TASMANIA'S reputation as being a reliable provider of precious metals stretches beyond the state's assortment of mines.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Cycling is doing its bit to share the load with the end of the European season prompting an influx of the shiny stuff.
Macey Stewart alone has provided the sort of gold yield that would have kept Beaconsfield busy for a few more years.
With Stewart and Campbell Flakemore both topping time trial podiums at the road world championships in Spain last month, Tasmania would have finished third on the medal table had it been treated as a country in its own right, behind only Germany and the US.
In contrast, cycling powerhouses Spain, Great Britain and Belgium could only muster one medal each.
This followed Stewart's double gold at the track junior world championships in August in Korea where Lauren Perry also picked up a second world title.
At the national championships earlier this year, Perry and Stewart won a team pursuit gold with two more multiple junior world champions, Amy Cure and Georgia Baker.
Both of those are now among the senior ranks, Cure capping the transition in Colombia in May with her maiden open world title in the points race — the biggest single achievement in a phenomenal year for Tasmanian cycling.
That's a big call considering Richie Porte sat in second place in the Tour de France for the second year running, having begun the year with a stage win in Australia's biggest race, the Tour Down Under.
Even with Porte's campaign being derailed by illness and former track world champion Matt Goss dropping down from ProTour to ProContinental cycling, the state's elite representation continues to grow.
Nathan Earle went the other way to Goss, joining Porte at Team Sky, with Flakemore set to do the same next year at Cadel Evans's Tour de France-winning BMC.
Cameron Wurf continues to play an influential role alongside the likes of Ivan Basso and Peter Sagan with Cannondale while Will Clarke and Wes Sulzberger demonstrated that stepping down from ProTour is not necessarily a retrograde career move, Clarke swapping being a workhorse windbreak in favour of leading UCI tours as far afield as Japan, Iran and Azerbaijan.
And when they teamed up with Wes's brother Bernie and Jai Crawford for last week's Tour of Tasmania, the home state fielded enough riders to constitute a healthy peloton courtesy of Drapac and Polygon while Andrew Christie-Johnston's Avanti team maintained the production line which helped unearth Porte, Clarke and Flakemore in the first place.
On the road, track and even mountain bike trails, where the likes of Sid Taberlay and Rowena Fry have won national titles and represented Australia, Tasmania continues to reap the benefit of an enviable cycling heritage.
When Macey Stewart was born in 1996, it was 12 years after Michael Grenda had won Tasmania's first Olympic gold medal (in the event she would subsequently excel at), and 14 years after Michael Wilson claimed the state's first Grand Tour stage in the Giro d'Italia which Porte would lead nearly three decades later. It was also two years before the madison world title and four years before the Olympic silver medal which represented the career pinnacle for Stewart's state coach Matthew Gilmore.
The old adage about success breeding success could have been coined for Tasmanian cycling, which enters 2015 in possession of six rainbow jerseys, four World Tour riders, multiple candidates for 2016 Olympic selection and, perhaps most importantly of all, the structure, coaches and pathway to suggest there is no sign of the talent pool drying up any time soon.