“I was thinking: ‘Have I wasted seven years in pro cycling?’ But then, I thought, no, maybe I've just done a ridiculous seven year aerobic build that no one else can replicate in running. Maybe I’ve got a bit of a cheat code.”
Ex-professional cyclist, Jimmy Whelan, 29, is speaking to me 10 days after he ran 61:37 at the Valencia Half Marathon, a time which places him 13th on the Australian all-time list. It has been less than a year since Whelan retired from cycling at the end of last season, after a seven-year career that included four years at WorldTour and some notable results, including a win at the U23 Tour of Flanders in 2018, finishing ahead of a number of the current superstars of the sport.
“When someone asks me, ‘oh you’re a cyclist, have you beaten Tadej Pogačar?’ I say, ‘yeah, mate, in my first European bike race!’,” Whelan says wryly. From joking about scalping one of the greatest-ever riders to questioning the point of it all, Whelan is relaxed and content to open up about the challenging and precarious world of cycling, in part because he is no longer at the mercy of it. Despite some successes during his time on two wheels, it was also a period plagued by sciatica issues, increasing anxiety around safety in the peloton and the mounting pressure of securing contracts to sustain the career.
These strains ultimately led him to retire at the age of 28, originally with the goal of becoming a professional triathlete, but over the course of 21.1km and little over an hour – on two feet rather than two wheels – his plans have now changed.
“After my run on the weekend, I could potentially go pro in running,” says Whelan, who is now targeting a spot on the Australian marathon team at the Los Angeles 2028.
As we chat, it becomes clear how a full-circle moment is dawning on Whelan; as a teenager he aimed for a professional running career. In 2015, he ran 8.19 over 3,000m at the Zatopek track meet in Melbourne, an event he is returning to on December 13 to race the Australian 10,000m championships. Back at the Zatopek meet, 10 years on, Whelan will be wearing the same black and red striped vest of the Old Xaverians Athletics Club, a touching tribute for Whelan, signalling where he is from and paying tribute to those who have helped him along the way.
Talking to me on a video call from Melbourne, I can tell the prospect of his new challenge is genuinely exciting Whelan – it’s “getting him fired up”. It’s in stark contrast from the jaded perspective he gives of his last few years on the bike.
“It's just bizarre to be doing my childhood dream ten years later. That's why I'm so happy. I'm so passionate about it,” enthuses Whelan. The decade in between has been a whirlwind.
From Olympic dreams to WorldTour
“I wanted to go to college in America and to eventually represent Australia at the Olympics,” Whelan tells me. The then 19-year-old’s ambitions to reach an elite level at running wasn’t a pipedream; he was in contact with a number of American colleges before an achilles injury put everything on pause.
It was during that injury period that he took up cycling, first going out with a friend in Melbourne, which Whelan says is one of the best places in the world to get into the sport. He entered some races and in the following months rose up the ranks, placing second at the Elite Men’s Oceania Continental Championships a couple of weeks before his win at the U23 Flanders in 2018 – around 18 months after deciding to take the sport seriously.
What followed was a WorldTour contract in August of that year with EF (known as Team EF Education First - Drapac p/b Cannondale), and a move to Girona, one of the European hotspots for professionals. The 2018 EF team boasted the likes of Grand Tour podium finishers like Rigoberto Urán and Dani Martínez, as well as a fellow cyclist with a running background, Mike Woods, who has reached out to Whelan since his run at Valencia to say how impressed he is.
Whelan on stage five of the 2019 Jayco Herald Sun Tour (Image: Zac Williams/SWpix.com)
On the bike, Whelan was a climbing talent, who thrived in attritional races, particularly when it was hot: “I was good at one-days, especially when they were quite long and quite hot. Whenever we lined up for the Australian National road race, I was always one of the strongest guys there.
“That was always the funnest day of the year for me on a bike, just rocking up with good form, knowing that I had like 14 bullets to everyone's four. In hindsight, I almost should have raced like I had three bullets not 14. But I got pretty popular in the Australian scene just for my attacking at the National Championships.”
