If you're wondering where the winner of the 2022 Festival of Cycling is as the men's WorldTour level Tour Down Under gets underway in Adelaide, he's sitting back in Victoria wishing that he was there up among the top level professionals like in previous years.
James Whelan, 26, is in a tricky position as he weighs up his future in professional cycling. The strong climber has now been over a year without a professional contract since not being renewed by EF Education late in 2021, and now doesn’t have a new deal for 2023 despite maintaining his professional levels and acquainting himself, perhaps a little too well for his liking, with the ins and outs of hustling for a deal.
Most riders who lose WorldTour rides retreat to normal life relatively quickly, the anomalies of the Cameron Wurfs of the world out-weighed by the sheer numbers of riders that lose out on deals not finding their way back into a contract. Whelan doesn’t appear dispirited, if anything he is more motivated than ever to make the most of his next opportunity, whenever it comes.
“It’s been a difficult experience, maybe I’ll never be successful, but I’ll benefit as a person from this whole experience I think,” said Whelan in an interview with SBS Sport. "I’ll also benefit if I do get a job, I’ll be so passionate after this 18 months. I’ll be taking it 110 per cent seriously and I’ll be over the moon.”
Whelan’s biggest win remains his breakthrough Under-23 victory at the Tour of Flanders, unbelievably winning his first race in Europe at any level in one of the toughest age-restricted events of the year. In his seasons in the professional ranks, he made strides in the sport and still has some big goals on his mind if he can make it back to the peak of cycling.
“If I didn’t think that I couldn’t achieve something great at the top level of the sport, I don’t think I’d be so stubborn and keep doing what I’m doing,” said Whelan.
“If I was going to be in a contract issue again two years down the track, then I don’t think it would be worth it.”
Though he entered the sport as quite an inexperienced rider due to his meteoric rise through the domestic and Under-23 ranks, he made a strong impression on teammates, Australians and other riders in the peloton who have gone into bat for the Victorian with their team principals.
“I have a lot of top WorldTour guys observing my situation and they feel frustrated and sick for me,” said Whelan. “I’m the perfect example of the situation they hope to never be in. Perhaps we’re physically the same way, but it’s just turned out differently.
“I’m lucky enough to have a lot of guys in WorldTour teams vouching for me, but these days, it’s so competitive that it doesn’t matter who you are, a Tour de France stage winner, it’s just so hard to get a spot and if the teams are full, then the teams are full. It doesn’t matter if someone says you’re a good bloke and have a lot of watts if the team doesn’t have the budget to put on another rider.”
Whelan’s 2023 bid for a deal is progressing well at present, though he would have preferred a win to go with his strong performance at the Australian road national championships. Whelan was called ‘the strongest rider in the race’ by winner Luke Plapp on the Stanley St Social Podcast, also saying that Whelan’s performance was understandably ‘desperate’, given his contract circumstance.
“I wanted to show on TV how strong I was and I wasn’t willing to gamble in the same way he (Plapp) was willing to,” said Whelan in reference to Plapp’s comments. “Maybe, in the context of season training, he wasn’t going as well as me, so he had to gamble to lose the bike race and come from the back, whereas I showed I had the legs to race from the front and be at the front at the finish.”
“Depending on who you ask, maybe I was a bit too aggressive, yadda, yadda, but I was happy with how I rode. The only regret I had was maybe doing too much of a turn on that slight rise into the uni, and losing touch with Bling, Clarkey and Drew Morey. That’s my only regret of the bike race. To be honest, I can’t fault myself.”
A win might have been the ticket to the deal Whelan has been craving, but the Girona-based rider has been very close to securing his future without luck, talking through the past 18 months of near misses.
A year without a contract in 2022 saw him retreat down to Continental level with Australian squad Team Bridgelane, a move that paid dividends early in the year after being released by EF Education First. Only a crash with a car mid-season threw off a strong return that would have made a better case for prospective teams.
“When you don’t get a contract from a WorldTour team at the end of a season, it’s very hard to get picked back up,” said Whelan. “It’s almost an auto-filtering process. I showed that I was back to the athlete I was before the crashes in the Australian summer with Team Bridgelane. I think I showed that with coming second at nationals and then winning the Santos Festival of Cycling (Ed: National Road Series level replacement event for the Tour Down Under).
“After that, a lot of World Tour and Pro Tour teams looked into my Training Peaks data, looked into my story and I had some calls, but no team was coming with paperwork, which was really frustrating over about three months.
“I didn’t quite have the results (in Europe) to turn heads and then I got hit by a car before the two big climbing races, which was a crucial moment in a big year and really disappointing. Those were the two big races that I wanted to win.”
“In September, October, November, I got close with some WorldTour and Pro Tour teams, there were calls. I don’t know if it’s professional of me to say which teams and managers I was speaking to, but I got through the power testing, got some calls, and in one case it was down to me and one other rider for a spot on one of the biggest WorldTour teams and I just missed.
“I had an agreement with a Pro Tour team that if that fell through, they would take me on, but the process took too long and that fell through too.”
“It seems that teams are looking for the next Remco (Evenepoel), the 19-year-olds coming through, which is fine, but it comes to my demise at the moment.”
The odyssey to make it back to the top continues for Whelan into 2023, with the Victorian set to relocate back to Europe to put himself close to hand if a spot opens up on a professional squad. If dogged determination and optimism in face of multiple rejections in the past are any sign, a resilient Whelan is set to be a prime candidate if a team experiences a spate of injuries, picks up a sponsor, or simply wakes up to Whelan’s top-class abilities.
In a sport that is clamouring for ever younger riders to keep up with the Evenepoels and Pogacars of the world, Whelan is a safer signing. Currently, outside of the WorldTour, there is no better rider ready to slot in, capitalise on his past experiences and deliver immediately at the top level in a variety of roles.
“It’s exciting times, it’s uncertain times, but I’m pretty stubborn,” said Whelan, “and I’m pretty sure that a ride will come up.”
