“I believe that the sole reason I became a professional cyclist is because of how my brain is wired,” says Harry Sweeny, an Australian rider for EF Education-EasyPost. “The bits I am bad at I obsessively work at, and the bits I am good at I also obsessively work at to make sure I don’t lose that level. The way I could describe it for someone who is neurotypical is that it’s almost like an addiction without a drug: your brain craves to do things that, for want of a better term, is a special interest. Being neurodivergent is a massive benefit for me and my cycling, and this is one of the few sports where having an atypical brain is definitely really useful.”

American cycling greats Greg LeMond and Jonathan Vaughters, as well Germany’s Jan Ullrich, have all been diagnosed post-career as having a form of autism but, speaking with Escape Collective, 25-year-old Sweeny is believed to be the first active WorldTour rider to publicly announce that he is autistic, with the Queenslander revealing that he has ASD 1 – formerly but no longer referred to as Asperger’s. 

Though Sweeny might be a trailblazer in one sense, he and a growing but still limited number of studies agree that he is most definitely not alone in being an autistic cyclist competing at the highest echelons (and there may well be other pros who simply have opted not to share their diagnosis publicly). “There is more and more emerging research that people at the absolute pinnacle of their field are a lot more likely than the general population to have an atypical brain, and the more I’ve learned about it the more I can see that there are a shitload of pros who have autism but just don’t know,” Sweeny continues. “I think sport brings that out in people: to get to the top, alongside being incredibly talented, you need to have an obsession or hyperfocus on it, and there are a lot of my colleagues that I can see that in.”

This article was published on Escape Collective in May 2024. You can read the full article here.