System failing athletes grinds Drapac's gears Focused: Cycling team owner Michael Drapac. Michael Drapac is shaking his head. Intense frustration has taken over his face. How, asks the wealthy Australian businessman and owner of the rapidly rising professional Drapac cycling team, have government sport policy makers got it all so wrong? "I think it's a disaster," Drapac says of the Winning Edge manifesto launched by the Australian Sports Commission in late 2012 with the aim of reviving the country's elite performance after a general pattern of plunder. I'm angry. I'm appalled. A pillar of the Winning Edge plan is that it prioritises ultimate success - world champions and gold medals - when it comes to funding. The none-too-subtle message being good luck to those sports and athletes producing neither. "In this model, athletes' whole identity and sense of identity depends on winning," Drapac says. It creates a ruthless, treacherous, win-at-any-cost system. And it's not the Australian Institute of Sport's fault. It's not the coaches' fault. The federal government needs to take responsibility for the horrible human cost that has already been left behind from their sporting programs. This man, who in 2007 owned the most commercial property in Melbourne's CBD, has a fortune that continues to grow through a self-made property business in Australia and the US. Drapac's acquisition activity in the US is expected to reap billions. Twelve years ago, the high school dropout, who later put himself through university and emerged with a science degree majoring in biochemistry and pathology and a masters in nutrition dietetics, founded the Drapac cycling team. Drapac estimates he's since ploughed around $10 million into it. Back then, he'd already formed a firm view that elite Australian sports institutes were failing cyclists shockingly. Not a position that endeared Drapac to Cycling Australia or the Victorian Institute of Sport, which he tried lobbying about his welfare-first ideas. This year, Drapac's professional outfit (all male at this stage) is competing for the first time with a Pro Continental licence that puts it just one rung below the world's creme de la creme. Right now, a 17-man unit is in its final preparation for another tilt at the coveted road-race crown at the national championships. It's a title the team last won in 2009, but its latest national gong was delivered on Wednesday when Jordan Kerby emerged as the top under-23 male time-triallist in the land. Drapac's views on athlete welfare have only strengthened. He believes the mainstream sporting system grabs talent, sucks it dry and then spits it out. To those who argue that is just a hard reality of elite sport, Drapac retorts that elite sport should be better and Australians should demand it. The light-bulb moment in what has become a crusade came after Drapac was asked to meet troubled track star Gary Neiwand, soon after Neiwand won two medals at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. By then, Drapac, who grew up around the West Heidelberg housing commissions, was active in the Victorian cycling community. Cycle Sport Victoria had enlisted his help in negotiations that eventually led to a velodrome being built in Darebin. Having marvelled at Neiwand's sporting exploits from afar, Drapac was horrified by what he encountered close up. Here was this man, at 33 years of age when I met him, who really had no life skills. He was institutionalised," he recalls. But Gary was a product of a system. I'm not excusing what he's done since [Neiwand was jailed in 2006 for breaching an intervention order and in 2012 received a suspended four-month jail term for exposing himself to two women], but I'd ask - why is it? Since then, Drapac has counselled several suicidal cyclists, who he says have been messed up by an utter lack of preparedness for sporting dreams not being fulfilled. He has watched tears stream from faces as honest sporting stories - not those we see on race day or even at training - have been shared in confidence. They're in shocking black holes. In deep, dark places," Drapac says. There's helplessness, a lack of self-worth, and just a crying out. The word suicide has come up on a number of occasions. Not a dozen, but a number of occasions. What disturbs me most is that the system doesn't seem to care about it. The system won't seem to take responsibility for it. Drapac reflects on the tragic story of Jobie Dajka, the Australian track sprinting star who died in 2009. In the silence after he raises it is the unanswerable question of what might have been. Words Drapac uses repeatedly when talking about athletes are "reintegration," "awareness," "education" and "skills." No one's saying you should be a full-time student and try to ride the Tour de France. What I'm saying is that you need to make a rider - an athlete, a swimmer or a cyclist - truly aware that the door of their sport is going to close one day," he says. You need to give them the skills so that when it does they can reintegrate into the world. A statistic Drapac raises with pride is that there have been over 25 university graduates from his team. He's not about to take on Drapac's most obvious Australian rival, Orica-GreenEDGE, owned by new Cycling Australia president Gerry Ryan, that seemed to debut on the biggest stages overnight after gaining its top-tier license. But when discussing two ex-GreenEDGE cyclists who joined Drapac - Travis Meyer and Wesley Sulzberger - there seems to be much in what Drapac doesn't say: "I suppose, fundamentally, neither of them [Meyer and Sulzberger] had been prepared in any way for the day when their sport ends." In sport, Drapac says he has always felt like an outsider and does not seem bothered by it. Past arguments with administrators aside, he isn't exactly what most would call conventional. A yoga devotee who has immersed himself in Buddhist teachings, Drapac is a self-described "spiritualist" committed to a strict diet featuring green vegetables. The consequence of consistently challenging the status quo in a highly political scene, Drapac says, is that it may have marginalised his cycling project. Yet the team is now on the verge of its first Tour Down Under appearance, having finally received a wildcard entry after years of lobbying. This may seem a small step, particularly when compared to the trail GreenEDGE has blazed. But it is enough for Drapac to say his team will be the second Australian outfit on the start line of the 2016 Tour de France. In the meantime, Drapac is seemingly confined to a relatively local sporting influence. That doesn't mean he's giving up on a bigger, better picture. I believe we need to have a different way. At its most simple, I think we need to re-define success.