Radmila Avramovic’s enthusiasm for cycling is palpable. Radmila was born in Australia into a large family with a rich Serbian heritage blending with Western Sydney, Canadian and Wollongong cultures.
Radmila’s passion for cycling came from her Father who was a thrill seeker and adventurer and got his whole family to be active by riding tricycles when they were small, and then bicycles as soon as they could.
While Radmila’s Dad never got to own a brand-new bike as a child, that didn’t stop him from picking up bike parts and building his own hybrid and riding it down Mt Keira Road to test it. However, Radmila was lucky enough to get a new bike as a child. Her new bike was a white framed dragster bicycle with a sparkly pink banana seat and handlebar streamers.
She and her brother rode their bikes everywhere. They went to the shops for milk, they rode to their friends’, to parks and took them on camping trips and holidays. Bikes were, and are, an integral part of Radmila and her family’s life.
Radmila was able to impart her love of cycling more extensively when after coming home from living in Los Angeles, where she cycled daily, she and her husband capitalised on a gap in the market and jumped on a business opportunity with OZ Cycling. Their bicycle hire business supplied bicycles to hotels, caravan parks and anyone wanting to hire a bicycle. Their role was also to help train and support people wanting to cycle. Their mission and mantra was to make cycling a viable mode of daily commuting.
While Radmila doesn’t have this role today, she describes some of her greatest moments as seeing the joy and sense of independence in the eyes of people who learnt to ride a bicycle for the first time. Radmila got a great sense of satisfaction coaching and encouraging a group of Rawandan women in Bankstown to wrap their robes safely in order to learn to ride. In another workshop a woman who had never been on a bike, not only learnt to ride, but went on to road cycling and racing.
Radmila can see so many opportunities to make cycling easier for people to incorporate into their daily lives and is happy to pass on her ideas and experiences.