As the 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow approach, track cycling star Matt Richardson is ready to set aside the public uproar that followed his high-profile switch of national allegiances from Australia to Great Britain, and focus on defending the two gold medals he won while competing for Australia four years ago.
Born in Maidstone, Kent, Richardson moved to Australia with his family at age 9 and held dual Australian-British citizenship for decades. His career-altering decision to change his cycling registration to Great Britain came just days after he claimed two silver medals and one bronze for Australia at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. The Australian cycling federation responded with a permanent ban barring Richardson from ever rejoining the national team, a move that sparked widespread debate across the global cycling community.
Now, 27-year-old Richardson says he has intentionally tuned out the criticism surrounding his switch and moved forward with his career. “I tried to block out all the negativity, and all the noise,” he told BBC Radio Kent in an exclusive interview. “I experienced the way they decided to handle it at the time, and moved on as quickly as I could. Ultimately, it has zero effect on me. If, for some reason, the British public didn’t take it well, that wouldn’t have been very good, but it wasn’t the case.”
Since joining Team GB, Richardson’s on-track results have strongly validated his career choice, with a string of landmark performances that have cemented his status as one of the world’s top track sprinters. He followed his Paris Olympic success with two silver medals in the individual sprint and team sprint events at the 2025 UCI Track Cycling World Championships, before going on to claim both the European sprint and keirin titles later that year. Most notably, Richardson made history by breaking the men’s flying 200m time trial world record twice, becoming the first sprinter ever to clock a time under the nine-second barrier.
Richardson attributes his rapid recent improvement to the enhanced support, resources and training infrastructure available through British Cycling. “No expense is spared when it comes to trying to achieve success, and it really feels like that,” he explained. “We fly with more bikes, and more equipment – anything we need to perform at our absolute best at a given race. I remember doing World Cups for Australia, and I would only fly over with my race bike. I fly to races now with about four or five bikes. I’ve got spares, I’ve got bikes for team sprint, I’ve got bikes for sprint, I’ve got a road bike, I’ve got a bike that I just warm up on for activations. Those things really make a difference, when a final comes down to a thousandth of a second.”
Heading into the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, Richardson is not daunted by the target on his back as defending champion in both the individual and team sprint events, nor by the fact that he will now compete against his former Australian teammates. Instead, he channels that extra pressure into motivation. “I use it as fuel,” he said. “I always find motivation in something, whether it’s trying to hunt someone down, trying to be better than someone or trying to stay better than other people.”
The only major uncertainty hanging over Richardson’s Commonwealth Games campaign is his tight competition schedule, which requires him to travel directly to Glasgow from a race event in Japan. This leaves his participation in the full slate of events he planned to enter in question. “It’s nip-and-tuck on which events I can actually make,” Richardson admitted. “If I was to race in the team sprint, I will fly in on the day and literally go straight to the velodrome and race. Whether or not that’s the best thing to be doing physically, I’m undecided yet, but there is theoretically time for me to race everything. My plan currently is to race in the team sprint, keirin and the sprint. The kilo is undecided. If I do race everything, the goal is to win everything.”