Sport
18 November, 2025
Talented trio cites EB as career launchpad
With Energy Breakthrough (EB) mere hours away from sweeping through Maryborough, former participants are encouraging students to make the most of the active learning program.
Growing up as local kids, Jeremy McInnes, Aaron Stewart and Mark Henriksen were just like the students from around 250 teams who will tackle the EB challenge this week.
The opportunity to design, build and race Human-Powered Vehicles (HPV) sparked a passion in the trio for cycling and the HPV industry.
For McInnes, EB was the beginning of a tremendous cycling career, peaking with three Ballarat cycling championships and racing professionally from 2015 to 2017.
Not content with just cycling, McInnes also raced alongside Henriksen and Stewart in the highly successful Aurora Racing HPV team, started by Stewart alongside his father.
“With any sport, it just started with just being with your mates really,” McInnes said.
“(Stewart) outside of EB started his own team at a national level and I wanted to race with them and all of a sudden, if you’re a racer, you want to win, you keep on training until you do win.
“I started off racing in Bendigo straight after high school. By 2012, I came second in Bendigo’s club championships and they have got world-class riders. The person who came first, Jack Haig, still rides the Tour de France today.
“I did race professionally with an Australian team where we raced all over Australia, so I did get a lot out of it all. I made friends all over Australia and I got to see all of Australia.”
Amassing over 800 km a week during training weeks on the bike at his peak, McInnes said his competitive passion routinely fuelled his cycling career.
“I always had the mentality that if you train the best, you win, you are the best,” he said.
“I put in so much work, I’ve always been a footballer, cycling is 20 times harder than playing that game. You have got to be strong, tough, fast and fit, but cycling is its own mental ball game.
“Even when you don’t win a race, it’s still a pretty good feeling once you cross that line, you have got a fair few endorphins pumping through and if you win it’s amazing.”
Winning became second nature for McInnes, especially as part of Stewart’s Aurora Racing, which is one of the most flourishing teams to compete in the Australian HPV Super Series.
After starting to build for his own team when he was 20, Aurora Racing went on to set multiple lap and distance records, earn five series championships and three Australian International Pedal Prix’s at Murray Bridge, arguably the biggest HPV race in the world.
“I just loved the sport and wanted to continue,” Stewart said.
“I found a community team and we just had too many mechanical issues, so I decided to go out and run my own team with my old man.
“For me, it was probably more about building a quick bike with the engineering and design side of it, back when we started it was more of a technology race, more than a fitness race.”
As a key cog in many of Aurora Racing’s most substantial triumphs, Henriksen is hopeful this year’s EB is the start of a similarly life-changing journey, knowing the path-way for local students is available.
“You don’t really know what bike racing is until you do EB and then it broadens your horizons, where there are Bendigo and Ballarat where you can go racing,” he said.
“The 24-hour races like EB, you would be sitting there at 2 am, you don’t know which way is left or right and someone comes in full of energy. That’s the stuff I used to love. You can’t get that by doing anything else.
“You can do cycling all of your life, you have got a certain amount of time playing football, but cycling is low impact on your body and keeps you super fit.”