Sprinter
DOB 11-03-1999
AGE OF DIAGNOSIS 12
YEARS WITH TEAM 11
“My journey with diabetes is not a barrier. It teaches me discipline, fuels my awareness, and sharpens my strength. When I race, I carry that message forward, that informed athletes are empowered athletes, and empowered athletes are unstoppable.”
PROFILE
Declan Irvine begins his eighth professional season with Team Novo Nordisk in 2026, and he does it as one of the most versatile rider on the roster: a road professional who has represented Australia at the World Gravel Championships and raced the biggest off-road events in the United States.
Irvine had an active childhood in Newcastle, New South Wales: motocross, sailing, soccer, swimming, bikes. From an early age he wanted to try every sport available to him. When he was 12, he came home from a two-week ski trip and his family noticed he had lost a significant amount of weight. A week later he started feeling very sick. On the morning of August 11th, he lost his vision. At the hospital he was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. The hospital team was supportive, and told him that diabetes should never define him.
He had one piece of luck. A classmate and soccer teammate had been diagnosed with diabetes at a year old, and Irvine had watched him stay active his whole life, which meant he already knew that going back to sport was possible. A week after leaving the hospital, he played in his soccer team’s grand final. They lost. Irvine still credits it as the first moment he felt “normal” again.
At 14 he started doing triathlons and got quickly addicted to training and competing. As a junior he finished second at the Australian Duathlon Championship and represented Australia at the 2015 World Duathlon Championships. That July, he attended one of Team Novo Nordisk’s talent ID camps in the United States.
“Since being diagnosed I had never come across another athlete with diabetes. So, to be in an environment with 20 other athletes with type 1 diabetes was so cool. It was comforting to know I wasn’t alone.”
Irvine joined the team’s junior squad the following season, then moved through the development program, collecting a top 10 at Athens Twilight, the New South Wales road race and criterium state titles, and three wins in Belgium. His entrance into the professional ranks came as a stagiaire in September 2018 at the Tour of China, and his results across the rest of that season earned him his first professional contract for 2019.
He made his WorldTour debut that year at the UAE Tour, and backed it with multiple top 20 stage results at the Tours of China I and II, the Tour of Taihu Lake and the Tour of Taiyuan, plus 14th overall in the youth classification at the Tour of Denmark. He opened 2020 with a pair of top 20 finishes at the International Tour of Rhodes and the International Rhodes Grand Prix before Covid-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions cut his season short.
2021 — the centenary of the discovery of insulin — gave him both the best week of his career and its cruellest ending. His season built steadily to the Tour of Denmark in August, where he produced commanding performances for four straight days before crashing out on the final-stage time trial and breaking his leg. Recovery from that crash shaped a difficult 2022 spent chasing form, and the work paid off in a consistent 2023 whose highlight was pulling on the Australian jersey at the World Gravel Championships in Italy.
In 2024 he committed to a dual program and it worked on both surfaces: strong results off road at Unbound Gravel and Big Sugar Gravel in the United States, alongside a top 10 on the road at the Tour of Hainan. A difficult 2025 followed, and Irvine met it the way he has met everything since he was 12. He starts 2026 with the same range that has made him one of the team’s most adaptable riders.