To say cycling champion Dr Bridie O’Donnell is a multi-hyphenate is an understatement.
Not only does she kill it on the bike, Bridie is also a trained medical professional having graduated from the University of Queensland Medical School. She now works in the Community and Public Health Division of the Victorian Department of Health.
In between? Bridie competed in Olympic distance and Ironman triathlons, began road cycling and won the National Time Trial title, raced in the Australian National Team, and represented Australia at three World Championships between 2008 and 2012. From 2013 to 2017, Bridie managed and raced for the Rush Women’s Team in the Cycling Australia National Road Series and in 2016, broke the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) Women’s Hour World Record.
Her achievements cement her status as one of the best female cyclists in Australia, but Bridie insists she was a very ordinary athlete growing up.
“Average, definitely average. And I didn’t ride a bike. I was playing team sports like a lot of kids in Queensland,” she says. “Sometimes you can suck at school because all the sports are about hand-eye coordination, or the kids that have done soccer or cricket or footy or netball are better than you. And that’s not a reason to think you’re no good as an athlete or that you’re not going to be good at sports. Maybe you just haven’t found the right activity.”
It wasn’t until she hit university that Bridie started to experiment with other sports, like rowing. But in her second year of medical school, it was cycling that captured her body, mind and spirit. She distinctly remembers the first time she gave it a go: “I’d never ridden in a triathlon before, so I was 19 and I was so scared riding the bike. I didn’t take my hands off the handlebars to change gears for the whole bike. So it was a pretty terrifying experience, but I actually had a lot of fun doing it.”
The college experiment has led to Bridie breaking the world record for the longest distance covered by a bike in one hour – at the age of 42. She says one of the greatest challenges she’s faced in her athletic career has been ageism, and she’s found that people can be ageist across both sports and business.
“In Australia, most of our talent identification, whether formal, you know, by sports or informal, is focused on youth. You know, we see talent scouts at junior sports. We talk about how fast, strong and high people can jump, but as teenagers and parents are very focused on if their kids are going to get selected for juniors and regionals and all those sorts of things,” she explains.
“And yet what I encountered coming to sport later in life in my thirties and then really peaking in my early forties is that there’s all these really highly motivated, very strong athletes, particularly women who are competing and they’re doing it in endurance sports because they can at least control their own selection,” she says.
In Dr Carol S. Dweck’s bestselling book Growth Mindset (2017), she writes that in sports, everybody believes in talent. Even – or especially – the experts. “So great is the belief in natural talent that many scouts and coaches search only for naturals, and teams will vie with each other to pay exorbitant amounts to recruit them.”
The hidden cost of this belief system, however, is a failure to understand that with practice, resources, and what Carol calls a “growth mindset”, tomorrow’s athletes can grow from the most unlikely places. Bridie shouts out her cycling peer Paula Newby-Fraser, who was winning the women’s category at events in Hawaii in her forties.
From the outside, no one would have predicted that a young, slightly-awkward-with-ball-sports Bridie, had a professional cyclist deep inside of her. Now, she’s paving the way for so many women to come and show that you don’t have to be in your 20s to be a world champion.
Off the roads and in the office, Bridie later became the inaugural Head of the Victorian Government’s Office for Women in Sport and Recreation. “We had a budget, a very small team. And so our priorities were to implement all of the recommendations that came from the report that had established my office. So we wanted to get more facilities built for women and girls, and change rooms in particular in regional parts of Victoria. We also wanted to get more women on boards,” she says.
“We achieved a quota that all funded sporting organisations [across Victoria] would have 40% women on their board. And that was the first in the world jurisdiction in the world to ever achieve that. And then get more women speaking about sport, and making decisions about sport.”
You can watch the 2024 Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes live on SBS.