The Australian National Road Cycling Championship has today been run and won at Bunninyong near Ballarat and I never saw a minute of it even though it was live on national television.
Where was I? Out dining on the Kingston waterfront and being culturally invigorated at the Tom Roberts exhibition at the National Gallery which is an affair I highly recommend to all even if you don’t know a masterpiece from a chicken dinner.
For many years my parents had a large print of Roberts’ famous painting “The Breakaway” (no, it’s not about cycling!) on the wall in their lounge-room so I grew up looking at this precious work and having some appreciation for Roberts’ ability and vision.
Even those who are ignorant of Roberts’ fame as possibly the greatest Australian painter will have seen many of his most notable works even if you are no fan of art or artists and are largely indifferent to their influence on Australian culture and the burgeoning nationalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Tom Roberts had been born in England and come to Australia as a boy. He had returned to England in middle age and resided there for close to twenty years before returning to spend his twilight years on a property at Kalista outside of Melbourne. He died of cancer aged 72 and is actually buried near Longford in Tasmania, a state for which he held much affection and seems to have had an affinity as well as being where he met his wife.
He had made a brief visit to Melbourne in 1919 and it seems to have jogged his memories of days of yore and the sights, smells and sounds of Australia seem to have lured him back to spend his last days in the land of his youth. Shades of Dorethea Mackellar’s “Sunburnt Country”.
So, getting back to the point of this mish-mash of a post, I came home to find Jack Bobridge had won the national road cycling championship after a 90 kilometre solo breakaway, an effort which pleased me but not for the reason most would expect.
I’m not a great fan of summer road racing and you can find any number of posts in the archives of this Blog lamenting the rise of the road warriors of summer to the detriment of our unique track cycling culture but the national road race does often produce some inspired racing even though it really seems to be put on for the benefit of Australia’s European based professionals rather than for the average home based Aussies who keep the sport going in this country from year to year. However there are plenty who will disagree with me but I will say no more about it.
I’m also not a great fan of Jack Bobridge although I applaud his ride today which from all accounts was very gallant and resulted in a well deserved victory. Bobridge has always seemed to be a queer rider and a fellow who doesn’t seem to fit in the rarefied air of professional cycling. He began his career as a young tyro and was actually a world pursuit champion on the track but had no success at all for the professional teams for whom he competed for in Europe and I have only heard the vaguest of rumors as to why he left the relative comfort of the Australian based Greenedge squad and will not repeat them here.
He competed domestically last year with no results which stand out but he is riding in the big league again in 2016 for Trek Factory Racing. It will be interesting if he can finally find an outlet for his undeniable talent on Euro roads or whether today’s effort will merely be another blip on an otherwise flat-lining career.
Of course some may realize my relative glee at today’s result come from the fact that Greenedge cycling, Australia’s top ranked, World Tour rated professional team, were left empty handed once again, the second year in a row they have the missed the top prize which they seem to assume is theirs by right.
I am not sure how you can turn up at a race like this with such strength in numbers as they have and let the championship ride down the road. They seem to rate the race highly and there may be a few questions being asked about strategy and tactics in the team camp tonight. I hope so.
Greenedge dominated the race for a number of years but it always seemed like it was the professional bully-boys coming home to pick on the locals in their very small backyard, loading the race up with superior numbers and riding everyone into the bitumen. Simon Gerrans then had the gall to declare that Australia’s domestic riders shouldn’t be allowed to start their own national championship! I’m glad an ex-Greenedge rider, risen again has taken the race off his former team-mates today.
So, that is my regular January gripe about our local World Tour team for 2016. I know Greenedge have a large supporter base in Australia and rightly so but I am more of a BMC man myself, the legacy of Cadel Evans and the tenure of Richie Porte and Rohan Denis on the squad dragging my allegiance away from the locals to the Swiss/American juggernaut. Bring on the Tour Downunder I say!
Have a nice evening.
Strange Notations From a Laborious Life 