then there was the team’s showing in the Vuelta a España, the final grand tour of the season. Not only did they get to cheer Simon Clarke’s memorable stage win at Valdezcaray, where he outfoxed Tony Martin after a long break, but Clarke added the king of the mountains competition, which required him to be aggressive and opportunist enough to score points when the big-hitting climbers were not trading blows in the overall battle.
There was a moment of levity too. They reminded the peloton, and all who follow a sport so often bogged down in politics and controversy, that you can have a laugh now and again. The Orica-GreenEdge Vuelta squad’s lip-sync video of the Call Me Maybe song became one of the most celebrated feats of the year and a YouTube hit – and justifiably so.
Coming at the tail end of a year that also saw Gerrans win the Grand Prix of Quebec in Canada before the WorldTour finished with the Tour of Beijing, their YouTube video brought some long-overdue relief and joy at a time when cycling was dealing with the ongoing controversies concerning Lance Armstrong and the UCI.
In that, Orica-GreenEdge had done cycling a much needed service – not that they would want that to be their legacy. Winning still helps.
With the season almost over, the long-awaited report into doping by Lance Armstrong and the US Postal Service team was released by the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
The consequences were far-reaching and Orica-GreenEdge was not untouched.
Matt White, the team’s head sports directors, issued a personal statement in which he confessed to having doped while a rider at US Postal Service between 2001 and 2003.
His confession came after he was named in the testimony made to USADA by Floyd Landis, one of his former US Postal Service team-mates.
As we all now know, Armstrong did not defend himself against the charges and so was found guilty by USADA of the charges against him.
Armstrong was banned for life and stripped of his seven Tour de France titles and all other race results since August 1998.
USADA’s findings were also ratified by the UCI.
White stood himself down from his positions as head sports director of the Orica-GreenEdge team and as Cycling Australia’s professional co-ordinator as well as resigning his role as men’s road coach as soon as he confessed to doping.
Cycling Australia then announced his contract was terminated, while his future at Orica-GreenEdge hinged on talks between team owner Gerry Ryan and general manager Shayne Bannan that were scheduled to take place in late October.
Rupert Guinness is the cycling writer for the Sydney Morning Herald (Fairfax). He has been covering the sport since 1986. Guinness, who now lives in Sydney, has covered every major cycling race – including 24 Tours de France – and still returns to Europe to cover races regularly. He has also authored 12 books, his most recent being The Tour – Behind the Scenes of Cadel Evans’ Tour de France (Hardie Grant, 2012).