McCONNELL Daniel

General
HUSBAND AND WIFE TEAM
In 2016, after four seasons with Trek Factory Racing, both he and his wife Bec were cut from the Trek team. He joined Primaflor Mondraker XSauce in 2018, and Rebecca also races for the same team. The couple both competed at the 2012 and 2016 Olympic Games, and in 2021 they both won their respective cross-country national titles in Australia. "We spend all day, every day together," Rebecca said in 2018. "We train together and that can be up to five hours on the bike each day but it works well for us." (ambmag.com.au, 12 Mar 2021; adelaidenow.com.au, 12 Apr 2018; sbs.com.au, 10 Mar 2017; uci.org, 01 Jan 2018)

MONKEY CAUSES WORLDS MISS
He was ruled out of the 2015 World Championships in South Africa after being attacked by a monkey when he was travelling home from training three days before the event. "The hardest one for me was two seasons ago, just before world champs in South Africa, everything was going really well, and I was really looking for a result, then maybe three days before the race I was riding back to the apartment after training and a monkey took me out at about 60 km/h. That was pretty much me done. That, for me, was really mentally hard to get past because I put so much into getting ready and to have something completely out of my control take that away was really difficult." (flowmountainbike.com, 22 Apr 2017)