‘I don’t want to be just going through the motions’ – Lachlan Morton in search of even more freedom as he departs EF Education to go it alone

It’s a little hard to imagine Morton as anything but the multidiscipline adventurer now, but there was a time when he couldn’t even conceive of the path that he ended up following with EF Pro Cycling. After all, what was on show at the time he was starting out was a far narrower version of what you had to deliver to be able to ride your bike every day and call it a job.

“I was very much a road racer, and all my my goals were to succeed and win races and do as much as I could in the WorldTour, and then that sort of started to shift,” Morton told Cyclingnews. “The more I was exposed to it, I guess I started to gradually follow the other passions in cycling and that was sort of happening outside of racing.

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“But I never dreamed that I’d be able to race and follow those kind of passions, simultaneously or under one banner. Initially, it was definitely just kind of like a hobby, it was not very closely in line with with what I was doing for a job. I didn’t think that the kind of set-up I’ve had at EF would ever be something that that I could actually do.”

Morton did ride as a pro in the peloton (Image credit: Getty Images)

It certainly wasn’t the norm for a WorldTour professional to go and spend his off season riding 2,500km to Uluru and filming the adventure along the way. But back then, a young Morton didn’t really care to do the expected, and that was probably a good thing.

“I was pretty stubborn, and I would just do the things I was going to do anyway,” said Morton when asked what the Garmin Sharp team thought when he embarked on the first of three Thereabouts adventures in 2013, with the next two in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and Colombia in the following three years. “So I don’t think I really took notice of what people thought, you know. I think the film led reassessing a little bit what I was doing racing.”

“I think around that period of time, in my second year with the team, I wasn’t racing particularly well, I wasn’t particularly happy, and I think in that time I was definitely pretty self-absorbed,” said a frank Morton, who isn’t afraid to lean into a bit of typical Aussie self deprecation.

“So I don’t think I really cared too much what anyone thought, just like a typical like 20-year-old, 21-year-old who is trying to work things out. So yeah, I actually haven’t really thought about what they thought. I’m sure that they were not stoked. Maybe, I remember my coach wasn’t super happy about it.”

Fast forward a few years to the EF Pro Cycling team that formed out of the shell of that original squad, and there was a wholly different attitude. In 2019 Morton, after his sojourn with Jelly Belly and Dimension Data – decided to head back to a set up which was now far more enthused about embracing the unconventional.

It was, in fact, a move he made even though at that point he was quite content in the WorldTour.

“With Dimension Data, I found that as a professional. I was like, ‘OK, I found a nice groove here where I can be happy in my life, training and doing this thing and accept the level that’ll get me,” said Morton.

But the lure of alternative plan was too hard to pass up.

“I remember speaking with some friends of mine at Rapha at the time, and they sort of mentioned the possibility of this idea,” said Morton. “Initially, there wasn’t any team really attached to it, and still I committed to doing it, which at the time felt sort of risky because it didn’t really exist at that time, and cycling, I think, was even more traditional at that time.

“So there was a slight worry about if I was able to do this thing. And then if it doesn’t work, if it could be hard to be taken seriously after that. I also didn’t know physically, when I started to do longer distance stuff, how that would affect my ability to race. I don’t think anyone really knew at that time, but it was just too good of an opportunity, and there were too many things that I realised that I wanted to do other than just road racing, so I was like, ‘OK, let’s go for it’.”

Initially while at EF Pro Cycling, Morton combined his alternative calendar with stints of racing with the WorldTour team “as needed”. However, as time progressed and Covid came and went, dropping that made more and more sense, particularly with the build in level that meant ducking into the pro road peloton less than ideally prepared was a huge challenge.

“As a rider, I’ve never had biggest engine, so I need to show up really prepared generally, especially in in that kind of racing,” said Morton, who didn’t have the room for the type of preparation required given the alternate schedule commitments.

“It was very hard to do the job I needed to do at the race, but also mentally to just like show up and get your head kicked in. So yeah, it just no longer made sense to me to be doing that, especially when it’s like there’s 18-year-olds who are knocking on the door that deserved that spot more than I did.”

By that time, however, there was no doubt of the value of the alternative calendar with the ‘Alt Tour’ in 2021 a validating experience that capture the public’s imagination and showed that “if you do things a little bit outside the box, there’s still space for it, it still exists alongside the traditional path,” explained Morton.

Morton on his 2021 Alt Tour (Image credit: Getty Images)

That and his latest adventure, inspired by an affinity for the courage and tradition of the Pony Express riders that delivered mail through the harsh terrain, were two of the memorable moments he picked out from his time with the team when we spoke to him in the days following the conclusion of his last adventure under its umbrella.

“That was really, really satisfying, from the the group of people I had there and then the route itself, and then the way I was able to ride it. That was a dream one for me, and also to be so removed from cycling in a way, the route itself, it’s not one that’s been ridden a lot,” said Morton.

“It was also cool to get to a point where you could say to the team, ‘Hey, I want to do this’, and there wasn’t a huge amount of questioning about it. There was a trust.”

That trust, and evident satisfaction that comes through from Morton when discussing his time with the team raises on big question. Why is he leaving?

“Above everything, I think it’s just time is probably the biggest reason,” said Morton. “I also don’t want to be just going through the motions, knowing I can just do this thing that that works for everyone and just kind of be comfortable in doing that.