“Going to Rwanda and racing there brought me right back down to earth,” Morris says. “I now speak to people in Australia and I tell them they can do anything and live their dreams because I know for them it is possible. We have a good healthcare system, we have a good support system for people living with Type 1 diabetes. We have all the resources available to us.

“But in Rwanda, you realise pretty quickly that’s not the case. Getting to meet the diabetes community there, and seeing what they deal with each day, made me motivated to help some of the organisations trying to give support to places like that. You suddenly realise there are a lot of people around the world living with Type 1 diabetes where daily life is still a huge struggle. It’s a huge struggle to get the life-saving medicine they need.”

While trips to Rwanda - and Russia and Korea and China – while competing with his professional team were certainly enlightening, there was also plenty to be learnt in his new base in Michigan.

The move to America – he was based out of Traverse City around 410km north-west of Detroit – gave Morris a great appreciation of the differences in cycling cultures between the United States and his homeland of Australia.

Most notably, it gave him the chance to live life as a minor celebrity on the USA circuit - which mainly involved short, sharp criterium races in big cities across the country.

“What I loved about racing in America is that the crits are run in the downtown areas of the city and they are very well publicised and promoted and you get these huge crowds,” Morris says. “There can be 20,000 people lining the streets and cheering and it’s really cool. It brings the community together and it makes a real event of it. In Australia, a lot of the domestic level races are in very small country towns and you might get a couple of school kids at the finish line.

“One thing that was cool in America was that as a cyclist and a professional athlete, people really respected you. When you mentioned what you did as a job, the people were excited by it and interested in it. They wanted to know more.

“In Australia we have more of a tall poppy syndrome. The nail that pokes up too high gets hammered down pretty soon, so you tend to be a bit more modest in Australia. In America, though, you can pretend you’re a real celebrity and milk it for all it’s worth and that was kind of cool.”