A 20-hour-plus flight is a long time to worry about how you’ll be received when you land on the other side. So when Matthew Richardson flew from the UK to Australia before Christmas, he did so with a slight tinge of nervousness.
Escaping the British winter, the 25-year-old returned to the country he won three Olympic medals representing last summer. He wasn’t expecting a hero’s welcome, though. Quite the opposite, in fact, because in the time that had elapsed since the Games, he had undergone a high-profile nationality swap, changing his allegiances to Great Britain, his country of birth.
At the time, Richardson read the polarising social media comments from his new home in the UK. Many, particularly Brits, welcomed the change and the prospect of rooting for one of the world’s best track sprinters. Others were more critical, with a vocal few branding him a “traitor” from Down Under. When he got off the plane, would an angry mob be waiting for him in the arrivals lounge?
“It’s hard to understand the scale of things when you aren’t there,” Richardson says. “I was so far away from where that was actually a situation, that when I went back, I was kind of thinking, ‘How is this going to go be?’ Not just with the cycling community, but would people recognise me at the airport as I came in?”
The answer, he was relieved to find out, was no. Not a soul.
“It was great,” he grins. “I was like, ‘Yes, no one cares! This is fantastic!’ People only care on Facebook. It was a breath of fresh air, because I just wasn’t 100% sure how it would actually play out.”
That general indifference towards his nationality swap continued beyond the doors of the airport. He remembers one encounter in particular with a local bike mechanic, who gave him a surprisingly warm welcome.
“He was like, ‘Are you the guy that swapped? Good on you! Do you what you want to do!’” Richardson says. “For a second I was like, ‘Oh no, he knows who I am. This is not going to go very well.’ But it just shows that the group of haters is so small and minute.”
On another day, Richardson returned to his old cycling club, Midland, who introduced him to track sprinting as a teenager. Despite travelling with his new GB kit, he asked if they'd rather he wore his club kit during a session at Perth Velodrome. “They were like, ‘No! Wear the GB kit! We want to see the GB kit!’” he says.
“The group of people that are hating is such a small group of people, and it really came to light when I was back in Australia. I was a bit nervous about how it was going to go around the cycling community, and the response that I got was just amazing.”
Everyone, in fact, was “super supportive”, Richardson found.
“It was a super surreal experience for me to be back there where it all started, but now in GB kit,” he says. “I remember hearing stories from when the sprint team used to go, like Chris [Hoy] and Jason [Kenny] and all those guys. You’d be like, ‘Wow.’ They used to come out here and train, and now I’m one of the GB athletes going out there to train, obviously under a different circumstance.”
Richardson has since traded his mornings on the beach for the brisk Manchester chill, and returned to his base in the UK. This weekend, he will vye for his maiden British titles at the National Track Championships. He will then turn his focus to his first outings with the Great Britain national squad – next month's UCI Nations Cup and October’s UCI Track World Championships – at both of which he’s likely to face his former Australian team-mates.
Six months have now passed since Richardson first announced his nationality swap. Does he think the online criticism will continue this year? “I expect there’ll be eyes on me when I do well, is what I’ll say,” he says.
“The sense that I got last year was that whenever I would succeed in something or do well, that’s when the most amount of stuff would come, trying to either shut me down or beat me down a little bit,” he continues. “Obviously I won’t let that happen.”
