Phil Latz started Bicycling Australia in his home garage way back in 1989. Here he details how it all came about.
First of all, congratulations to Nat Bromhead and the Yaffa Media team on Bicycling Australia’s 250th edition!
I feel honoured that Nat has asked me to write about the origins and history of Bicycling Australia and hope that he doesn’t regret his decision after reading the somewhat indulgent autobiography that will now unfold.
Founded through a passion for cycling
My family weren’t particularly sporting. There was absolutely no history of cycling, but for whatever reason, I was obsessed with the sport of bicycle racing from my early childhood.
I began racing on the local velodrome in suburban Adelaide, South Australia from the age of 10.
Things were obviously very different back then but we still had bike technology, well a form of it. I recall a cable-linked, handlebar-mounted odometer on one of my earlier bikes. I rode and raced that machine wherever I could, and eventually logged 12,500km before the cable snapped.
A few years later a critical “sliding doors” moment happened at age 19. I came up with the bright idea of dropping out of university to go and race bikes in the United States, much to my mother’s horror in particular who had a path mapped out for me of, “Get a degree. Get a good safe job!”
Although I only had modest success on that USA trip, my best result being one stage win and second overall in the Tour of Salt Lake City, later known as the Tour of Utah, my exposure to a much higher level of racing than Australia offered at the time had me hooked.
The Early Days
There was no Australian Institute of Sport cycling program in those days and only four Aussie pro cyclists in Europe, led by Phil Anderson and Allan Peiper. International airfares were super expensive in those days. So I took the only path available – I worked multiple jobs for 18 months saving everything I could, then paid my own way to Europe.
After racing one season for a team based in Paris, it was clear that I wasn’t good enough to make the top grade and that I wasn’t prepared to take the drugs that were rife within the sport during the 1980’s era.
Returning to Australia I got married to Catie, we had two children and I struggled to adjust to a post-cycling live of a menial job, no qualifications and struggle to pay the mortgage. Partly for the adventure we moved to the Pitjantjatjara Homelands, in outback South Australia where I worked for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Then we bought The Old Hotel general store in Wangary, South Australia.
Rural South Australia
It was the only store in this tiny town of 78 people, 700 kilometres west of Adelaide, that served the surrounding farming and fishing communities of the lower Eyre Peninsula.
It was soon clear that this seven day per week business had the potential to break our young family, and we discussed the critical question, what should we do next?
As well as cycling, I’d always had a passion for journalism and photography and had been freelancing for Velo News magazine in the USA plus a former Australian magazine called National Cycling. For about five years of my teenage life, I’d also published a small SA cycling magazine called Sprocket. If the online world had existed then, I would have been into it like a pig in mud.
Despite being told that the success rate for national magazine start ups was one in seven and that the minimum capital needed was $250,000, compared to the $100,000 we raised from selling The Old Hotel, to my wife’s eternal credit, she said, “We can always start again if it fails.”
On 1st November 1989 we incorporated Lake Wangary Publishing Co Pty Ltd and published our first edition in early 1990, launching on the back of the Auckland Commonwealth Games.
Early Challenges
It might sound like something out of the Monty Python Yorkshireman sketch, but I literally started with a shovel, hand digging the foundations to build a shed in Wangary that would become our first office. At the time I thought, “If this magazine succeeds, then it would be nice to have a photo of this moment.” But no-one was watching me apart from the sheep in the next paddock.
As you can see from the cover photo that accompanies this article, we launched as “Cycling Magazine”. We were immediately sued by Phillip Mason of Mason Stewart Publishing, a big Sydney based company. Unbeknownst to me, he’d recently bought Freewheeling Magazine and renamed it Cycling World.
Even though we’d done nothing illegal, rather than fight a legal battle I could not afford, we changed our name to Bicycling Australia from the second edition onwards and spent the next decade in pitch battle with Cycling World, which eventually closed after Bicycling Australia had long since surpassed it.
Publishing a national magazine from a remote township in the early 1990’s was not without challenges. “Desktop publishing” had only just been invented but was still rare and expensive. Our first computer, that probably had 1,000th of the capacity of the phone in your pocket today, cost $35,000, the same price as we’d just paid for our house, but with 18% interest the total computer lease payments were closer to $50,000.
Floppy Disks And 286 Computers
I had no tech experience at all. This is long before the internet, social media, digital photography or mobile phones. When I first tried to boot up the computer, I put the floppy disk in upside down. Needless to say, my learning curve was steep…
Early production included a world of bromides, dark room film processing, mainly black and white pages, with expensive “four colour film separations” for our precious cover pages.
Catie and her friends enveloped subscription copies on the dining room table. Automated mail fulfilment contractors happened much later.
Because the magazine struggled in its early years and cash was ultra-short, I couldn’t afford to fly to the eastern states, so I did a monthly road trip, either in my rusty old Datsun ute or borrowing my parent’s Mazda 323. I would typically drive 4,000 km per trip, covering national races and heading to Melbourne and Sydney to sell advertising space, critical to our business survival, to the major bike bosses of the day.
Business Trips With A Tent
In those days, a suit and tie was the expected business attire – which was tricky to put on in the two man tent that I’d stay in – located in the most hidden site I could find in a suburban caravan park!
I remember being so nervous at the first event I covered for issue one, John Trevorrow’s Bay Criterium series in Victoria. It was the first time I had to publicly say to people that I was launching a new magazine and needed to take their photo or interview them.