Popular and successful, despite never grabbing the green and gold bands as the winner — his best result was second in 2022 when he was caught and passed by Luke Plapp in Buninyong.
Whelan had and still has a “monster aerobic engine” and was light enough to have a strong power-to-weight ratio. However, something he struggled with was positioning in the bunch, often starting climbs too far back in the bunch and spending too much energy. That alongside the recurring sciatica issue, which he says affected him most when he was riding over 400 Watts, meant he felt he never achieved the results that he was physiologically capable of – factors that have not affected his running ability.
He rode the Giro d’Italia in 2020 (the Covid-19 edition won by Tao Geoghegan Hart) – a proud moment in his career and his only Grand Tour. His contract with EF came to an end at the end of 2021 season and two years at Conti level followed, which included a victory on the queen stage of the Volta a Portugal 2023 when riding for Glassdrive Q8 Anicolor. This win kick started his professional career again as Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team signed him. However, soon Whelan decided it wasn’t what he wanted – and here we are two years on and on the brink of his life as an elite runner.
Plaudits and targets
Whelan’s smooth, gazelle-like running style lit up social media long before his Valencia performance. The Australian has his own YouTube channel to document his journey, a meteoric rise which has surprised many – not only for how quickly he has adapted but also his approach to the training.
“Runners say: ‘Woah you go on the treadmill and do a two-hour session?’ and I’m like: yeah, I used to riding the ergo for five hours.” Whelan said he was running once a week even when clocking up 30 hours every seven days on the bike.
Although he has cut his training hours in half (which is near the top end of what is possible for running training), adjusting back to life on two feet still required adaption: “The biggest challenge over the last year while I went from cycling to triathlon was having a big aerobic engine, but my legs would fail before my engine would kind of go into the red. Whereas now after building the strength, my legs fail at the same time as my engine.”
When in his new adopted home of Barcelona, Whelan does most of his runs alone, training up to 190km a week, with three days of sessions, under the supervision of the coaches from the Melbourne Track Club, one of the best running squads from his home country.
Re-accustomising himself to running training is not the only change Whelan has had to make; he is also adapting to the often self-promoting environment of athletics – a different scene to cycling, where, like in all team sports, squads are determined by whether particular athletes fit the team’s strategy and requirements. In the individualistic pursuit of running, sponsors don’t sign athletes to be domestiques, something which Whelan is getting used to: “I had to learn about the whole professional cycling world when I was 21 and now I feel like I have to learn the whole professional running world when I'm 29.
“Two weeks ago I was reaching out to brands on LinkedIn, the marketing people were interested just from a social media point of view, but I didn't have that big result to get the athlete managers interested. When you get the tick from the athlete managers and the marketing teams, that's when brands actually come forward and say: ‘hey, we want you’.”
Whelan in the red and black vest of the Old Xaverians Athletics Club at the Valencia Half Marathon
Whelan isn’t shy about his ambitions for his new career. Australian records and Olympic qualification may seem lofty goals, but he can take confidence from what a fellow competitor at Valencia told him at the finish; the Olympic triathlon champion Alex Yee, who finished just ahead of Whelan in a time of 61:29, saw how comfortable Whelan looked at 15km and at the finish congratulated Whelan: “He was like, ‘mate, you could run so much faster.’ That was pretty cool for him to say that.”
Yee knows a thing or two about endurance sport, but you don’t need Olympic medals to get a view of what is plain to see: Whelan could get close to an hour for the half marathon, a time he said he will shoot for at the next opportunity. What could follow is a debut marathon, perhaps at Seville 2026, an event where Whelan will target a time of 2:08.
“Now I've done this massive, ridiculous training block – luckily, in cycling, I always over-trained, so I've just built this stupid, strong engine. And now this engine has a pair of legs that still work. It runs really nicely, so let’s see what happens.”
