For an athlete that was relatively late to elite sport, Jimmy Whelan has had a diverse and fascinating career. After being a promising middle-distance runner as a teen, he turned to cycling, and almost immediately began to impress. Whelan won his very first race in Europe, the U23 Tour of Flanders, after self-funding his trip over.
The Melbournian jumped straight to the WorldTour, signing a three-year contract with EF Education First (2019-21), and raced the Giro d’Italia in 2020. But when his contract didn’t get renewed, Whelan found himself scrambling for a ride at the Continental level. That didn’t feel like it did justice to Whelan’s talent, but he kept at it: notable results included second place at the 2022 Australian Road Nationals and overall honours at the Tour Down Under a few weeks later (then a domestic-level event during the COVID years). In May 2023, he took a punt on an unpaid contract with Portuguese team Glassdrive-Q8-Anicolor, and a few months later won the brutal queen stage of the Volta a Portugal – a result that helped pave the way to a contract with Q36.5 for 2024.
By the end of that year, though, Whelan was done. A string of crashes and sickness meant that he wasn’t able to show what he was capable of: at Critérium du Dauphiné, he told Escape Collective at the time, “I ripped my knee open, and I was in hospital again, and I was again in a hotel after the hospital, staring at the ceiling, feeling sorry for myself, and thought ‘OK, something has to change. This isn’t where I want to be.’”
Jimmy Whelan’s had enough of ‘going to hospital every three races’
The fact road racing is “incredibly dangerous” is one of the reasons the 28-year-old Aussie is leaving cycling for triathlon.
His answer, in the end, was to walk away from his pro cycling career – a choice made out of frustration, and self-preservation from the risks of a “savage and incredibly dangerous” sport. But Whelan’s athletic engine is impressive, and his desire to use it remained: he initially pivoted into triathlon, with a goal of representing Australia at the Olympics, and narrowed his focus further from there to long distance running.
On Sunday, Whelan lined up at his debut marathon in front of a home crowd, in Melbourne. The race was headlined by one of the greatest of all time, Eliud Kipchoge, winner of four Olympic medals including two gold – and it was Whelan that took the fight to Kipchoge, the only runner to stay with the Kenyan for the first 30 km before fading to finish fifth. In a comment after the race, Kipchoge wrote “Thank you Jimmy, it was wonderful to share the streets of Melbourne with you!”
Photo: Julian Schulz for Salomon.
Although the result was less than what Whelan hoped for, the way he went about it was significant, and arguably the main talking point of the entire event. I caught up with him for an interview to learn more about the cyclist-to-runner pipeline and his ambitions in his latest sport.
Iain Treloar: Hi Jimmy, thanks for taking the time to chat. How are you?
Jimmy Whelan: Well, I’m actually still in bed, believe it or not!
IT: I suppose you’ve got some recovery to do.
JW: Yeah, I’ve tried to have a sleep-in today, and I’ve done very well. I woke up at 9.15.
IT: I’m impressed!
JW: That’s what happens when I wake up at 3.30 in the morning to go do a marathon on Sunday.
IT: That is a bit ridiculous. I actually saw you out running the other day, on the way to work. You looked very springy – like a gazelle – and I was just a haggard commuter, but I thought ‘I recognise that guy’.
JW: Yeah, especially because that would have been during my taper, so I was feeling extra fresh.
Photo: Julian Schulz for Salomon.
IT: I’ve got a number of questions for you today, but bear with me if I get running terminology wrong or say stupid things.
JW: That’s all good! I’m kind of over the running nuffy questions.
IT: So you’ve obviously just had a pretty eventful weekend – the last guy to stick with Eliud Kipchoge in your first marathon. You’re best known to our audience, though, as a cyclist. Does it feel like coming full circle back to running, or is it all just another chapter in the evolving story of Jimmy Whelan in sport?
JW: It does feel a little bit like a full circle. I mean, this whole last week since returning home – normally I return back to Melbourne as a bike rider every year, but last year when I came back home, I still wasn’t a professional runner. I still didn’t really know my future with what this year was going to look like, in terms of sponsors and whether it was going to be my job and all that stuff. So this time round, it was my first time kind of coming back as a full time pro runner.
It was almost like coming home for the Australian Road National Championships again. But this time I was a pro runner doing the Melbourne Marathon instead, and it felt a bit more special. That’s not to say Road Nats wasn’t special every year, and I always gave it a crack, but this time round it felt like I was doing what I was always meant to do.
The opportunity that presented itself on Sunday with my debut marathon at home on a fast flat course against Eliud Kipchoge – yeah, it was pretty crazy. And even just the build up the week prior to the race, doing all the media stuff, feeling all the hype and support and noise around me coming back to do this marathon – as a local boy, my story is different against one of the greatest of all time, and then the question marks on whether I’d be able to keep with him, the entertainment of that, and of the unknown … it was just crazy to feel that.
I felt like Tadej Pogačar doing the World Championships at home, in his hometown, or something. That sounds ridiculous, but the noise on race day was the loudest thing I’ve experienced in sport. More than when I did the Giro, more than I did when I did any of the big Belgian races. It was just crazy.
IT: Last time we spoke to you, you’d just retired and had a different plan, to become a professional triathlete, which is obviously different to where you are now. Can we talk a little bit about the triathlon arc?
JW: Yeah. No one really mentions that.
IT: Right – I found myself wondering. You’re pretty settled in running now, but how long did that plan last? Was it the swim leg that finally ruled that out for you, or did you just find that running was your happy place?
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