The very first person I spoke to at that event was former pro rider Eric Bishop, a man with a fantastic positive personality. He immediately enthused, “That’s great! We need a good cycling mag in Australia.” Over future years I ended up staying with Eric in Melbourne on more than one occasion – welcome relief from the tent!
To make ends meet I’d do extra work such as taking all rider photography at each year’s national track titles and selling black and white prints to the riders and their families.
I drove across the Nullarbor to Perth twice, picking up hitchhikers to share the driving, once for the track nationals and once for the Junior Worlds, where a consultant to SA Government had long conversations with me about the idea of starting a major annual stage race – later launched as the Tour Down Under.
Lucky Breaks
I knew that good European coverage would be critical our success and the standout choice for European Correspondent was Rupert Guinness, an Aussie who spent every season in Europe as Editor of Winning Magazine.
I managed to catch Rupert in an airport hotel in Sydney the night before he flew out for the 1990 European pro season. In turn, Rupert recommended me to the world’s best cycling photographer, London-based Graham Watson, and our pioneering Aussie pro Allan Peiper, who wore his heart on his sleeve in a series of brilliant articles.
It’s hard to believe in today’s electronic age, but when I’d get the Graham Watson “trannies” (film slides) in an express air envelope, I’d be the first person in Australia seeing high res images of that season’s Paris Roubaix or Tour de France.
Allan Peiper was the first in a long string of pro cyclist columnists who gave fantastic first-hand accounts of their lives that our readers were hungry for, long before blogs existed.
One of our best and most diligent writers was Cadel Evans, who also wrote great tech tips articles. I remember going to Wellington New Zealand for a round of the Mountain Biking World Cup. Cadel was always pretty nervous before a race.
Evans, Watt, Armstrong, Watson, McGee, McEwen …. The List Goes On
He’d just changed to the Diamondback team and when I visited his hotel on the eve of the race he asked me to pick up his new bike. Knowing that I’d just been visiting some of the other teams and looking at their bikes, he anxiously asked, “Do you think it’s lighter than their bikes?”
I picked his bike up. It felt like a boat anchor compared to some of his rivals’ bikes!
“Sure! I think it’s lighter,” I lied. It was a great moment watching him become the first ever Aussie MTB World Cup winner the next day.
Other fantastic pro columnists included Kathy Watt, Brad McGee, Robbie McEwen and Anna Wilson (Milward). National coach Charlie Walsh wrote many long columns about training and insisted on never taking a cent in payment.
Expert cycle fitter Steve Hogg was extremely popular with our readers, answering their questions in great detail.
I will never forget the support of race promoter Phill Bates, founder of the Commonwealth Bank Cycle Classic. Before the Tour Down Under, this was the biggest annual stage race in Australia.
Phill agreed to use Bicycling Australia as his official magazine and the glossy colour preview and review editions came at a critical time in our first year of publication, becoming an annual highlight for years to come.
But the biggest break of all was building a relationship with SBS TV at the recommendation of another bike industry veteran, John Sunde.
“Win a Trip for Two to the Tour de France!” was the annual competition that we launched in conjunction with SBS’s takeover of the Australian TV rights. I will always be indebted to the SBS team including Les Murray, Ken Shipp and Mike Tomalaris.
The subscription revenue from that first competition in 1992 allowed us to take the huge step of selling up in backwoods Wangary and buying a house in Wollongong, NSW which cost triple the price at that time, for a basic house. But it was just an hour from Sydney airport, which was important now that I could finally afford to fly everywhere. I typically did about a dozen interstate trips and several international trips per year for the next two decades.
A Wonderful Quarter Century
Once we moved to Wollongong, we steadily built the company and our team. One of our very early Wollongong era hires was Rob Arnold who later founded Ride Media.
Initially Bicycling Australia including both road and MTB. Later we spun off Mountain Biking Australia as a separate magazine, edited for 14 plus years by John Hardwick.
We also started book publishing, ran the Bicycling Australia Show for a decade, bought Triathlon Sports magazine, started Bicycling Trade Magazine and its related Yearbook and a range of other activities.
Gradually our team grew to a peak of 15 in 2012, including a mix of full and part time team members. We also purchased our office premises – one of the best things a business can do.
By then it was becoming clear that it was time to sell. Our two daughters had both grown up. Each had worked in the business for five or more years, but were not interested in taking over. Bicycling Australia gave us perhaps our biggest bonus of all, when we needed to hire an additional graphic artist. We interviewed Tim and immediately after he left and closed my office door, I said to Catie, “That’s going to be our future son in law.” This happily became a true prediction about 18 months later.
The Magazine Changes Hands
Yaffa Media made the best offer and were a pleasure to deal with. We had been approached by the previous generation of the Yaffa family many years earlier, along with five other buyout offers over the years, but time had not been right then, until we sealed the deal on 4th July 2014, 25 years after I started swinging that shovel in Wangary.
As someone with cycling in my veins, I could not have asked for a better career. I’d been able to interview everyone from Sir Hubert Opperman to Eddy Merckx to Lance Armstrong. I’d had the privilege of meeting and sometimes working with many of Australia’s greatest cyclists, coaches, promoters and industry members. I’d also worked with a great team at the Bicycling Australia office. Some were with me for up to 17 years by the time we sold.
It has certainly been tough times for the media industry in the decade since 2014 and I congratulate the Yaffa team for their dedication and persistence when many others have dropped off the back of the peloton.
Happy 250th edition Bicycling Australia!