Australian Road Championships: 10 Riders to watch at the elite road races

Large crowds turned out for the 2020 Australian Road Championships road races in Buninyong

The crowds turning out for the 2020 Australian Road Championships road races in Buninyong (Image credit: Con Chronis / Zac Williams)

The opening round of the 2021 Federation University Road National Championships has already been claimed emphatically as a win for a new generation of riders, with Sarah Gigante (Tibco-SVB) and Luke Plapp (InForm TMX Make) taking the elite time trial wins. Now the pressure is on for Team BikeExchange to flex its WorldTour muscle and hold onto the elite road race titles.

It is not likely to be an easy task for Australia's only WorldTour team to take control of the racing in the women's or men's event. The fact that the talented Australian-based youngsters are staking their claims is far from the only challenge in this year like no other. The race was delayed a month due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ranks of WorldTour riders have been diminished by the difficult travel circumstances and lack of international events while the domestic teams are out in force with the form and motivation to embrace opportunity after facing a 2020 domestic calendar laden with cancellations.

The racing begins on Sunday morning with the 104.4km event on a course that runs nine times around a loop that starts and finishes in the small town of Buninyong just outside Ballarat in Victoria. The key features of the regular Nationals circuit is the climb up Mount Buninyong Road and a technical section through Federation University, where there are plenty of corners to break the line of sight to those riders that manage to get away. It’s a race for the breakaway riders rather than the bunch, most often coming down to a small group or a solo victor.

At 20 years old, Gigante still fits squarely in the under-23 category and, as she is signed to the US-based Tibco-SVB, is racing without any teammates. Usually those two factors would weigh heavily enough to strike any rider off the favourites list, but Gigante is not just any rider. The Brunswick Cycling Club member has a habit of making the seemingly impossible look easy, starting off with her clean sweep of the under-19 titles three years back. She then took out the elite road race title in her first year out of U19’s and has won the time trial at the event two years running. On top of that, she’s just secured overall victory at the Santos Festival of Cycling, with a long solo break in one stage and a flying run up Willunga Hill.

Last year was a huge one for Brown, despite the interrupted race schedule, with a win at Brabantse Pijl and a second in Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Though it hasn’t been quite the start to 2021 she may have been hoping for, Brown entered the Santos Festival of Cycling a favourite and then fell out of contention in the very first stage. Then on Wednesday she failed to win back the time trial title again, but did see her second place with a significantly faster time than 2020 as a step in the right direction.

The Tasmanian rider has the strongest claim of being able to match it with Gigante, Brown and Kennedy on the climbs and sheer individual speed, having taken third on both the Willunga Hill stage at the Santos Festival of Cycling and the elite time trial on Wednesday. She also took fourth overall at the Santos Festival of Cycling and may have even been in the running for the podium if it weren’t for a painful wrong turn near the line that lost her valuable seconds on the overall. A podium place at Nationals would surely help her quickly forget that near miss.

Roseman-Gannon is another one of those domestic riders who has shown she is quite prepared to go toe-to-toe with the returning Women’s WorldTour riders. Last year, when she was racing the under 23 category, her turn of speed left her a close second to one of Australia’s best sprinters, Chloe Hosking, during the criterium. This year she has also been displaying a climbing ability that is bound to increase her chances of being a threat during the road race. Roseman-Gannon finished third on the overall at the Santos Festival of Cycling and delivered a more than respectable fifth on top of Willunga Hill.

The multi-discipline rider has a talent for surprising and delivering when it really matters. She is also ever so familiar with pulling on the green-and-gold jersey of the national champion. Mullens won the road race title in 2015 and it is easy to lose count of the rest of her national title wins as they span road, multiple mountain biking disciplines and also cyclo-cross. If she can hold on over the hills, her turn of speed and experience-fuelled feel for knowing just the right time to launch will make her a rider few will want to head toward the line in the same group as. Plus, with a large team around her, a win on the lumpy first stage of the Santos Festival of Cycling, and a third place in the final criterium, she looks like she has the form to be a particularly formidable competitor this year.

The defending champion clearly valued the opportunity to wear the green-and-gold bands of the Australian champion in Europe, an emotional winner who has come close before but finally cracked the top step of the podium in 2020. Unfortunately, though, he didn’t get to show off that hard-earned jersey quite as much as he may have liked and that may just well provide a bit of extra incentive to try and hold on for another year.

After taking such a dominant win at the Santos Festival of Cycling, there is no looking past Luke Durbridge. He has finished just off the podium in the road race the last two years and this year would be a perfect one to step up onto it, with his clearly-expressed desire to represent Australia at the Olympics. Plus a little extra motivation may come from the fact that he handed over his time trial title to 20-year-old Plapp on Wednesday, after a stressful couple of days trying to make it to the start line when he found himself on the wrong side of a snap COVID-19 state border closure.

Plapp was the revelation of the Australian summer even before he took the time trial title from Durbridge after stepping up to the elite category early. The rider, who won a stage at the Santos Festival of Cycling, took a gracious second to Richie Porte up Willunga Hill and secured second on the overall, has delivered one impressive performance after another. That’s why the elite podium doesn’t seem a stretch, even in his first year of racing the longer distance of the elite category, which takes in four more laps and as a result four more climbs up Mount Buninyong.

O’Brien showed that speed when he stood alongside Plapp on the time trial podium, putting Durbridge in the middle of a new generation of rivals on the results table. O'Brien will also be in the position of tackling the extra distance of the elite race for the first time, but the signs are promising with four days of competitive racing under his belt in the highly successful Team Garmin Australia that included a stage fourth and fifth place. It could well be the 22-year-old’s turn to take centre-stage on Sunday instead.

The WorldTour rider isn’t going to have any of his Jumbo-Visma teammates to help out, but Harper is one of the few riders who has shown he can stay near Durbridge and Plapp this summer when it comes to outright time trial speed and hilly terrain. Harper was fourth in the time trial on Wednesday, third on the overall behind Durbridge and Plapp at the Santos Festival of Cycling and finished in the top 10 of every single stage of the four-day event. Harper also has a proven record on the Buninyong course, finishing seventh last year, second in 2019 and third the year before.

Simone is a degree-qualified journalist that has accumulated decades of wide-ranging experience while working across a variety of leading media organisations. She joined Cyclingnews as a Production Editor at the start of the 2021 season and has now moved into the role of Australia Editor. Previously she worked as a freelance writer, Australian Editor at Ella CyclingTips and as a correspondent for Reuters and Bloomberg. Cycling was initially purely a leisure pursuit for Simone, who started out as a business journalist, but in 2015 her career focus also shifted to the sport.