ABC Radio Tour de France Preview

The Private Cyclist recently made an appearance on ABC Radio Perth for a Tour de France preview segment. This is some serious mainstream exposure which, I guess, means that I’ve finally “made it” as they say in “the industry” and can now just sit back and wait for the lucrative journalistic offers to start flooding in.



ABC Radio must be a complex and tangled web of bureaucracy, internal politics and burnt bridges that resulted in their Saturday morning presenter from Perth having to interview a Melbourne-based blogger, calling in from Albury about a bike race in France. This would not happen at SBS. They’d simply get Mike Tomalaris on the satellite phone direct from the top of some Pyrenean mountain summit for an update about the Tour de France. In hindsight, it might have been more interesting if I’d done the whole interview in Flemish or Chinese just to add another layer of regional confusion – but unfortunately I’m not as gifted linguistically as I am…hmmm…sarcastically(??).

I’m aware that some reader(s) may have missed the broadcast, due to one of many possible reasons including but not limited to:

1. You don’t live in Perth
2. You don’t listen to ABC Radio on Saturday mornings
3. It was not advertised anywhere in advance
4. You get all your road-cycling-related news via Jens Voigt’s Twitter feed
5. It wouldn’t be very interesting anyway

If you did happen to miss it and are also keen to find out what went down (I realise that this is probably a very small subset of the population) then I’ll ease your tensions by first letting you know that the interview went off without a hitch and I’m pretty sure that they never suspected I was actually planting the seeds for my fallback plan of a career in breakfast radio if my current lucrative occupation (Cynical & Sarcastic Cycling Gonzo Journalism) fails to realise its potential.

This is the opposite approach to SBS TV’s Sam Pang, who first cut his teeth on the popular Breakfasters RRR radio program before finding his niche as host of The Sag Wagon SBS Tour de France podcast – I’ll give it 20 years and then check back to see which one of us has achieved more.

If you’re still not satisfied with this (or you happen to be a Breakfast Radio Talent Scout looking for a fresh new voice) then I’ve posted the interview below. It’s probably best to avoid listening to this while driving or operating heavy machinery as there is a strong potential for dozing off.