Tour Down Under returns to Port Adelaide in 2018
THE Tour Down Under goes from strength to industrial strength with a return to Port Adelaide this year — and the Port won’t be anything but itself.
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THE Tour Down Under goes from strength to industrial strength with a return to Port Adelaide this year.
After the festive weekend opening in the city, the world-class cyclists will on Tuesday start their working week in a working-class suburb, the sort of place that built the South Australia that’s again on show to the world.
The Port, which last hosted the Tour in 1999, opens a first stage that is more for the high-vis South Aussie than the Lycra set.
Instead of hills, there’s arching expressway bridges, and the helicopter shots will be of paddocks, salt flats and a rubbish dump, rather than cereal fields, grapevines and koala-laden gums.
All that will come with the stage end at Lyndoch, but not before a bumpy run through the northern suburbs and that long commute up Main North Rd. People may come just to see the traffic lights turned off.
Back on the short western stretch St Vincent St that will be the starting straight, there will be bunting and balloons, flags and posters and all the other airs and graces of a Tour start, but “Port Adelaide will still be Port Adelaide”, says Steph Taylor with obvious pride. “It still has to have its edge.”
The recreational cyclist and proprietor of Red Lime Shack cafe, right on the starting line, is a champion of the Port Adelaide that has slowly been redeveloping itself with art, music and cafe culture while politicians and millionaires argue about how they might do something like that one day.
Ms Taylor says the Port’s empty shops are “filling up organically and the way that they need to”.
“People say it needs to go faster but, no, it doesn’t. It needs to work itself out, because Port Adelaide knows who it is and no one can tell it who it is,” she said. “It’s a raw edge. Unique, quirky, rustic.
Next door, the Mayfair Bakery will feature be tarted up, so to speak, with historical cycling paraphernalia, and proprietors Peter and Suzanne Donnelly will proudly drape a banner over the balcony that’s been there more than a century.
Mr Donnelly says the event “will put Port Adelaide on the international scene”.
“It is a great way of adding to that spirit, that development of the Port,” he said.
“The Port’s eclectic … you don’t want to become a Jetty Rd, Glenelg, or a King William Rd, Hyde Park. You need to maintain some of the edge.”
Port Adelaide-Enfield mayor Gary Johanson agrees with that, even if he “ruffled a few feathers” in October when he said building owners who weren’t prepared to tidy up for the tour should sell up.
And he is seriously proud to show off the suburb’s blue collar. “People sometimes forget that this is a working sea port,” he said.