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News & Racing<\/a><\/p>\n The Praties Cycling Team dominated at the domestic level in 2025, but it might not exist in 2026.<\/p>\n The Praties Cycling Team is an institution. For more than 25 years, Andrew Christie-Johnston ran the most successful men\u2019s team in Australian road cycling, helping many riders to the top of the sport; riders like Richie Porte, Chris Harper, Ben O\u2019Connor, and many others. While the men\u2019s team closed at the end of 2024<\/a>, the women\u2019s team \u2013 founded in 2023 \u2013 continued into 2025 and dominated at the local level. In the ProVelo Super League<\/a>, Australia\u2019s new top-level domestic road racing series, Praties was the team to beat, winning the series overall with Sophie Marr, with several other riders sharing in the success throughout the year.<\/p>\n But despite that success, the future of the Praties women\u2019s team is very much under threat. A long and exhaustive search for a sponsor for the 2026 season has so far proven unsuccessful and the team has now turned to crowdfunding<\/a> to help raise any money to race on in 2026. With only four weeks remaining to raise roughly $90,000 this could well be the end of an era.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t the first time the team has used crowdfunding to help shore up its future. In late 2022, on the eve of its debut season, the team asked the cycling community to help get the team off the ground. The response was positive, but it was through an anonymous donation of $100,000 that the team\u2019s future was secured. Now, the team\u2019s managers \u2013 Christie-Johnston and Pat Shaw \u2013 are hoping for something similar, otherwise one of Australia\u2019s most important pathways for emerging road racing talents could be done.<\/p>\n Escape spoke with Pat Shaw earlier this week to learn more about the current status of the crowdfunding efforts and what\u2019s required from here.<\/p>\n Matt de Neef: So what\u2019s the latest with the team? Where are things up to with the crowdfunding campaign?<\/p>\n Pat Shaw: Well, essentially we’ve really been fighting pretty hard for the last three years, to be honest. We even came to the point where we wound up the men’s program<\/a>. It’s been a real tough last three years for sure. I mean, I hate to sound like a broken record, but the reality is that travel is an imperative item to being successful in the sport of cycling, and the cost of everything has gone up, whether it be vehicles, whether it be repairs of vehicles, whether it be petrol, whether it be accommodation, whether it be flights, baggage, everything. So all that stuff’s gone up.<\/p>\n I must say, though, the one thing that hasn’t probably changed all that much over the period of the last three or four or five years is the support from our sponsors, particularly our hardware sponsors \u2013 bikes and components and helmets, all that sort of stuff. The support’s always been very fantastic \u2013 we couldn’t really ask for better support. Fantastic brands, but also just how much they’ve supported us has been amazing, and they should really be commended in the way that they’ve nurtured Australia’s talent, as much as anyone else.<\/p>\n But financial backing is really the hardest part. It’s always been the hardest part to find, particularly for a niche sport. Although in Europe it has corporate sponsorship which flows in for given reasons \u2013 obviously, the Tour de France being one of the major ones \u2013 but certainly we just don’t have those outlets or avenues to sell sponsorship to the big corporates.<\/p>\n The hard part about it is that you’ve got to consistently get multiple sponsors of different values and then trying to manage those as well when, you know, we [team management] effectively are volunteers. And that makes it really quite a difficult challenge on every level.<\/p>\n We’ve really tried everything this year. We’ve scraped every left-hand, right-hand side we can find to get a sponsor that could drive us into 2026 and beyond, hopefully. But we’ve dried up our resources. We’ve even dried up some externals where people have been able to \u2013 and, you know, thanks to them for trying \u2013 but they’ve tried to help us find a sponsor as well and just to no fortune, unfortunately.<\/p>\n The last resort was to do crowdfunding. We did it three years ago. We were lucky that we had a major contributor involved as well, but it also raised the profile of what we were doing and what we have done.<\/p>\n This post is for paying subscribers only Already have an account? Sign in<\/a><\/p>\n Did we do a good job with this story?<\/p>\n \n \ud83d\udc4dYep![\"Matt](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/Matt-de-Neef-150x150.jpg\")
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