2025 has been a year of change for Australia's domestic road cycling. With the long-running (and ailing) National Road Series (NRS) now shuttered 2025 ushered in the first edition of the ProVelo Super League (PSL), a new six-race series backed by Australian cycling's most important benefactor, Gerry Ryan. The inaugural series delivered some intriguing racing right until the end, with professional contracts on offer to the best male and female U23 riders.
Now that the dust has settled on the first edition of the PSL, how do its creators think it went? Escape caught up with PSL co-founder Matt Wilson to talk about what went well in year one, what didn't go quite so well, and what next year's PSL might look like.
The following Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and fluency.
Matt de Neef: What’s the feedback been like from the first edition of the PSL?
Matt Wilson: Yeah, majority positive. There's plenty of things that we recognised through the series that we could do better and other people picked up on those things as well. Some good ideas that have been put out there that we can consider for next year.
The sentiment last year before the series, once we launched it, once we were talking about it – even knowing the Australian cycling public like I do it surprised me some of the sentiment that was going around. But, yeah, it definitely changed once the series was up and running, and afterwards, I think almost all the teams have already told me that they're on for next year, and I've got several new ones and some international ones interested as well. So clearly something's right there. And yeah, pretty happy with where it was at.
MdN: What was the sentiment that you heard before the series? Were people sceptical that it would work; that it wouldn’t be any different to the NRS?
MW: Yeah, that's it. People carry baggage from the NRS and carry baggage from what they think, and everyone's got opinions and "should have done it this way" and "why are you doing it like this?" and "this is not going to work". And just, yeah, constant negativity and criticism. But whenever you try and do something new, that's always going to happen, and things have to change, and people have to evolve, and teams have to evolve, because we've got to make this commercial. We've got to make it make sense for sponsors, and got to try and get money into the sport. So you know, doing it as it's always been done is not going to fix those issues.
MdN: What do you think worked particularly well?
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