The Australian cycling community is in shock at the death of former world and Commonwealth champion rider Jobie Dajka.

The 27-year-old, who won gold at the Manchester Commonwealth Games in 2002 and who had recently said he hoped to compete at the London Olympics, was found collapsed in his home in Adelaide, South Australia, by police on Monday evening. His death is not believed to be suspicious.

A promising young cyclist, Dajka won gold at the men’s kieren at the world championships in 2002, and was a member of the Australian gold-medal wining men’s team spirit at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002.

However his career spiralled out of control after he was sent home from a pre-Olympic training camp for lying to a doping inquiry just weeks before the Athens Games in 2004.

He suffered weight and alcohol problems and later admitted he had been depressed. He was also convicted in 2005 of assaulting Australia's head track coach Martin Barras.

The president of Cycling Australia, Mike Victor, said today that Dajka had been shattered by missing the Athens Olympics, and never recovered from missing out on his dream.

"Because of what happened back in 2004, where he was taken off the team, I don't think he quite got over that," Mr Victor told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"That was the dream of his lifetime and everything seemed to have gone downhill from then."

A former girlfriend of the cyclist told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph newspaper that Dajka’s death was “tragic”. She said he had recently lost his job and blamed the harsh treatment he received after being expelled from the cycling team as contributing to his long-term depression.

“He got a lot of criticism he didn’t deserve,” the woman, who did not want to be named, told the paper. “He has a lot of friends in Sydney that care for him and the cycling community will be crushed by what’s happened. He was such a lovely man.”

Last year Dajka had tried to reach out to another troubled Australian athlete to warn of the perils of being an elite sportsman at such a young age. He warned swimmer Nick D’Arcy - who was arrested for assaulting a teammate in a nightclub last year, was subsequently banned from the Beijing Olympics and this week dumped by the Australian swim team – to be careful in how he dealt with his problems.

"He's a 20-year-old and his dream has been taken away," Dajka said last August of D’Arcy. "I know how he feels.

"My advice to him is not to try and numb the pain, like I did, instead of dealing with the problem. That's how I got into the alcohol and it went from there.

"I would hope swimming can provide help for him. In my case with cycling, I just got booted."

The head of the Australian Olympic Committee, John Coates, said today while Dajka’s death was sad, he believed the sporting body provided adequate support for athletes.

“There is something to pick them up,'' Mr Coates said in Melbourne. “There is a network through the AIS, and all the Australian institutes of sports, that look after athletes on our Olympic team or on scholarship, who have disappointments in events, form that may just be retiring, some people don't handle retiring.

“I would be very certain that would have kicked in through the South Australian Institute of Sport, the AIS and cycling in respect to Jobie.

“It is a very, very sad occurrence obviously ... I don't think you can ever take unknown consequences such as that into account when you are determining how to deal with a situation.”

Dajka said last year he hoped to make a comeback and compete at the London Olympics in 2012. Cycling Australia chief executive Graham Fredericks said Dajka had recently begun talking about making a return to the sport.

“He was talking in terms of coming back to the sport and asking what hoops he had to jump through,” Mr Fredericks said.

“Because he was an elite athlete, he had to go through a reinstatement process in terms of WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) protocol and I was probably expecting as the next phone call from him he was to say that ‘Yeah, I'm ready to sign up as a member’.

“So it (his death) came as quite a shock in the last 24 hours.”

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