Stanley St. Social | Cycling News and Interviews

Former GreenEDGE rider Sam Bewley joins us for a look at what goes on behind the scenes at a WorldTour team. Sam is now Head Sports Director at NSN. His job covers race strategy from the car, deciding which DS goes to which race, and helping recruit the riders who will shape the squad in 2028.

We talk about how NSN is rebuilding into a balanced team after Derek Gee's departure, and how you create a single culture across 25 nationalities. Sam also explains why race calendars and support riders often matter more than salary to young leaders, and how the invite system can leave teams stuck at races they no longer want.

He goes inside Biniam Girmay's Tour de France campaign and explains why the team stayed motivated without a stage win. He also remembers his first race as a DS, directing Chris Froome at the Tour Down Under, and shares the beer-with-the-mechanics approach he took to building trust in the job.

Brandon McNulty is the 2026 road world champion. Team USA's 8-man squad outplayed Mathieu van der Poel, Remco Evenepoel and Wout van Aert at the UCI Road World Championships in Montreal, and Michael Matthews rode to a heroic silver for Australia with almost no team support.

On this week's Social Club, Alex Clements and AFL captain Max Gawn break down the most chaotic Worlds road race in years. We cover how the race unfolded and how Team USA used their numbers perfectly, with Matteo Jorgensen and Quinn Simmons setting up McNulty's winning attack. We also get into why Belgium's plan fell apart, Isaac del Toro's huge workload for Mexico, and Tom Pidcock's late move. And we ask the big question: should Australia have sent a full team to back Bling?

Plus we recap Demi Vollering's thrilling win in the women's elite road race, Talia Appleton's fifth in the women's U23s, Jack Ward's top 10 in the men's U23s, the junior races, and the rest of the week in pro cycling.

Max is fresh off fourth in the Brownlow, the best vote count of his career, and a red carpet interview that started with a question about the world wheelchair championship. He also talks Everest prep: seven laps of Mount Dandenong, roughly 40 climbs to go in South Australia, and a possible pub stop for a parma halfway through.

Plappy's back in Spain after an underdone return in Italy, and he's lining up in China next month, where a certain mountain bike world champion has just appeared on the start list. He also walks through the mechanics' nightly group chat, chainrings, cassettes and the tyre pressures that will horrify anyone still running 120 psi.

Then it's Worlds. With Pogačar out and Carapaz withdrawn, the road race is wide open. We break down Belgium's two-leader plan, whether the French can make it hard enough to drop Van der Poel and Van Aert, and why Del Toro might beat Remco and Paul Seixas in a sprint. Max gives his tips, Alex backs Lorenzo Finn as a smokey, and Plappy is dreaming of a Van Aert rainbow jersey.

Plus: the TT verdict on Ganna's future, Felicity Wilson-Haffenden's junior title, the Oceania Championships landing in Adelaide in January, a transfer round-up including Gall, Mühlberger and a possible Welsford move to Jayco, and Max's Top Five presented by Pillar Performance: the best fluffers in cycling.

Aaron Gate made the WorldTour with Astana at 34. New Zealand's most decorated Commonwealth Games athlete joins us to talk through one of the most unlikely careers in the peloton. He won Olympic team pursuit bronze in London, then worked through a string of teams that folded underneath him, including Aqua Blue, which shut down with a single email in August, and Evo Pro, which still owes him half a season's pay.

Aaron takes us from hacksawing time trial bikes together before De Panne, to riding Madisons around Europe with Shane Archibald to qualify New Zealand for the worlds, to finally landing a WorldTour contract with Astana at 34. He also relives this year's Tour debut: a teammate's disc wheel flying at his head in the Barcelona team time trial, stitches in his face after stage two, then leading out sprints in the final kilometres. Plus Stefan Denifl, a voice note from Vinokourov, and whether LA 2028 is next.

Luke Tuckwell's first Grand Tour was a three-week apprenticeship. He rode the Vuelta a España as Primož Roglič's climbing support, spent most of it on his wheel, and came out the other side named in Australia's team for his first elite world championships. He's 22.

Roglič wanted him sitting behind rather than leading, which turned out to be the better classroom - Luke could watch where a nine-time Grand Tour podium finisher puts himself in a bunch, and when he spends energy and when he doesn't. By the final week the two of them had stopped needing to speak. He also gets into what Roglič passed on off the bike, the bus conversations, and why a rider that decorated was still thanking his teammates on stage 21.

Then Montreal. Luke wasn't expecting selection, what Matt Hayman told him about bringing young riders through early, and a very honest answer on why the green and gold never moved the needle at junior and U23 level — and why it does now. Plus why he thinks a chaotic race suits an Australian team without a superstar.

