Harry Sweeny joins EF Education-EasyPost

The 25-year-old Australian will join our team in 2024. It will be his fourth season as a pro.

Harry is still discovering his limits as a racer. As a U23, he won Il Piccolo Lombardia and has since ridden the Tour de France, where, as a rookie, he finished third on a stage and rode onto the Champs-Élysées in the break, as jets trailed red, white, and blue streaks into the sky overhead. He has raced Paris-Roubaix in the wet and Liége-Bastogne-Liége alongside his friend, the former winner and local legend, Philippe Gilbert. This year, he finished fourth on GC at the Vuelta a Castilla y Leon. Harry believes that his best is yet to come.

“My biggest ambition for the coming years is to reach my full potential as a rider,” he says. “I love all of the different disciplines within cycling and am really looking forward to exploring them more with EF Education-EasyPost. I would love to be a part of the team that goes to try to win the Tour de France or goes to try to win the Tour of Flanders. I really love winning as a team and getting the most out of myself, so that is really my biggest goal and to really enjoy what I am doing.”

EF Education-EasyPost CEO Jonathan Vaughters is glad to welcome Harry to the team.

“Harry is going to be like a middle linebacker for us,” Vaughters says. “He is a strong guy who can climb and help riders like Marijn van den Berg in reduced bunch sprints. Harry also has a good nose for a breakaway, so I’m counting on him to continue our tradition of winning stages in grand tours out of breaks.”

Harry would love to do that. He came to cycling late. As a kid growing up in Brisbane, where his family moved when he was a child, he played soccer and rugby and did gymnastics and swam. He took up triathlon as a schoolboy, but focused on cycling when he was a junior and was recovering from a running injury. He started out racing local crits. His athleticism soon shone and he was picked to race the world championships in Richmond, Virginia for the Australian national team.

“That was the most scary experience of my life,” Harry says. “I vividly remember riding along the barriers in the first part of the race. It was pissing rain and there were all these Belgian guys scraping their knuckles against the fences to get positions and I just remember being so scared. So I decided then that if I was going to give it a proper shot, I was going to have to move to Belgium and find out what it was really like.”

That is exactly what Harry did. He moved to Europe to race, first for a small junior team in Belgium, and then for two years with the Australian Institute of Sport squad, which was then based in Italy, before moving back to Belgium for his final year as an U23.

“My first few years in Europe were really amazing,” Harry says. “I was a young kid, living the life. It was really exciting. I was away on what was basically a holiday, trying to make it pro. Actually the hardest time that I had in Europe was my first year when I made it pro and it sort of settled in that this would be my life for the next 15 years or so. That was actually a really scary moment. You realize that you don’t really know anything about the place where you live. My whole time as an U23 I was trying to live on as little as I could, so if I never made it I wouldn’t have to sell things when I went back to Australia. I went four years without having a toaster for example because I didn’t want to buy one in case I didn’t make it. But then as soon as I signed pro I realized that I had to rebuild my life, make new friends, find hobbies. I was missing all of the things that I had in Australia that I didn’t really realize that I had the whole time that I was growing up. When you are an U23, it is a really transitional period in your life and it is really easy to just sort of coast through it and it doesn’t really matter what happens, but as soon as you actually make it then it is about figuring out how to make it work and how to make the most out of it.”

EF Education-EasyPost’s international character is a big draw for Harry for that reason. On the teams he has raced for in the past, he has often been one of the few foreigners. Our team is made up of riders and staff from dozens of nationalities. Most of them know what it is like to build a life far from home and can help with all of the little difficulties that come with that. Our multicultural make up helps us to expand our outlook and think beyond traditional ways of doing things too.

“My whole background since I started cycling is the furthest from tradition that you could have,” Harry says, “especially when you compare it to other guys, like the Belgians who have been doing it since they were six years old. The thing about the team that is really attractive to me is the open-mindedness about, not only how you get into the sport, but around the racing and the lifestyle. The team will take into account how the riders perceive things and how that affects performance as opposed to having a really traditional mindset, where it is like, this is what works and this is what we are going to do. You really see that with the other projects that the team has. Lachy Morton, for example, is really inspirational. You are not just one thing, where that is all you can be in the team.”

Harry is a lot more than a bike racer. He is a keen cook and he loves to go camping and hiking with his girlfriend, an environmental scientist, near their adopted home in Andorra. In the winters, he loves to ski. And he is a YouTuber.

“I actually got into that when I was at an altitude camp in Isola, up in the mountains on the border between Italy and France,” Harry says. “I went up there the week the station closed, so there was seriously not a person within 50 kilometers of me. It was one of the most boring times in my life: super cold, snow all through the mountains. Not even a supermarket was open within 20 kilometers of me. It was really, really isolating. I remember thinking: imagine having all of this time and having nothing to do with it. No one was making videos that were actually good, and I’ve always liked picking up things and learning new skills, so it became a bit of a challenge to see how good I could get at it. It has become a bit of a hobby. I like editing and learning about all of the technology behind it when I have time, and people love it.”

Watch out for Harry on RaceTV. He is going to bring an exciting perspective to our team next year.

“I love the camaraderie in professional sport and being in team environments,” Harry says. “I think that the main reason that I love being a pro is that I really enjoy having mates to go through hard times and good times and be in that performance environment. That is what makes it really special for me and why I enjoy it. It is not so much for winning that I am a pro cyclist. It is more for the enjoyment of the sport and the enjoyment of the people around me.”

The coming years are going to be fun, Harry. Welcome to EF Education-EasyPost!