Tour de France glory a Green dream for cycling boss Gerry Ryan

IT was the finish of the 2010 Tour de France. Business tycoon Gerry Ryan stood on the Champs Elysée. waiting for the riders to come into view.

GreenEDGE Cycling team launch at The Rydges, Adelaide. Australian businessman Gerry Ryan who owns Jayco Australia and is a financial backer of the team.

IT was the finish of the 2010 Tour de France. Business tycoon Gerry Ryan and his good mate, former professional cyclist John Trevorrow, stood on the Champs Elysée waiting for the riders to come into view.

As Ryan looked up at the national flags of the competing teams fluttering in the breeze, he turned to his friend and said, “There should be an Australian flag up there”.

And that’s how Orica-GreenEDGE started.

Gerry Ryan is a man who makes things happen, and when he does things, he does them well. The owner of Jayco, Australia’s most successful caravan manufacturer, he decided he wanted to win the Melbourne Cup, so he did his research, bought the French horse Americain and now has the 2010 Cup sitting on his mantle. When his mate John Ribot was convinced to take the role of first chairman of the Brisbane Roar football club, Ryan put his financial clout behind the team, which has since gone on to win three A-League premierships. He has put his money into basketball clubs and stage shows and inevitably, finished in front.

In 1991 he was approached by cyclist Kathy Watt to sponsor her bid to make the Australian team for the Barcelona Olympics. He did, and when Watt won gold she wrote him a letter saying, “I owe this all to you”.

Gerry Ryan celebrates Americain’s Melbourne Cup win.

Ryan was hooked. “He got more involved in cycling. He’d never been on a bike in his life but he loved the sport and he liked the people,” said Trevorrow, who met Ryan when he was asked to manage a Jayco-sponsored cycle team competing in Australia.

“I started taking him to France for the Tours. People say Gerry’s greatest achievement is managing to survive five Tours with me. He’s a great guy Gerry, and Australian cycling is so lucky to have him.”

Following his experience with Watt, Ryan continued to contribute to Australian cycling. The first person he contacted after deciding to put an Australian flag on the Champs Elysée was Shayne Bannan, head coach of Australian cycling for the previous 10 years. It was the call the Europe-based Bannan had been waiting his whole life to take.

“Gerry told me he was at the Tour and asked if I could get to Paris because he had something he wanted to talk to me about,” he said.

“We went to lunch at a small cafe and he said, ‘I’d really like to start up an Australian team to compete on the Tour. How can we do it?’

“For 20 years, whenever I’d got together with Australian cycling people at meetings or barbecues, it was always a topic that came up. ‘Why can’t we get an Australian team to compete on the Tour?’ When Gerry told me that day that he was going to do it and wanted me to be part of it, it was like winning the lottery.”

Gerry Ryan congratulates Simon Gerrans at the Tour Down Under.

As with all of Ryan’s ventures, the birth of GreenEDGE was the result of intricate planning and preparation. Bannan was appointed general manager, and over 18 months set about finding the right people to make the team competitive from the start.

“It was a start-up,” he said. “But at the same time there were a lot of experienced people on board. We wanted staff and riders who knew what they were doing and who could build the type of culture we wanted.

“A lot of the work was done before we ever entered a race but even so, the success we had was pleasantly surprising.”

To those who had been around the cycling world for a long time, “astonishing” would be a more apt description. In its debut event, the Victoria’s Bay Classic Series held in January 2012, Allan Davis won the men’s classification racing for GreenEDGES’s second team, with Melissa Hoskins taking the women’s event.

A week later Simon Gerrans won the Australian national road race championship, then followed up by winning the team’s first World Tour event, the 2012 Tour Downunder. Two months later GreenEDGE broke through in Europe with a win in the Tirreno-Adriatico stage race in Italy.

But it was in last year’s Tour de France that even the non-cycling fraternity started to take notice, as Gerrans won the third stage. The next day GreenEDGE took out the team time-trial, giving Gerrans the coveted yellow jersey, which he held for two days before handing it over to South African teammate Daryl Impey for another two days. Impey, who tested positive to a banned substance at his national championships in February, has been dropped from this year’s GreenEDGE Tour team.

Simon Gerrans pulls on the yellow jersey at last year’s Tour de France.

For Bannan, the arrival of GreenEDGE has been a case of right place, right time.

“The professionalism of Australian cycling had been growing and growing to the point that when we started, just over half of our riders were Australian. In time that percentage will grow but this is a global sport and it has never been our intention that being Australian is a requirement to ride for GreenEDGE.

“Our aim is to develop good young talent and put it together with the best experienced riders, regardless of where they come from.

“We want to be a Grand Tour contender. There’s no time limit on that. It could be next year or two years. Whatever. We’re a work in progress.”

GreenEDGE goes into this year’s Tour, which start in Leeds today, knowing they do not have the overall depth of specialist riders to win the event, but just like last year they have targeted specific stages.

The most important will be Stage 2 that takes the Tour from York to Sheffield and then Cambridge to London.

“We’re looking to grab the yellow jersey on day two or three and keep it through to the Alps,” said Trevorrow, who describes his position in the team as “official mascot”.

“It’s just such a great experience for these young blokes to get to ride in these Grand Tour races, and know that they’re doing it not just for their team, but for their country.”