And the road that got him there: the Simon Clark message in 2021, an Italian team where nobody spoke English, learning how to train in Girona, and the night at the Baby Giro when Red Bull said his results didn't match his power numbers.

Australia's team for the world championships in Montreal has been announced, and there are a few names on it worth talking about — and a few that aren't on it at all. Alex and Max go through the selection rider by rider, look at how the squad might race in Canada, and get into a side of the selection process that doesn't get much airtime.

Then the Vuelta a España wrap. Movistar win a home Grand Tour with Enric Mas, Roglič takes second off a time trial he hadn't trained for, and Sepp Kuss sneaks into fifth. Mikel Landa and Eddie Dunbar both save their seasons in the final week, Uno-X put six riders into a 69-man breakaway on stage 20, and Max rates every team at the race from Tier 1 down to Tier 6 — with three big names in the bottom bracket.

Plus Max reports back from Amy's Gran Fondo: 122km, no training, a broken cassette 25km in, and a Top Five of everything he'd forgotten he hates about riding a bike. And a first look at Worlds off the back of Quebec and Montreal.

Max is back from the footy trip (alive) and Plappy's building form for Tour of Bright as the boys dive into a huge week of La Vuelta a España. They break down every stage from 9 to 16 - Van Aert's green jersey dominance, Movistar's masterclass in setting up Enric Mas, and Brenner's big win for the team. Plus: Max's off-the-red-eye top 5 (and honourable mentions) for the best under-25 riders in the world right now, Tour of Britain wrap, early Worlds selection chat for Belgium, Slovenia and the Aussies, and a fresh batch of transfer news.

Bling / Michael Matthews joins the podcast for a wide-ranging conversation spanning his entire career — from a motocross-obsessed kid in Canberra who stumbled into cycling, to Australian champion within six months, to a decade-plus at the top of the World Tour.

Bling opens up on the origin of his nickname, meeting Kobe Bryant in a hotel elevator during his first year as a pro, and the eerie parallel of watching LeBron James walk through a crowd in Paris untouched. He walks through the highs — winning the Green Jersey with Sunweb, the emotional 2017 Tour de France stage win in Rodez two years after breaking ribs on the same climb, the legendary Green Edge "Aussie rock star" era — and the lows, including a horror pre-Tour crash in 2014 and a brutal, injury-riddled run through the 2015 Tour just weeks before his wedding.

He also reflects candidly on team culture then versus now, what he sees of his younger self in Tadej Pogačar, the role his wife and daughter play in keeping him motivated at 35, and why the World Championships remains the one jersey that's slipped through his fingers — with Canada, a course that's been kind to him before, right around the corner.

Dr. David Spindler is a neuroscientist, cognitive performance strategist, and elite athlete wellbeing expert who's spent his career helping athletes and teams understand that brain chemicals matter. He's worked with some of the biggest names in professional sport, most famously alongside Mark Cavendish through the darkest years of his career, chronicled in Netflix's "Never Enough."

Three big segments in this one.

Team culture. David breaks down the actual neurochemistry behind why old-school GreenEDGE had that "I'd do anything for my mate next to me" quality — it comes down to oxytocin, the same bonding chemical released when a parent holds their newborn, and why some teams manufacture it constantly while others can't buy it no matter how much they spend. He and Alex build an entire hypothetical Australian WorldTour team from a blank sheet of paper — values, non-negotiables, culture — and get into why "old school Green Edge" gets thrown around constantly but almost nobody can actually define what it means.

Concussion. A proper breakdown of concussion protocols in the peloton and why cycling is dangerously behind rugby and the NFL on brain safety — including the messy legal reason nobody wants to call an impact sensor a "concussion sensor," and who actually carries liability when a rider gets hurt.

Training the brain. David explains the real neuroscience of reactionary decision-making, why riders like Tadej Pogačar seem to have supernatural crash radar, and the actual mechanics of how he trains neural efficiency in elite endurance athletes to extend time to exhaustion — plus how his own PhD on decision-making under physiological load in professional cyclists led him down this path in the first place.

The boys have a plan to get Tadej Pogačar down under.

Meanwhile the Vuelta has completely flipped on its head, someone's playing it ice cold in the red jersey, and the mountain bike world championships produced one of the most ridiculous rides of the year from a guy who basically chose to start from the back. Max's new top five ranks the teams he'd actually send a rider to and there's a brand new segment debuting this week that involves some very confident guesswork about riders' salaries.