Dave Armstrong: Australia’s First Dual International

A couple of weeks back, we ran an online piece that claimed Luke Styke was Australia’s first ‘dual international’ – the first Australian to represent his country on both it ISDE and MXoN teams. Well, that ain’t true. Styke was the second Australian to achieve the incredible feat, some 27 years after Dave Armstrong created history by doing so in 1992.
Ironically, that article on Styke was prefaced by an observation that, “In Australia, we don’t always do a great job of acknowledging and celebrating our Pro riders’ milestones”. And this factual faux pas suggests we don’t always do a good job with our background research, either.

In any case, we’ve apologised to Armstrong for the oversight and set the record straight through our Facebook channel. And to his credit, Dave was good-humoured about it.
So, for the record, David Armstrong was selected on Australia’s MX of Nations team three times (in 1984, 1986 and 1987) and on Australia’s ISDE team in 1992, when the Six-Day was first staged in Australia (at Cessnock). As a matter of interest, Dave Armstrong was also the first guy to win the Finke Desert Race on debut (in 1987); a feat that wasn’t repeated until Toby Price – who was born in 1987 – won Finke on debut in 2010.