Matt Richardson didn’t swap Australia for Manchester for the weather, nor the lifestyle and certainly not for the traffic.
Instead, he did it solely for the “magic” of British Cycling.
“A way I can probably describe it is the Australian programme is like high school and the British programme is like Hogwarts,” he says.
Little more than a year ago, the 26-year-old track cyclist – a three-time Olympic medallist at last year’s Games – sent shockwaves through the sport when he announced he was changing allegiance from Australia to Great Britain, the country of his birth.
The transition was tough at the start, landing on British soil at the start of 2025 when the weather was getting “colder, greyer and darker”, but the sprinter quickly found his home at British Cycling’s high-tech HQ.
“It’s incredible with all this magic going on. It’s a crazy place to be. I remember my first couple of weeks there and being like ‘wow’,” he tells BBC Sport.
“People talk about no stones unturned and that’s the definition of this place. I feel so fortunate to [have experienced] two completely different programmes, and I think having that is a real strength, applying two different mindsets or philosophies to try to find the fastest way to do things.”
It’s a case of so far, so good for Richardson since the swap. In August he made history as the first cyclist to go under the nine-second barrier in the flying 200m, setting a new world record of 8.941 seconds in Konya, Turkey, before lowering that mark to 8.857 the next day.
He is matter of fact about his achievement.
“It was a just a simple day,” he says. “I rocked up to the velodrome, did a warm-up, did a little bit of an activation and then rode faster than anybody else in history and that was basically it.”
