Mawson Road runs quiet through the Adelaide Hills. White gravel stretches out ahead. It’s exposed in a way that feels honest. No shelter. No distractions. Just road, rider, and whatever condition the day decides to offer. If there ever is a location that personifies Peta Mullens, it’s Mawson Road. There is no performance for the camera. No exaggerated effort. Just pure class. The kind that comes from years of racing. And she is showing no signs of slowing down.

It's late February, and we're out riding with Peta and some mates. We're thrilled that Peta is joining the Black Sheep family. Not as a billboard. But as a voice for women's cycling. And the best way to start that conversation is to tell the story of one of Australia's most accomplished cyclists.

Adeliade is not where her story starts. She didn’t grow up chasing cycling. Running came first. Then triathlon. Then, almost by accident, cycling. At 15, she turned up to a state championship and finished second. From there, things moved quickly. Track. Road. Junior World Championships. The AIS. 

Like a lot of athletes, she followed the path in front of her. Coaches, teams, opportunities. One step leading to the next. By the time she was 20, she had already become what most would consider successful. A national champion. Embedded in the system. And then she walked away. Not because she wasn’t good enough. Because it stopped meaning anything.

She describes waking up each day without motivation, without enjoyment. Wins didn’t feel like wins anymore. The structure that once gave direction had started to feel restrictive. For someone who had never dreamed of the Olympics, but instead of challenge and experience, it didn’t fit. So she quit.

At the time, it felt like stepping away from more than just a sport. Identity, friendships, expectation. All tied to the same thing. Remove cycling, and what was left? The answer didn’t come immediately. It came a few weeks later, on a borrowed mountain bike, at a 100-kilometre event she had no real business being at. She finished last. Couldn’t clip in. Couldn’t get food out of her pockets. She sat at a feed zone eating jelly beans just to keep going. By her own account, it was terrible. But by the next day, she wanted to do it again. Not because she had succeeded, but because she hadn’t.

That moment became the start of something different. Mountain biking wasn’t just another discipline. It changed the way she experienced the sport. Less controlled. Less predictable. More room to learn, to fail, to adapt. From there, her career stopped following a straight line. Cross country. Marathon. Cyclocross. A return to road. Crit racing in the US. Early gravel events. She moved between them not as separate sports, but as different expressions of the same thing. Each one offering something new. Where others specialised, she expanded.

What stands out is not just the range, but how she approached it. She was never the rider with the best numbers. She never had the highest threshold. By her own admission, her data never suggested the career she built. Instead, she learned how to read races. How to manage effort. How to respond in moments that mattered. A tactician. Not just a performer.

Across that time, the sport itself changed. When she first travelled to Europe, there were no phones, no live tracking, no constant connection. Results could take days to filter back home. Communication meant finding a computer, buying a calling card, dialling long sequences of numbers just to reach family. For months at a time, you were effectively gone. Now, everything is immediate. Racing is visible. Athletes are visible. The pathway, while still difficult, is clearer. She’s lived through both versions.

What has kept her in the sport it is not what you might expect. Not results. Not progression. Not even competition in the traditional sense. It’s the experiences. New places. New races. New environments. The ability to keep finding something unfamiliar within a sport she’s been part of for more than two decades. And more than anything, the people. She talks about it simply. Community. The shared experience of effort. Of long days. Of something difficult that becomes meaningful because it’s done alongside others. In gravel, she calls it “trauma bonding.” In road, it might look different. In mountain biking, different again. But the core remains. You show up. You ride. You share something with the people around you. That’s what stays.

Back on Mawson Road, nothing about it feels staged. The road is still rough. The light still beautiful. It’s the classical elements that have shaped the sport for decades. Beauty and brutality sitting side by side. Peta Mullens doesn’t try to define cycling. She’s spent a career moving through it instead. And she’s still finding new roads.