Self Righteous Cyclist

The Bendigo and District Cycling Club hosted the Merv Dean Memorial 3 stage tour over the King's birthday long weekend at Sutton Grange and Harcourt just outside of Bendigo. 83 riders across Men's A, B & C grades and Women's A, from as far afield as Alice Springs, Mt Gambier and Adelaide signed for 3 challenging days of racing. More notably Alyssa Polities, a local star of road and track and heading to her second Commonwealth Games in just over 6 weeks and Mark O'Brien, who has won about every road and gravel bike race there is to win in Australia, were ready to serve it up to their rivals. The elites in A grade received a lot of the coverage, so this report is going to concentrate on the combined Women's A and Men's C grades. Whilst there was an overall General Classification for each grade, the stages, the sprint and king of the mountain primes and time bonuses were combined. Picking up time bonuses within each stage would be vital for those hoping to sta...

Northern Combine and Coburg Cycling Club hosted the Jack Wood Memorial Handicap to honour the memory of Jack on the Glenaroua course, just out of Broadford.  The 16min bunch of 8, started 18min behind limit on 34min in conditions as good as you could hope for at this time of year. By two thirds the way around lap one, we were down to 6, but still rolling strong. Shayne Kirby gave us a time call of 3min to the group in front and 7min to Tom McDonough's 25min bunch. It was deflating to know that we had made no progress on the group of 11 in front of us with a 3min head start, containing some pretty handy riders. On lap two, Shayne was parked at the top of the Sugarloaf Creek climb and this time the margin was down to one and a half and four to Tom’s group. This time we were in with a shot. We took the left hand turn onto the Broadford-Glenaroua Rd and had the 19min bunch in our sights. We swept them up and a good few of them including Roger Venning, Seb Slezak, Carl Simmons, Stephen ...

Hopefully by now, the Apple Crumble Gravel Crit needs no introduction. Since September 2025, the Brunswick Cycling Club has been serving up something truly unique in the form of a gravel crit held inside Petty's Orchard , a working organic farm with some of the best tasty treats and coffee. The venue is a comfortable one hour ride from the inner north of Melbourne along the Yarra River trails. If you are feeling a little more adventurous, you can test yourself on the many single tracks that divert off the main trail. B grade heading up Col du Monsieur rose 23-05-26 The course itself is 820m, which includes a hill to rival Melbourne's other famous crit track, the "Teardrop" and has now been named "Col du monsieur rose" in honour of Brunswick CC's very own Mr Pink and is adorned with a pink marquee. First lap of Mens C/D grade 13-09-25 There are three left hand corners each with their own nuances. The first, Knog Bend a descending left hander, which has b...

What travels at 100km/h, has 4 heads, 12 wheels, a kitchen sink? Stephen Saunders' Kombi on the way to Balliang for the Northern Combine Pop Stewart, Alf Walker and Norma Adam's Handicaps. Never mind how we fit 4 bikes into and onto a Kombi, all I can say is that I was rewarded with the most leg room in the back. Needless to say that I was "on the rivet", "in the wheels" and "chewing bars", and we hadn't even left Melbourne. Business Class in the Kombi: Tom, Roger & Steve Welcome to bucolic Balliang where thanks to global warming the weather just keeps getting better each year. The late autumnal weather was turned on as about 60 riders from as far afield as Portland and Warrnambool fronted up for three torturous threshold laps, including a challenging climb, corrugated gravel and a stiff northerly headwind. Before the race, Bella Gadsen (limit) came over to me and asked me to take care of Liam Vaughan who was riding his first race. Happy to...

Time to get my review of 2025 out before 2026 gets away. 2025 has been a year of learning, which I feel is incredibly relevant as someone in their late 50s, because as they saying goes, if you are not learning, you are going backwards. That said, 2025 has been punctuated with many personal breakthroughs as a cyclist and a person. Lots of racing across a range of disciplines and clubs. Taking an active role in organising the Apple Crumble gravel crits at Petty's Orchard and giving people a chance to race a different kind of crit racing has been a lot of fun. There's that word again, fun. Bike racing is often referred to as type 2 fun. Filled with pain and suffering during but when you look back you think "that was fun". I will use the word fun again from a " game theory " perspective, where I strategise before, during and after a race. How to place well in a bike race by being smarter, rather than riding harder? Rarely does the strongest person win the bike r...

RADL GRVL , what's with all the missing vowels? Don’t worry, they didn’t lose the vowels, they just put them on low‑weight gravel wheels to save grams. For one week each year Adelaide turns into a cycling mecca as thousands of cycling enthusiasts, pro-teams and aspiring pros turn up for the Tour Down Under and the myriad of support events around the week. RADL GRVL is one of those events and came about through the commitment of Adelaide local and current pro cyclist  Tiffany Cromwell and her partner Valteri Bottas of F1 fame, to create an event that captured the essence of the varied terrain and the beauty of the McLaren Vale region from a different perspective. The event is now in its third year and caters for professional, elite and age group riders, has gone from strength to strength. With over 100 elite men and women racing, the field represented the strongest ever assembled in Australia for a gravel race.  The event gathered even more cache, when it became the inaugural ...