Stanley St. Social | Cycling News and Interviews

Bling / Michael Matthews joins the podcast for a wide-ranging conversation spanning his entire career — from a motocross-obsessed kid in Canberra who stumbled into cycling, to Australian champion within six months, to a decade-plus at the top of the World Tour.
Bling opens up on the origin of his nickname, meeting Kobe Bryant in a hotel elevator during his first year as a pro, and the eerie parallel of watching LeBron James walk through a crowd in Paris untouched. He walks through the highs — winning the Green Jersey with Sunweb, the emotional 2017 Tour de France stage win in Rodez two years after breaking ribs on the same climb, the legendary Green Edge "Aussie rock star" era — and the lows, including a horror pre-Tour crash in 2014 and a brutal, injury-riddled run through the 2015 Tour just weeks before his wedding.
He also reflects candidly on team culture then versus now, what he sees of his younger self in Tadej Pogačar, the role his wife and daughter play in keeping him motivated at 35, and why the World Championships remains the one jersey that's slipped through his fingers — with Canada, a course that's been kind to him before, right around the corner.

Dr. David Spindler is a neuroscientist, cognitive performance strategist, and elite athlete wellbeing expert who's spent his career helping athletes and teams understand that brain chemicals matter. He's worked with some of the biggest names in professional sport, most famously alongside Mark Cavendish through the darkest years of his career, chronicled in Netflix's "Never Enough."
Three big segments in this one.
Team culture. David breaks down the actual neurochemistry behind why old-school GreenEDGE had that "I'd do anything for my mate next to me" quality — it comes down to oxytocin, the same bonding chemical released when a parent holds their newborn, and why some teams manufacture it constantly while others can't buy it no matter how much they spend. He and Alex build an entire hypothetical Australian WorldTour team from a blank sheet of paper — values, non-negotiables, culture — and get into why "old school Green Edge" gets thrown around constantly but almost nobody can actually define what it means.
Concussion. A proper breakdown of concussion protocols in the peloton and why cycling is dangerously behind rugby and the NFL on brain safety — including the messy legal reason nobody wants to call an impact sensor a "concussion sensor," and who actually carries liability when a rider gets hurt.
Training the brain. David explains the real neuroscience of reactionary decision-making, why riders like Tadej Pogačar seem to have supernatural crash radar, and the actual mechanics of how he trains neural efficiency in elite endurance athletes to extend time to exhaustion — plus how his own PhD on decision-making under physiological load in professional cyclists led him down this path in the first place.

The boys have a plan to get Tadej Pogačar down under.
Meanwhile the Vuelta has completely flipped on its head, someone's playing it ice cold in the red jersey, and the mountain bike world championships produced one of the most ridiculous rides of the year from a guy who basically chose to start from the back. Max's new top five ranks the teams he'd actually send a rider to and there's a brand new segment debuting this week that involves some very confident guesswork about riders' salaries.

We're (Alex is) sorry — Monday's show fell apart in a car park in Stage 3, so here's the make-up episode. Max's 9th All Australian jacket, plus Ed hard-launches the next cycling project: an Everesting attempt in October with zero training.:Max's Top 5 on fixing cycling coverage and a full Vuelta recap.

Alex sits down with Matthew Richardson at his home in Manchester for his most open interview yet. The world's fastest man over 200m takes us inside the Japanese Keirin World Series — the deliberate hit that broke his scapula and put him in a Tokyo hospital, body armour, betting culture, and three days locked away with no phone and a stack of second-hand DVDs.
Then, the full story of the switch: deciding on Christmas Day to leave Australia for Great Britain, telling AusCycling after winning silver in Paris, the equipment saga, the two-year ban threat that became a lifetime ban, and why he'd do it all again. Plus 240kg squats, why he never trains his upper body, creatine, LA 2028, and a golf handicap that shouldn't be ten.