Stuart O’Grady brings considerable experience to GreenEDGE

Veteran Stuart O’Grady said Monday he will leave the Leopard-Trek cycling team and the Schleck brothers to join new Australian pro team GreenEDGE.

“To ride for an Australian team has been a dream of mine since I turned pro way back in 1995. I wasn’t sure such a team would come around before I retired, but I’m glad it has,” O’Grady said.

The 38-year-old O’Grady joins Jack Bobridge and Cameron and Travis Meyer as the first racers to commit to GreenEDGE, Australia’s first UCI World Tour-licensed team planning to begin competing in 2012.

“I’ve spent quite a few years supporting the Schleck brothers (Frank and Andy) at the Tour de France and Fabian (Cancellara) in the classics and doing that job alongside Jens Voigt,” O’Grady said in a statement.

“We’ve been like a family. It’s been a privilege racing with those guys and leaving Leopard-Trek to join GreenEDGE has been the hardest decision of my career.”

O’Grady said the lure of joining an Australian team was too strong to resist. “I’ve been racing for a long time and seen the evolution of Australian cycling from guys like Phil Anderson, Neil Stephens and Patrick Jonker to myself as part of the generation that followed and now we’ve got an impressive group of young riders coming through.”

“For a country where cycling is a relatively small sport, the progress in such a short period of time has been incredible.”

According to GreenEDGE Cycling General Manager Shayne Bannan, having O’Grady on the team will play a critical role in guiding the younger members of the team and building a squad for the big one-day races. “He can teach our guys stuff on the road that simply can’t be communicated from the team car sitting behind the peloton.”

“And you don’t stay at the top end of any sport as long as Stuart has without doing something right. He won a Silver medal in the Olympics in 1992 when Travis Meyer and Jack Bobridge were only three years old, so there’s a lot he can teach our younger guys.”

O’ Grady also sees his experience as his major contribution to the team. “There’ll be a lot of young guys on the squad and Shayne understands the need to have someone to guide them. There’s no point in having the biggest and shiniest ship in the ocean if you don’t have a captain to steer it and I think I bring plenty of experience at steering the ship.”