Julie Speight

Julie Robyn Speight (born 1 October 1966) is an Australian former cyclist, eight time National champion, and Australia's first female Olympic and Commonwealth Games track cyclist, competing in the women's sprint event at the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics and winning a silver medal in the 1990 Auckland Commonwealth Games. At the time, she was described as 'a class above any other female rider in the country.'

Biography Speight is the only Australian to have held both the national Road Race title and the national Track Sprint title in the same year (1983). The women self-funded their tour, with the assistance of their respective cycling clubs, as the Australian Cycling Federation refused to support any international women's racing.

When Speight started competing in the early 1980s there were only two national track events in which women could enter - the Sprint, and the Scratch Race. During her career, Speight lobbied for more women's events to be added as state and national titles, and was successful in her campaign to have a Points Race included in the 1990 Australian National Track Championships.

In 2017 Speight was recognized for her trailblazing contribution to Australian women's cycling through her induction into the Cycling Australia Hall of Fame.

Speight lives in Hobart, Tasmania, where she is on the Executive of the Tasmanian Olympic Council and also works to raise awareness of concussion related injuries, namely Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in athletes.

Honours In 1983, Speight was awarded the Bradley Matthews Memorial Award from Randwick City Council. In 1984 she received the Sydney Girls' High School Old Girls' Union's "Centenary Prize for Excellence", for meritorious completion of her Year 12 studies while simultaneously embarking on an international cycling career.

In 1988 she was nominated for Australian Female Athlete of the Year by the Confederation of Australian Sports. In 1989, Speight was crowned Rider of the Year at T-Town Velodrome, Trexlertown, Pennsylvania, United States, the track from which she would eventually announce her retirement from racing in 1997.

In 1994, Speight was inducted into the Randwick Sporting Hall of Fame. In 2017, Speight was the first female track sprinter to be inducted into the Cycling Australia Hall of Fame.

Major results