Play Sport, Not Politics

Our sporting rivalry with the Brits is famous. The Ashes, on the track, the road…whenever we can, we go up to bat against the Mother Country in the hopes of returning home victorious.

So it seems odd that the Australian Olympic Committee has knowingly handicapped the Australian cycling team’s chances of a gold medal, in either the time trial or the road race. The road race course is billed as a sprinter’s course, and the best sprinter in the world is, of course, Britain’s Mark Cavendish. The race for second is always heated, but Australia’s Matt Goss is always up there giving it his best shot. The obvious choice for the road race would therefore be Goss, and the obvious choice to lead him out would be Mark Renshaw, billed as the best leadout man in the world – and conveniently Australian.

Well, the selectors got Goss right, but it seems to have somehow slipped their minds that Renshaw was available to take ‘Gossy’ to the finishing line. Renshaw was left out of the Australian World Championships team for 2011 as well, sparking speculation that Renshaw is being deliberately shunned. The 29-year-old is known for being a bit explosive and controversial – he was sent home from the 2010 Tour de France after a well-publicised headbutting incident with Kiwi Julian Dean. It has also been posited that Renshaw’s signing with the Dutch team Rabobank rather than the new Australian team Orica-GreenEDGE is the reason the sprinter has been left out of the Worlds and Olympic teams. Interestingly enough, of the five riders selected for the Olympic team, Stuart O’Grady, Matt Goss and Simon Gerrans all ride for Orica-GreenEDGE, Cadel Evans is the first Australian winner of the Tour de France, and Michael Rogers is an all-around Australian favourite. In saying that, almost half of the Australian pros are signed to GreenEDGE, so a certain amount of GreenEDGE-domination is to be expected.

But there’s another glaring omission in the Australian roster – and a GreenEDGE one at that. Luke Durbridge is the reigning Australian time trial champion, and in particular the only Australian to have beaten Bradley Wiggins in a time trial while Wiggins has been in his current brilliant form. 21-year-old Durbridge won the time trial prologue of the Critérium du Dauphiné just prior to the Tour de France ahead of riders like Wiggins, World Time Trial Champion Tony Martin, French National Time Trial Champion Sylvain Chavanel and, yes, Cadel Evans. Granted, Durbridge is young, but his time-trialling abilities speak for themselves, and he’s proven himself as a domestique throughout his debut season with GreenEDGE.

So why aren’t Renshaw and Durbridge on the team, then? In fact, why is there only one pure sprinter on the team – Gossy – when Australia boasts a pretty good arsenal of sprinters like Heinrich Haussler or Adam Hansen who could help Gossy give Mark Cavendish a run for his money? Australia’s team is simply not geared towards winning a gold medal; rather, each appointment to the team was a political move to pacify and acknowledge Australian cycling’s heads of state. It’s a noble intention, certainly, but someone needs to tell the AOC and Cycling Australia that the Olympic Games is the wrong place for playing politics.