THE INVISIBLE CRASHES
There are nights in cycling when everything feels like it clicks. The legs are good, the weather behaves, the pace is honest, and your teammates slide into position like they’ve been rehearsing a script no one ever wrote. This past Tuesday Night, for the worlds best crit race, was almost one of those nights.
For most of the race, the Hydraplay boys rode beautifully. Lines were tight, communication was crisp, and everyone knew their role. There’s nothing better than seeing my team move as one — a small pocket of order inside the chaos of club racing.
And then, in the last two or three laps, something shifted. Not dramatically. Not catastrophically. Just enough for the vibe to change shape. A couple of egos got restless. A few heads drifted out of the team plan. Instead of five riders trying to make the race, we briefly slipped into a few riders trying to save their own race.
It happens. It’s human. But it’s also a lesson.
Because while one of our lads rode with real panache and genuine race craft and simply emptied the tank in the final moments and ran out of legs... the truth is this: if we’d stayed together in those closing laps, we could have written a very different ending.
That’s the thing about cycling. The sport can be brutally honest. It tells you when you’ve executed well, and it tells you, sometimes quietly, often firmly ... you fuckin haven’t.
But the physical mistakes aren’t the ones that stick with me. Not the positioning errors. Not the missed wheels. Not the legs that gave out. Those things happen in every bunch, in every grade, in every city across the world.
What stays with me are the invisible crashes. The ones you don’t hear.
The ones nobody yells “rider down!” for. The ones that don’t get reported on AusCycling's LiveTiming.
The crashes in trust.
The crashes in respect.
The crashes that happen off the bike, in group chats, in whispers, in moments when character wobbles.
Every cycling team, from WorldTour giants to Tuesday-night crit squads, is built on the same foundation: TRUST. Trust that the wheel ahead will hold its line. Trust that the guy on your left won’t dive bomb a corner. Trust that your teammate will call the move, close the gap, and do their absolute best to cover the moves.
And just as important:
Trust that the people you ride with have your back even when your legs don’t.
What young riders sometimes don’t realise is this: strong legs don’t make a good teammate. You can FTP-test your way into a squad, but you earn your place through character. Through humility. Through being coachable. Through riding with people, not in spite of them.
A cycling team is one of the few places left where ego, unchecked, can genuinely hurt the group. It can fracture the bunch. It can unravel months of quiet work. It can turn what should be a joyful, collective effort into something brittle and self-serving.
So leadership becomes a strange thing. Uncomfortable, often invisible, almost always misunderstood...and this week for me quite hurtful.
People see selections.
People see race plans.
People see the jersey.
What they don’t see are the decisions behind the scenes, the ones that protect culture, and unity, and that small sacred bubble of trust that turns individuals into a team.
Sometimes leadership is setting tactics.
Sometimes it’s celebrating the best ride of someone’s life.
Sometimes it’s putting an arm around someone who emptied themselves but came up short.
And sometimes — the hardest times — it’s making a call that no one sees, that no one applauds, and that no one wants to make.
Not because of punishment. Not because of anger. But because protecting the culture is protecting everyone.
I’ve been around this sport long enough to know one thing with absolute certainty:
"Good teams stay good because they defend their values as fiercely as they defend their position in the bunch."
And there’s a human cost to all this. Nobody starts a cycling team thinking they’ll have to make tough calls or draw hard lines. You invest in people, you want everyone to grow, and it stings when it doesn’t work out. But leadership means carrying that weight so the rest of the team doesn’t have to.
Cycling gives us the chance to be better — better riders, better teammates, better humans. But only if we respect the invisible contract:
Ride for the wheel ahead.
Ride for the boys and girls beside you.
Ride for the jersey on your back.
Tuesday night reminded me — in the best and hardest ways — that the most important work in cycling doesn’t happen on the bike. It happens in the choices we make to keep a team healthy, united, and proud of who they ... who WE are.
The legs matter.
The tactics matter.
But the culture?
That’s what wins the long races.
And that’s the race I’ll always choose to lead. .... A lot of people on this platform would relate to this and may have never been in a bike race as I think the same goes for your in the office.