Matthew Glaetzer, the cycling champion and cancer survivor known for his perseverance in the face of sporting heartbreak, has a thing for ducks.
He and his wife, Nikki, often enjoy a “therapeutic” stroll along the river near their home. Spectacular rosellas and rainbow lorikeets flit through the branches of the gums above, while Pacific black and wood ducks lumber down in the long grass.
“We get out after a long day at work, enjoy a nice stroll, see if we can find some ducks,” Glaetzer.
Sometimes they recognise particular ducks, he says, and sometimes the ducks recognise them.
For the past 15 years, 33-year-old Glaetzer has been overcoming hurdles while gathering podium honours with the Australian cycling team. Tense fans watched on as he repeatedly missed out on an Olympic medal, coming fourth again and again. Then celebrated when, after all that torment, he won bronze not once but twice in Paris – the games he already suspected would be his last.
At the end of last month, Glaetzer announced his retirement from the sport, keen to set off on his next adventure as a firefighter. The South Australian Sports Institute described him at the time as a “symbol of perseverance, adaptability and quiet determination”, while he said he was proud of his achievements. His final career haul comprises four Olympic Games (two bronze medals), three Commonwealth Games (five gold and two bronze) and nine UCI track world championships (three gold, four silver and two bronze).
“If, along the way, I have had any positive impact on you, then I consider my time in the sport a true success,” he said.
He knew in Paris that he was just about done. Thirty-three is a ripe old age for a professional cyclist and the team was moving to Brisbane, another sign it was time to leave. Now, asked what he misses, he chooses to focus on what’s to come.
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The smoothly coiffed, clear-eyed Glaetzer lives in Paradise in Adelaide’s north-eastern suburbs. It’s known for its sprawling megachurch, Futures, although it was named for a pub rather than any biblical reference.
It’s a Pentecostal church, full of music and light shows and family friendly events, set on an enormous campus.
“It’s the church I grew up in,” Glaetzer says. “It guides how I go about things and, you know, how I interact with the people that I meet … that’s been instrumental in getting me through my tough times as well.
“Knowing that I’m never alone in that was a big part of me being able to get through my thyroid cancer, to be strong through it.”
He speaks earnestly about his church, while navigating the occasional passing council vehicle or cyclist, then we move on to egos in professional sports.
They’re there, he says.
“[But] my friends and family kept me pretty grounded. They didn’t treat me any different.
“I was very conscious of the fact that I didn’t want the sport that I did or the environment that I was in to influence the person that I already was. So I kept that pretty consistent all the way through.”
Glaetzer grew up near here and now lives in a newly built home with neat topiary out the front. With ducks on the green grass it is the picture of a perfect suburban existence. His parents live five minutes away, and he seems almost unbearably wholesome.
“We’re happy here,” he says.
We’re walking a section of the Linear Path, a 30km trail from the hills to the sea that meanders alongside the Torrens River, and where Glaetzer rode as a kid.
“I remember learning to ride,” he says. “I got the hang of it pretty quickly.
“I don’t think I had my training wheels on for very long … I wanted to get rid of those things. I used to ride along here quite a bit on my BMX, and have some fun with a few little dirt jumps I made along there.”
The first bike he took to a race was a Malvern Star, lent to him by an uncle. “It was an old clunker with an old steel frame … I ran that thing into the ground,” he says.
Years later he would whip around the velodrome at 80km/h on a carbon-fibre bike, with nothing but Lycra between him and the ground.
“Chasing a motorbike we can edge that up a bit more, closer to the 85km/h in the draft of the motorbike. So that’s pretty fun – that’s pulling two g-forces on the corner and it’s pretty wild.
“The fastest I’ve been on the road is 102km/h.
“I just saw the road just disappear in the horizon. I was like: ‘Oh, here we go.’ I just lit up a big sprint at the top and then went for it down this hill. And I ended up going pretty quick.”
I suggest that might be a little deadly, a little nuts.
“To be honest after 80km/h it kind of all feels the same,” he says.
He has taken a chunk out from under his eye after T-boning a crashed rider and “Supermanning” on to the track. He’s had a 6cm splinter in his hip, and burned up the whole side of his body in a fall.
But he never broke a bone; elite cyclists’ training leaves them with an extra-dense skeleton.
It was 2019 when they found his thyroid cancer. Physiotherapists were working on his stiff neck, but it wasn’t getting better, and a scan spotted the nodules. He doesn’t like to focus on it too much now, he says, and at the time his main thought was that he wanted to keep his mind off it, to keep training.
“I asked the question of, ‘Well, if I do keep training, will that hurt my health?’ And the short answer was no,” he says.
“So I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to keep training.’ Because for me, mentally, keeping some sort of normality in my life was important so I wasn’t just, you know, stuck at home just mulling and thinking about the fact that this scary situation was happening.”
He had a thyroidectomy, radioactive iodine therapy and radioactive tablets, and was only let loose once he was no longer radioactive himself. Now he has medication that replicates the metabolic action of the thyroid. He’ll have to adjust the dose in this post-professional athlete world.
He was back on the bike after the diagnosis, performing well and training on a stationary bike, he says, when he suffered another blow.
“My timing was off. The calf was slightly too stretched and then it snapped. It was like a big fat rubber band letting go within my leg,” he says.
“I’d never felt anything like that.
“And I knew I was done. I was like ‘Oh no, I’ve ruined the world championships. I’m no good for the Olympics.’”
The grade-two tear was 7.5cm “up the guts” of his muscle. He was couch-ridden, unable to train.
But it healed. And – thanks in part to a Covid-related delay of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics – he made his fourth appearance, accounting for one of those fourth spots and a fifth.
Meanwhile, he met Nikki, a midwife and runner, through a mutual friend. “I couldn’t want for a better partner in life,” he says. They married in 2023.
After all those Olympic near-misses, in 2024 he headed to Paris, where he picked up a bronze in the team sprint and another in the keirin. He has described those podiums – after everything – as being “like a gold” to him and nominates Paris as a standout proud moment.
“It all kind of culminated into a perfect sort of swan song for me,” he says.
“And to be able to finally clinch those Olympic medals that had been eluding me for so long, that would probably be the proudest moment with [Nikki] in the crowd watching. We could share that, knowing that it was likely to be my last race.”
Since he wheeled out that Malvern Star, he says, the sport has transformed through technology, understanding of aerodynamics, including how to reduce the human body’s drag to be as strong as possible while not being bulky at the front.
“We’re always getting measured,” he says. “We’re essentially lab rats.”
Asked if that ever affected him psychologically, and he’s nonchalant. “We’re in the high-performance world … we’re here to be the best we possibly can be,” he says.
He credits his faith and faith community with getting him through tough times and says as he ventures in to a “more normal” life serving the community as a firefighter, he’ll cherish the moments sport gave him.
As we finish talking, leaving the ducks behind, he pauses and smiles.
“We also have some exciting news,” he says. “We’re expecting. In August.
“So, yeah, change of chapter. We’re just so excited to start this journey.”
