At just 20 years old, the West Australian neo-pro is still learning what sort of rider she is.
Coupland at sign-on for the 2026 Santos Tour Down Under – her first WorldTour event.
Life as a WorldTour professional normally starts pretty quietly. You mostly avoid the biggest events, you aren’t really thinking about results, and most of your first season – if not longer – is spent finding your feet.
Mackenzie Coupland’s first season in the WorldTour has started rather differently. After stepping up from the Liv AlUla Jayco Continental team to the WorldTour squad this year, the 20-year-old has burst into the spotlight immediately.
In early January, in front of her home crowd in Perth, Coupland started the year in perfect fashion, winning Australia’s elite and U23 road titles with a strong solo move. A week later, at the Santos Tour Down Under – her very first WorldTour race – Coupland was a regular fixture near the front of the bunch in her new green, gold, and white kit, animating the race and riding in support of teammates.
Green and gold rush-job: The making of Mackenzie Coupland’s Aussie champ’s bike
‘You can’t afford one thing to go wrong.’
And then, at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race Coupland was even more impressive. She was in all the important moves, particularly in the closing kilometres, and only just missed the podium in her first WorldTour one-day race, sprinting to fourth from an elite group of 12 – almost all of them established WorldTour pros.
She later described that result to Escape as “bittersweet”.
“I feel like I probably should have waited a bit longer [to sprint], but I’m pretty happy because it’s the first time I’m able to kind of get up that end of a UCI-level race,” she said. “It’s my second WorldTour race so I’m pretty happy with how I performed in the finish.
“But [I’ve] just [got] a lot of learning to go. So hopefully I’ll get there one day.”
Beginnings
While Coupland does have a lot of learning still to go – as you’d expect from a 20-year-old – the fact she’s duking it out in the sprint of a WorldTour one-day, a month into joining the WorldTour ranks, is noteworthy in itself. Not least because she really hasn’t been racing bikes for all that long, relatively speaking.
“There was a talent identification program run by the Western Australian Institute of Sport, and you could get selected for track cycling, rowing, and kayaking,” Coupland told Escape about her first foray into cycling. “I think I got selected for track cycling and kayaking. I really wanted to try out kayaking, but then my parents were like, ‘We’re not waking up at 4am to go to the river.’ My parents have a triathlon background, so they had bikes, so it also made sense to do track cycling. So I first started doing track cycling at the end of 2019.”
Coupland soon realised that track cycling wasn’t for her, describing it as “a little bit boring for me, just going around in circles.” But when she started riding to and from the track on a road bike she borrowed from her Mum, that’s when things started to click.
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