Nothing beats being able to watch your heroes racing in the flesh.
For Team Jayco AlUla sport director David McPartland, seeing the Jayco Herald Sun Tour peloton rush through his hometown of Albury in the 1990s was the spark that ignited a passion for cycling that still burns today.
McPartland, who has been with GreenEDGE Cycling since its inception in 2012, was already nurturing a budding interest in cycling at the time, but he knew that he wanted more from the sport.
“Every few years it would come through the region. There were a couple of stages in Albury in around 1996 and that’s when I really got into cycling,” McPartland says. “I was already racing at club level and then the Jayco Herald Sun Tour came through town and that’s when I sort of realized I really wanted to pursue the sport more seriously.”
Climbing the ladder into the professional ranks wasn’t going to be easy, though, especially coming from Australia. The creation of GreenEDGE Cycling 12 years ago has helped cut down some of the barriers for riders from Down Under, but it didn’t exist when McPartland set his sights on earning a pro contract.
“There’s a lot more opportunity and there’s just a good clear pathway now. For young athletes who are really hungry, even if they don’t end up making it, the fact that there’s a pathway that they can see in front of them is a big a big positive,” says McPartland. “When I started you just had to come to Europe by yourself and then you have to contact someone you know to help.”
Turning pro
McPartland would ride his first Jayco Herald Sun Tour in 2000, at the age of 19, and soon left Australia to get a taste of racing in the European peloton. In 2002, he made his Tour Down Under debut, winning the youth category and finishing in the top 20 overall – he would win a stage of the race in 2004.
Every time McPartland achieved one of his goals, such as racing the Herald Sun Tour or making the U23 Australian national team, he would set himself another target to chase. After racing as a stagiaire with the Italian team Tenax in 2003, he secured his first professional contract for the following season.
“Every aspiration I had, I ended up making. It was a little slower than some of the other guys, but I did it,” he says. “I didn’t have the goal to do the Tour de France from day one, as a 14-year-old. I always had these little dreams just in front of me to chase and then then as soon as you make it to one level you’re always thinking ‘okay, now I want to go to that next level’. It was three or four big steps, and I guess kept making them reality, eventually, and all of a sudden, I found myself living in Europe.”
Initially starting out in the Netherlands, McPartland has lived all over Europe before eventually settling with his family in the cycling heartland of Belgium.
An unplanned change
While McPartland had continually set new goals for himself to achieve, becoming a sport director was not a move he’d planned for. This change was one that came by chance, but it was an opportunity that he soon realised was too good to pass up.
In the midst of hunting out a contract for the 2008 season, he’d contacted Shayne Bannan in the hope of earning a place on Australia’s road team for the world championships. Bannan would eventually become GreenEDGE’s first general manager, but at the time he was the national performance director at Cycling Australia.
“I rang him to say I want to put my hand up for selection for the road worlds again, and he said ‘no worries, I’ll put your name in this in for the selectors,” explains McPartland. “He rang back that night and I said, ‘gee that’s quick I thought you said you wouldn’t know for another week or two.’ He said, ‘what are you up to next year?’
“I was struggling to get another contract. I had offers, but for nothing. I would have been 27 or 28 by then and I thought, I’m not going to keep going like this I need to go and do something else. In that same call, he offered me a job for two years coaching within national under 23 programme. That was a bit of a reality check. I rang him up about trying to get a start in the world championships and his answer was basically, no, I don’t think so, but what about what are you doing next year?”
Realising a dream
McPartland quit racing at the end of the 2007 season and began his new journey guiding young riders through the early part of their careers. He eventually moved on to work with the Australian women’s national team until the creation of the GreenEDGE men’s and women’s teams in 2012.
After working as a sport director with the women’s squad for two seasons, McPartland moved over to the men’s team and remains there now. He is one of several members of the GreenEDGE Cycling family that have been with the team since the very beginning.
Over the years, McPartland has been able to make his dreams come true. These days, working in professional cycling is not just a reality but it’s normality.
The job can be tough sometimes, but he tries to remind himself of the teenager who was so enthralled by the Jayco Herlad Sun Tour peloton rolling past that he embarked on a career in cycling.
“Now we’re on the other side of the fence, you got to take time out for kids and stuff like that when you see him at races, because the riders on a team are everything to them. They’ve got that passion for it and, and if you do something a little bit special or something for them they remember it forever,” says McPartland.
“As you go through your own career, you need to pinch yourself. Sometimes you have got your head in the business and working hard and you’re complaining or whinging about something. If that 15-year-old and I knew where I’m working now, at the top level of the sport, you know, and working on the Tour de France and all this. I’d be just like, wow. When I first started, it was a dream to even go and watch the Tour de France, let alone be involved in working in it.”
