VARIETY PERFORMANCE
WorldTour road pro Lachlan Morton found his racing ‘niche’ in 2019 – by riding anywhere, on anything
“I had a moment late on where I was disappointed to be finishing. Out there my life was very simple”
One of the stars of the 2019 men’s WorldTour season was, undoubtedly, Lachlan Morton. What’s unusual, however, about this 28-yearold Australian is that his most celebrated rides didn’t happen on the roads of the Grand Tours or Spring Classics, but off road, in the British countryside. As the main player of his team EF Education First’s ‘alternative calendar’ of racing, which was inspired by the team’s clothing sponsor Rapha and its hope to tell compelling stories away from road racing, Morton rode in events such as Yorkshire’s famed cyclocross race, the 3 Peaks and brand new off-road Land’s End-John o’Groats bikepacking enduro, GBDURO. He starred in the resultant Gone Racing documentaries, highly entertaining films depicting not, as some feared when the calendar was announced, a WorldTour racer sticking the boot into poor amateurs, but a man with a genuine love for riding his bike getting a chance to explore new goals, freed from the straight jacket of being a road racing professional. He was welcomed with open arms.
“The biggest fear I had with this project was imposing professional cycling on events that didn’t want it,” said Morton, speaking to an audience at the Kendal Mountain Festival in November, and later to Cycling Plus.
“But to see that people were really excited for me to be at their races, that was huge. The biggest thing for me was the interaction with the wider cycling community.”
Morton’s backstory is well documented. He burst onto the scene in 2013 at the Tour of Utah, but took time out of the sport in 2014 upon the realisation that the sport, with all its complexities and relentlessness, was somewhat different to what this free spirit had dreamt about. “The reality broke my heart,” he says now. “At that point I didn’t think I’d come back.”
But by riding with his brother Gus in the Australian outback during his time out, and the documentary that came from it ( Thereabouts), you can trace a through line to where he is now, back in the WorldTour but in different circumstances and a changed outlook on his career.
"The bike had always been something to beat another guy with," he says of the time before he left the World Tour in 2014. “I’d use it to train. My relationship with cycling was defined by performance. But Thereabouts opened up a gateway to a whole bunch of new people, a new way of life, personal growth that I didn’t know was available to me through the bike. Now, I ride a lot but I don’t ‘train’, and that’s a relationship that allows me to keep performing. I just love the opportunity to be out there, riding every day.”
The 3 Peak’s is exactly the sort of race he never thought he’d get the chance to do as a WorldTour pro, but bleary-eyed in the early morning of a grey mid-September day, he took on, as very much a novice, grizzled cyclocross racers such as Nick Craig and Rob Jebb at their own game, cycling and bounding, by any means necessary, directly over the three peaks of Ingleborough, Whernside and Pen-y-ghent.
“I had so much fun,” says Morton. "It’s an event that gets under your skin, the most unique cycling race I’ve ever done, that’s so specific to that area.”
He finished a very creditable fourth, just over four minutes behind the winner Jebb.
Given how it’s such a specialist race, where the consensus is that you’re never quite on the right bike, no matter what part of the course you’re on, was he surprised how close he got to the winner?
“Yeah. It was nice that I was still in the race, but if you know that race you’ll know how far away I was, in terms of ability. Those guys are on a different level.”
Morton was new to the race and reckons that it’s hard for firsttimers to win.
“Local knowledge is huge as you really pick your own precise route, so you need to know the course. I think it takes two or three tries before you can even think about winning it.”
Another film Morton made this year was at the American gravel race, Dirty Kanza, with team-mates Alex Howes and Taylor Phinney. It’s the world’s best-known event of its kind – 200 miles of rough stuff in Kansas. Morton suffered hard over 10 hours of full-throttle racing, and finished fourth behind a specialist, the domestic pro Colin Strickland.
“It was the first one I’d done,” says Morton. “It’s relaxed, like a mountain bike event, but the scale is huge. It’s so tough, just to finish the course is an achievement.
“With gravel, people get obsessed about the surface. I was riding with a guy yesterday [in northern England] and he was saying he didn’t have gravel here. Then we went over this fell and I was like, ‘This is gravel.’ It’s mixed terrain. The racing scene only really exists in the US at the moment but I think it will grow.”
The 3 Peaks was a huge technical challenge for this cyclocross novice. And, as the film shows, he was utterly exhausted at the end of Dirty Kanza, but that was closer to a post-road race feel. GBDURO, a 2000km bikepacking enduro, challenged him physically and mentally like few things have before. Initially, he was just excited about being allowed to do it, thinking that, with the through-the-night, unsupported, 500km stages, his team would be reluctant. He entered it anyway, and they came on board.
The image of world-class pro Morton, in his bright pink team kit in front of a convenience store’s drinks fridge loading up on carbs, is one of the most memorable of the year; the video, where he suffers such ignominies like falling face first, in the dead of night, into a cow pat, is a must-watch for anyone who’s considering this kind of racing.
“With this and the 3 Peaks, I threw myself in the deep end. I’ve got skills now I just didn’t have 12 months ago.
“It’s a very freeing feeling, riding the GBDURO, where you set off with everything you need on your bike, everything else disappears. But there’s a reality, which is it’s really, really hard. Your legs are only 20 per cent of the equation. Like sleeping in a hedge – I’m not good at that. Multiple times I ran out of food and water.
“You can’t have any expectations. In a road race, you know how long it’s going to take and how much climbing there is, you can get your head around the whole package. In an ultra-race you don’t know what’s around the next corner, so if you rely too much on your expectation of what it’s going to be it’s going to crack you, mentally. For me it was a mental battle. Understanding your emotions, and the way your brain is trying to stop you doing what you’re doing, then understanding you can push further.”
There was a simplicity to GBDURO that Morton loved. “I had a moment late on where I was disappointed to be finishing. Out there my life was very simple, I had one focus, on what I was doing. It’s a beautiful, simple way to be in your life. In that final three or four hours, I had this huge high, I felt like I was right where I needed to be, all the riding I’d done since I was seven led to this moment. It was a little epiphany.”