Matthew Glaetzer

A leg injury prompted Matthew Glaetzer to start cycling and it was cycling that became a driving force in his life as he confronted a cancer diagnosis.

In one of Australian track cycling’s most inspiring stories, Matthew overcame thyroid cancer and a serious calf injury to make it to the Tokyo Olympics, getting back on his bike just a month after surgery to remove a cancerous growth.

Starting out in athletics, the aspiring pole vaulter won a silver medal at the national championships at the age of 14. Plagued by injury due to growth spurts, Matthew was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter disease and the active teen was forced to find a new sport of choice. At 16, he turned to triathlon.

Matthew found that he excelled at the bike leg and decided to join a cycling club. Just six months later he won a silver medal at the National Championships and the following year he represented Australia at the UCI Junior Track World Championships and won two world titles.

As an elite competitor, the South Australian claimed a stunning victory at the 2012 World Championships alongside Scott Sunderland and Shane Perkins in the team sprint as they knocked off the French by one-thousandth of a second.

Making his Olympic debut at the London 2012 Games, Matthew and teammates Scott and Shane qualified third-fastest (43.377 seconds) in the team sprint.

They then defeated China in the first round with their time of 43.261 seconds ranking them fourth and setting up a bronze medal showdown with Germany.

The Aussies kept pace with the German team for most of the race but eventually went down by 0.146 seconds. They finished the competition in a time of 43.355 seconds.

Matthew added Commonwealth Games gold (keirin) and bronze (team sprint) to his growing list of achievements in 2014 as he steadily built towards another Olympic campaign.

At the 2016 World Championships, he qualified fastest in the sprint before moving through the field and eventually claimed silver behind Great Britain’s Jason Kenny.

Competing in his second Games at Rio 2016, Matthew came ever so close to standing on the podium. He lost out to British rider Callum Skinner in his sprint semi-final by 0.057 seconds before going down to Russia’s Denis Dmitriev by 0.044 seconds for bronze.

Along with Pat Constable and Nathan Hart, Matthew finished fourth in the team sprint by 0.155 seconds and claimed 10th in the keirin.

At the 2018 World Championships, Matthew claimed a memorable maiden individual world title victory in the sprint and claimed silver in the time trial, and at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast, he won gold in the kierin and kilo time trial and bronze in the team sprint.

Diagnosed with thyroid cancer in November 2019, Matthew was quickly back on his bike after the surgery and claimed multiple medals during the 2019-20 World Cup season before making it to his third Olympics.

After narrowly missing a medal with fourth place in both London and Rio, Matthew led Australia’s team sprint into battle in Tokyo.

Racing alongside Nathan Hart and Matthew Richardson, they posted the third-fastest time in qualifying of 42.371secs then beat the Russian Olympic Committee by 0.8 of a second in the next round. However, they were unable to overcome France in the race for bronze with the French winning by 1.7secs. It was the fourth consecutive time Australia’s men’s team sprint had finished fourth.

Matthew then competed in the keirin and made the final, where he and the rest of the field were surprised by Great Britain’s Jason Kenny, who went for home with three laps to go and won his seventh Olympic gold medal. Matthew crossed the line in fifth place.

He added two more gold medals at the 2022 Commonwealth Games (team sprint and 1000m time trial), and at the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships in Glasgow, Matthew took a silver in both the men’s 1000m time trial and men’s team sprint with Leigh Hoffman, Matthew Richardson, and Thomas Cornish.