Cadel Evans in the yellow jersey in the 2011 Tour de France (Courtesy BMC - Tim de Waele)
Never before has the call for an Australian team at the Tour de France been more relevant. Cadel Evans’ Tour de France win will rightly go down as one of the finest ever sporting accomplishments by an Australian. It will also go down as one of the most improbable.
On Sunday, Evans became the first Australian ever to win cycling’s marquee event in its 108-year history.
He also became only the third non-European to have ever topped the podium in Paris after the Americans, Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong.
And at 34, Evans is the oldest Tour winner in 88 years.
The gritty Aussie produced a near-perfect ride and, crucially, managed to avoid the sort of trouble that derailed his Tour bid last year to deliver an historic win.
But unlike John Bertrand and the crew of Australia II or Kieren Perkins or Cathy Freeman, Evans was not competing for Australia, when he rode onto the famed Parisian avenue the Champs-Élysées.
He was riding for a US-registered team, backed by a Swiss company, the bike manufacturer BMC.
That’s not unusual in cycling, a sport where commercial interests have historically trumped national ones.
The first Tour de France was organised by the newspaper L’Auto in the hope of boosting sales – it worked – and teams have typically been bankrolled by exposure-seeking sponsors.
But that’s not to say that certain trade teams don’t have defining national characters.
The Euskaltel-Euskadi team of King of the Mountains classification winner, Samuel Sanchez, prefers to recruit Basque riders and is funded in part by the Basque government; Lance Armstrong may have recruited a bunch of Spaniards to help him in the mountains but US Postal was an unashamedly American affair; and last year the British Team Sky was unveiled in a display of patriotic fervour.
But Australia has never had a top-tier, commercially-backed trade team of our own. Until now.
At the Tour Down Under back in January, Green Edge Cycling announced its bid to put a top level Australian team on the road in 2012.
It’s an ambitious undertaking that, if successful, would see the first Australian team at the Tour de France since a rag tag Aussie-Kiwi outfit led by Hubert Opperman lined-up in 1928 (Opperman finished 12th overall that year and returned as part of an all-Australian team in 1931 with R.W. ‘Fatty’ Lamb, Ossie Nicholson and Frank Thomas to finish 12th).
Run by Cycling Australia’s former high performance manager, Shayne Bannan and ex-professional Neil Stephens, Green Edge hopes to assemble a predominately Australian team to compete in the world’s top races.
Next month, Bannan, Stephens and their principal backer, Victorian businessman Andrew Ryan of Jayco caravans, will take the next step towards securing a place in cycling’s World Tour.
From August, Green Edge can begin signing riders and on the 15th, the team will submit a request for Pro Team status with the sport’s governing body, the Union Cycliste International (UCI).
On November 1, Aussie sports fans will find out if Green Edge has made the grade when the UCI announces the list of Pro Teams.
There is no guarantee that Green Edge will be admitted to the World Tour. Last year, another Australian start-up, Pegasus Racing, failed in its bid to reach the top level of the sport, but so far things are looking good.
The team has guaranteed funding for three years, a professional outfit headed up by CEO Mike McKay of “Oarsome Foursome” fame, and with a number of Australian riders out of contract this year, an enviable pool of talent to recruit from.
Should Green Edge get the nod from the UCI, it would represent a landmark moment in the history of Australian cycling.
Aussie riders have come a long way since Opperman’s pioneering rides eighty years ago. We’re no longer the underdogs.
Earlier this year, Tasmania’s Matt Goss led the World Tour rankings after his win in the one-day Classic Milan-San Remo, while Australia led the Nations ranking.
Now, Evans is on top and Australia lies third behind traditional cycling powerhouses Spain and Italy.
So, as Aussie sports fans debate whether or not Cadel’s Tour win is the greatest ever moment in Australian sporting history, one thing is clear: it’s about bloody time that Australia had its own team competing at the Tour de France.
T.J. Collins runs the cycling blog Il Gruppo.
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