Second chances don’t always come by, but when they do, they must be firmly grasped so as not to slip away.
After being forced to sit on the sidelines for the best part of 18 months, Team Jayco AlUla rider Rudy Porter is tightly holding on to his second chance to race in the WorldTour.
“I really put in a lot of hard work last year trying to keep the dream alive. I had a lot of unfinished business,” says Porter. “I’m still finding myself as a rider and where I can get to. To be given the opportunity to come back and race in the WorldTour, I’m really grateful and fortunate because not many guys get a second chance.”
Patience and persistence have been key for Porter in keeping his dream alive as he spent months trying to seek out a diagnosis for a strange sensation he was feeling in his leg before finding a solution.
He then spent a year trying to maintain WorldTour level fitness, without any racing to help him, so that he could make his return when the chance came.
“Even now, I look back at last year and I’m still in disbelief that I had the motivation to do it. I know a lot of people said to me that your situation is unique,” he says. “I think most people in my situation would have given up.”
Something’s wrong
Porter, who turned professional with GreenEDGE Cycling in 2023, first knew that something was wrong in the late spring of 2024. He was training at altitude in Andorra, preparing for the Critérium du Dauphiné when he felt something in his leg.
“The work had been going really well, and then in the last four days I was there, I had some just above threshold efforts,” he explains. “I’d get around 90 seconds into it and my left quad just felt as though it was getting tight, like a rubber band was tightening on it and a pooling of lactate was building up inside.”
Hoping it was a one-off, Porter tried the effort several times more, but the same sensation kept coming back. He had to pull the plug on the Dauphiné and went for tests instead to find out what was wrong.
Doctors in Italy ultimately concluded that Porter was suffering with endofibrosis of his left iliac artery, where the inner lining of the artery becomes thickened and causes restricted blood flow. While it is a relatively rare condition amongst the general public, it is not uncommon among professional cyclists and can be successfully treated with surgery.
A new diagnosis
It was decided that Porter would return home to Australia, so he had the support of his family while he recovered. Before the surgery, Porter went to consult with another doctor – which is where things started to get frustrating.
“I got testing done again, but this time the surgeon said there’s not enough evidence to justify such a major operation but in Italy they’d said I needed an operation,” Porter explains.
“It was really tough mentally because I had all of these symptoms, and I think I know my body pretty well when something’s not right.”
Porter was left with a tough decision. He could get the surgery, regardless of this new information, but it might not work and he’d have to go through the recovery while looking for a new fix. Alternatively, he could do nothing and be forced to call time on a professional cycling career that had barely just started.
In a last-ditch attempt to find a solution, Porter went to a sports doctor in Melbourne who had a different hypothesis for the young Aussie’s problems. Rather than an issue with the artery itself, he believed it was one of the leg muscles pressing into and pinching it that was causing the blood flow restriction.
Instead of an invasive surgery, the doctor believed that a simple Botox injection could be the answer to Porter’s problems – a procedure that several other athletes had successfully received. It would take time to have an effect, but unlike the surgery option, there was no lengthy recovery process to deal with.
“He said it would take 12 weeks for it to fully do its job. Through those 12 weeks, I kept trying on the bike and doing hard efforts. I’d roll out every day, knowing that my leg probably wasn’t going to work, which is pretty traumatising, but I just had to keep trying,” Porter explains.
“I was just rolling out for a few hours and trying every day. It wasn’t until the 13th week that I did a five-minute effort; I was extremely unfit, but I noticed that after those five minutes, I wasn’t experiencing those symptoms. After the 14th week, I was doing these efforts and my left leg felt normal like the right leg was feeling.”
A fresh start
The issue had finally resolved itself by December 2024, more than six months after he had first realised something was really wrong, and he could start training again as he had been before. AusCycling gave him the chance to ride for the national team at his debut Tour Down Under, where he finished 16th overall.
Despite being out of contract, he decided to head back to Europe to focus on his riding and take the opportunity to race if an offer did come during the season. While that offer didn’t come until ahead of the 2026 season, Porter kept putting the hard miles in as he coached himself throughout 2025.
“I just experimented. Obviously, I have a bit of experience now and I know what works with me and what I enjoy doing. I was able to take a few sessions from when I was being coached at GreenEDGE to get a guideline of what to do and when to do it,” Porter says.
“I really learned to listen to the body, while making sure that I was doing the right thing and I wasn’t chronically cooking myself. It was definitely a different experience, and I learned a bit more about what works for me. I was able to try some things that maybe you can’t get away with when you’re building up towards a certain race. For most of the year, it was a bit of trial and error in the right direction.”
That trial and error paid off, and Porter was raring to go when he got the opportunity to return to Team Jayco AlUla and race the 2026 Tour Down Under in support of Mauro Schmid’s GC bid. Challenges can build character and Porter believes he’s come through the other side of this one stronger than he was before it.
“The biggest change for me came with being a year and a half older. Before the injury, I was just starting to grasp what it looked like to be a WorldTour rider,” says Porter. “The thing I’m most proud of is my resilience. It might be called delusion or ambition, but I wasn’t going to throw in the towel. I didn’t have anything to prove to other people, but I wanted to prove to myself that I deserved to be at the WorldTour level. I definitely grew as a person as well. You learn a lot about yourself when you’re at your lowest.”
Now with another opportunity to pursue his dream as a professional cyclist, Porter has some big targets that he’d like to achieve.
“My first bucket list goal is to do a Grand Tour. I think that the type of rider I am, a three-week race would really suit me,” he explains.
“Ultimately, I would love to win a Tour de France stage. Nobody can ever take that away from you. They’re result-based goals, but also, as an Australian, having the opportunity to live in Europe is quite rare for us. I’m enjoying the process of being a professional athlete living in Europe, exploring places, and seeing different cultures. That’s what excites me.”
Lead photo: Sprint Cycling
